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Magical Realism and Deleuze
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Magical Realism and Deleuze
The Indiscernibility of Difference
in Postcolonial Literature
Eva Aldea
Continuum Literary Studies

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© Eva Aldea, 2011
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to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-0998-9 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aldea, Eva.
Magical realism and Deleuze : the indiscernibility of difference in postcolonial
literature / Eva Aldea.
p. cm. -- (Continuum literary studies)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4411-0998-9 (hardcover)
1. Magic realism (Literature) 2. Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.
3. Commonwealth fiction (English)--History and criticism. 4. Postcolonialism
in literature. 5. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995--Criticism and interpretation.
6. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995--Knowledge--Literature. 7. Literature--Philosophy.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN56.M24A63 2011
809'.915--dc22
2010015193
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
For Marcus
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Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations x
Chapter 1 Introduction: Magical Realism 1

Chapter 2 Gilles Deleuze and Magical Realism 19
Chapter 3 Models of Magical Realism 41
Chapter 4 Magical Realism and the Signs of Art 73
Chapter 5 Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 103
Chapter 6 Conclusion 146
Notes 150
Bibliography 163
Index 181
Preface
Since being introduced to magical realism through the short stories of Julio
Cortázar, many years ago, I have always wanted to know why magical realism has
been so fascinating and tantalizing a genre for me and so many other readers.
What exactly is it that makes the appearance of the unusual, strange and super-
natural so alluring when it is described in that deadpan, matter-of-fact voice we
have all become so familiar with since the Latin American literary boom reached
the Anglo-Saxon readership in the 70s? I never found a thoroughly satisfactory
answer. Any definitions and descriptions of the genre seemed to me never quite
to get to the bottom of how the interaction between the real and the magic in
magical realist novels and stories actually functions. I mean ‘functions’ in the
way a car or train functions – I wanted to know what drives the fantastic yet
thoroughly familiar engine of magical realism.
There was nothing for it but to investigate the matter myself. Having
come across the idea of the machinic assemblage in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s work, an early project looking at Cortázar’s stories as such little
literary machines yielded some results. It also pointed to the fact that Deleuze
could provide the thoroughly different approach to magical realism that I was
looking for, partly as a philosopher that could take me back to basics – What is
the real? What is the magic? – partly because of his insistence that the all that is
is in the same way, yet is different. This challenge to hierarchies of being seemed
to me to chime true with the main motion of the magical realist machine.
This book is the final result of a long process of research but also of thought,
the importance of which my guide throughout would never let me forget. I am
very grateful to Andrew Gibson for his long and continued support for, belief
in and acute criticism of my work. I would also like to thank my parents for their
never failing belief in the ultimate fruition of my work, and my friends and
colleagues for their input, patience and support. Finally, a special thank you to
Marcus Cheadle, without whom this book would never have been written.
List of Abbreviations
Primary Works
BD Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005).

CR Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (London: Granta Books, 1998).
DV André Brink, Devil’s Valley (London: Vintage, 2000).
FR Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage, 1991).
LP Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002).
MC Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995).
NC Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage 2003).
OHYS Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory
Rabassa (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
SC Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1989).
WCS Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 1978).
Works by Gilles Deleuze
AO Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(London: Athlone Press, 1984).
B Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
C2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005).
DII Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2006).
DR Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London:
Athlone Press, 1994).
EP Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York Zone Books, 1990).
List of Abbreviations xi
KM Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,

trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
LS Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles
Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004).
PS Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
TP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987).
WIP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London; New York: Verso, 1994).
Critical Works
AP Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and
the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
DC Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
LC Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).
MGP Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Decon-
structing Magic Realism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
MRF Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved
Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985).
MRPD Stephen Slemon, ‘Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Discourse’, Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 407–426.
MRT William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 29/1 (1993): 75–85.
MS Robert R. Wilson, ‘The Metamorphoses of Space: Magical Realism’,
Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (eds), Magic Realism and Canadian
Literature: Essays and Stories (Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press,
1986): 61–74.
OMRF Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12/2
(1986): 301–325.
PNC Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in
Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman
Rushdie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
PU Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002).
SCD María-Elena Angulo, Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse
(New York: Garland, 1995).
TWL Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986): 65–88.
WAF Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a
Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998).
Chapter 1
Introduction: Magical Realism
A History of Magical Realism:

Typologies and Definitions
Since the incredible success of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude, and the following Latin American literary ‘Boom’ of
the late 1960s and ‘70s, magical realism has enjoyed attention from publishers,
the reading public and academia. Yet while magical realism has become estab-
lished as a literary genre, its definition has remained vague. Although key works
have had a distinct impact, magical realism seems constantly to overlap and
merge with other types of literature and critical currents. As Peter Hinchcliffe
and Ed Jewinsky note, ‘Magic realism has been used for such a variety of
fictions and theories that the very variety compels critics to teeter on the verge
of inconsistency, juxtaposition and even contradiction’.1 On the one hand, a
great number of works referred to as magical realism belong to the realm of
commercial mainstream fiction, for example Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for
Chocolate or Patrick Süskind’s Parfume, which, while they have enjoyed great
popular success, merit only limited academic attention. On the other hand,
many works now commonly referred to as magical realist have attained canoni-
cal status, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s prototypical One Hundred Years of
Solitude or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and provide a rich ground for
academic inquiry. However, such key magical realist texts have often been read
primarily as postcolonial or postmodern works, shifting the critical focus away
from their specific magical realist form and function. In spite of this, magical
realism as a term has been neither rejected nor replaced. The fact that it has
been applied widely, almost carelessly, to quite differing works, testifies to both
its allure and its possibilities, at the same time as it also indicates the need for a
reconsideration of the genre.
Cuban-born literary critic Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría believes the ‘general
absence of historical bearings in the formulation of magic realism’ is responsi-
ble for the confusion surrounding the term, as he traces the appearance of the
term in three distinct moments in the twentieth century.2 He finds the first use
of the term ‘magical realism’ in a 1925 article on Post-Expressionist painting,
attributed to German art critic Franz Roh. Roh contrasts the fantastic, exotic,
2 Magical Realism and Deleuze
transcendental paintings of the Expressionists with a return to reality emerging

in art at the time, a wish to ‘feel the reality of the object and of space, not
like copies of nature but like another creation’.3 While often mentioned in
overviews of the beginnings of the genre, this definition has had the least
impact on the concept of magical realism commonly used in literary criticism
today, although it has remained a current idea in painting.4 However, Roh’s
article, receiving wide circulation in Latin America, did influence Cuban Alejo
Carpentier to develop the term into a uniquely Latin American concept, which
Gonzáles Echevarría defines as the second moment in the history of magical
realism: lo real meravilloso. In the 1949 foreword to his novel Kingdom of This
World Carpentier criticizes ‘the tiresome pretension of creating the marvellous
that has characterized certain European literatures over the past thirty years’,5
and calls for a ‘marvellous real’ literature of America, born out of the existing
reality of the continent and characterized by a rich style: ‘I have to create with
my words a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical
landscape [of Latin America]’.6 Finally, a 1955 lecture by Mexican writer Angel
Flores magical realism marks the third moment in Gonzáles Echevarría’s
history or the genre. Flores notes that Latin American romantic literature is
full of elements of realism, and realist works are full of elements of fantasy, and
calls this mix ‘magical realism’.7 Flores points out the affinity of this magical
realist style with the opening sentences of Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’: ‘As
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself
transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’8 Flores explains: ‘The transforma-
tion of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach [. . .] is not a matter of conjecture or
discussion: it happened and it was accepted by the other characters as an almost
normal event’. Similarly, magical realism, to Flores, is not weighed down by
‘needlessly baroque descriptions’ but ‘cling[s] to reality as if to prevent “litera-
ture” from [. . .] flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms’.9
To Gonzáles Echevarría none of these historical definitions of magical real-
ism have provided an approach adequately describing post-Boom examples of
the genre, and criticism since the Boom ‘has rarely gone beyond “discovering”
the most salient characteristics of avant-garde literature in general’. In response
to this inadequacy, he goes on to propose the identification of two versions
of magical realism: a ‘phenomenological magical realism’, corresponding to
Roh’s ideas, and an ‘ontological magical realism’, stemming from Carpentier’s
approach. In the former, the interaction of ‘subjectivity and reality, mediated by
the act of perception [. . .] generates the alchemy, the magic,’ but reality
‘remains unaltered’. In the latter, the marvellous ‘exists in Latin America’, and
is ‘revealed to those who believe’ through the act of faith that is literature.10
Even though Gonza ´ les Echevarría is sceptical about the usefulness of the term
magical realism, his division raises some valid questions about the genre: is the
magic understood as the supernatural, or merely a way of looking at reality? Is
the magic inherent in reality or is it purely textual? These questions have shaped
Introduction: Magical Realism 3
contemporary views of magical realism, as we can see in the typology of the

genre proposed by William Spindler in 1993.
Spindler suggests three variants of magical realism. ‘Metaphysical magical
realism’ is characterized by the technique of defamiliarization, creating an
uncanny and disturbing atmosphere, but without an element of the super-
natural. Spindler cites Kafka’s The Trial, Borges’s story ‘The South’, and even
James’s The Turn of the Screw as examples.11 ‘Anthropological magical realism’,
to Spindler, corresponds to the most current definition of the genre. It is char-
acterized by the use of ‘two voices’: one rational and realist, and the other
indicating a belief in magic. The implied contradiction or antinomy between
these two voices is resolved by the presence in the text of a specific cultural
world-view, a Weltanschauung where the mythical and the rational coexist.
Spindler links this type of magical realism to a postcolonial search for national
identity, and the struggle to reverse the hierarchy between Western and non-
Western cultures. Among the examples he gives are works by both Latin
American ‘greats’ such as Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and
Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, and by writers from other parts of the world
including Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and Salman Rushdie. (MRT 80–82)
Finally, in ‘ontological magical realism’ the supernatural also appears, but the
contradiction between it and the real world is resolved through a matter-of-fact
presentation rather than by the presence of a particular Weltanschauung. The
magic is not explained in any subjective, psychological way; but rather ‘the
unreal has an objective, ontological presence in the text’ (MRT 82). Spindler’s
examples are Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s
story ‘Axolotl’, and Carpentier’s Voyage to the Seed (MRT 82–83).
We can easily map Spindler’s metaphysical magical realism onto Gonzáles
Echevarría’s phenomenological magical realism, where there is no supernatu-
ral as such, but rather a ‘magical’ consciousness of reality. In addition, what
Spindler seems to have done is to divide what Gonzáles Echevarría’s calls onto-
logical magical realism according to whether the magic originates in a specific
extra-textual reality, or within the text itself. Notably, however, in both anthro-
pological and ontological magical realism, the main characteristics – the ethnic
Weltanschauung or the matter-of-fact narration – perform the same function:
they resolve the implicit contradiction between the natural and supernatural.
However, this division points to the fact that in approaches to the genre a
dichotomy has remained between attempts at defining magical realism through
socio-geographic factors on the one hand, and specific textual features on the
other. The vast majority of current Anglophone literary criticism of the genre is
concerned with what Spindler calls anthropological magical realism, which he
links ostensibly to postcolonial literature. Indeed, many critics read magical
realism primarily in this context, some defining it as a type of literature emerg-
ing exclusively in a postcolonial situation. The fact that magical realism can be
concerned with different cultural versions of reality potentially allows it to deal
with questions of cultural hegemony and its role in colonization, and to explore
the politically subversive power of exposing the relativity of such hegemony.
However, many critics also link magical realism with postmodernism, referring
to a number of specific textual characteristics that allows the genre to raise
questions about the nature of reality and fiction.
Reality and Text: Postcolonial or Postmodern?
In his widely read 1988 article ‘Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse’,

Stephen Slemon explicitly links the narrative structure of magical realism to
counter-colonial writing. Although he does not speak of a resolution of an anti-
nomy in magical realism, he offers a familiar concept of it as a ‘battle between
two oppositional systems’, or narrative modes, which remains unresolved or
‘suspended’, so that neither mode takes primacy over the other.12 To Slemon,
‘the metaphysical clash or double vision inherent in colonial history and lan-
guage is recapitulated in transmuted form in the text’s oppositional language
of narration and mirrored in its thematic level’ (MRPD 420). Slemon thus
concludes that magic realism can be seen to ‘comprise a positive and liberating
engagement with the codes of imperial history and its legacy of fragmentation
and discontinuity’ (MRPD 422). Slemon’s view is echoed in recent major publi-
cations on magical realism. In her 2004 study of magical realism, Wendy Faris
argues that the genre is ‘a narrative inscription [that] begins to transfer discur-
sive power from colonizer to colonized, to provide a fictional ground in which
to imagine alternative narrative visions of agency and history’. Novelists such
as Rushdie and Ben Okri use ‘their magic against the established order’ and
‘[this] use of magic often ultimately highlights the historical atrocities narrated
in them’.13 Also note Wen-chin Ouyang’s unambiguous statement in his intro-
duction to the section on ‘The Politics of Magic’ in the 2005 Companion to
Magical Realism: ‘Magical realism is inherently political concerned [sic] not only
with the continuing influence of empire in the postcolonial world but also with
the corruption of political authority set up in postindependence nation-states,
not to mention the attendant cultural politics that partake in the formulation
of a plausible postcolonial national identity’.14
Fredric Jameson has been immensely influential on such postcolonial read-
ings of magical realism, despite never offering a coherent definition of the
genre in literature. His main thesis, based mainly on a reading of films, although
occasionally referring to Latin American literature, concludes that ‘magical
realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of
pre-capitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’.15 He proposes
that the genre relies on a ‘narrative raw material derived essentially from peas-
ant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village [sic] or even
tribal myth’ (OMRF 302). Jameson seems to share Carpentier’s view of existing
reality as a base for magical realism, ‘a reality which is already in and of itself
magical or fantastic’ (OMRF 311). Jameson’s definition thus coincides, at least

in part, with Spindler’s anthropological magical realism, where the encounter
of the magic and the real in the text mirrors a meeting of old and new cultures.
To Jameson, magical realism is an inherently historical and political genre,
explicitly opposed to postmodern literature, which he elsewhere describes as
‘depthless’ and characterized by a ‘consequent weakening of historicity’.16
Notably, while to Spindler the contradictions implied by the dual cultural con-
text of magical realism are resolved in the magical realist text, to Jameson there
is no such resolution, but rather a distinct clash of cultures. However, while
Jameson continues to be regularly quoted by critics attempting to define the
genre, the notion of a resolution of the contradiction between the magic and
the real remains central to magical realism in literature.
A notable example of the use of Jameson’s ideas in critical studies of literary
magical realism is Brenda Cooper’s Magical Realism in West African Fiction.
Cooper defines magical realism through, first, the political circumstances from
which it emerges, and second, its textual and thematic characteristics. Expand-
ing on Jameson’s approach, she concludes that the often chaotic meeting
between capitalism and a pre-capitalist society in developing countries, and the
ensuing climate of change and ambiguity, is a catalyst for magical realism. While
naming the pre-capitalist world as a ‘critical inspirational source’ for the magic
of this magical realism, Cooper defines it more broadly as ‘the fictional device
of the supernatural, taken from any source that the writer chooses [including
his or her own imagination], syncretized with a developed realistic, historical
perspective’.17 To Cooper, the notion of ‘hybridity’ lies ‘at the heart of the
politics and techniques of magical realism’ (WAF 17–20). In political terms, this
hybridity can allow magical realism to oppose imperialism and promote cul-
tural multiplicity, although, interestingly, Cooper suggests that it may also end
up reaffirming the Western stereotype of the exotic ‘Other’. In technical terms,
hybridity is ‘a syncretism between paradoxical dimensions of life and death,
historical reality and magic, science and religion, [that] characterizes the plot,
themes and narrative structures of magical realist novels’ (WAF 32). Crucially,
such a thematic and stylistic hybridity allows the magical realist writer to ‘see
with a third eye’ or to create a ‘third space’, beyond the binary structure of
colonizer–colonized. So even though Cooper allows that the magic of magical
realism could have a source outside a specific culture, she explicitly links
what she sees as its essential hybridity to a postcolonial context. In addition, at
the same time as she adheres to Jameson’s view that the genre grows out of the
conflictual meeting of pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, her insistence on
the hybridity of the genre, in its creation of a ‘third space’, implies a resolution
of the contradictions between magic and reality and thus between the world-
views or cultures they are linked with.
Furthermore, Cooper characterizes magical realism by listing such elements
as the deformation of time and space, a Bakhtinian use of carnivalesque and
polyvocality, and narrative irony. These features lead her, while situating the
emergence and thematics of magical realism within a postcolonial environment,

to place it, in terms of style, within postmodernism: ‘Magical realists are post-
colonials who avail themselves most forcefully of the devices of postmodernism,
of pastiche, irony, parody and intertextuality’ (WAF 29). Thus she again devi-
ates from Jameson’s definition, which placed magical realism in opposition to
postmodernism. However, Cooper fails to explain fully why such devices are
necessary to the genre’s hybrid nature, and thus how magical realism can be
seen as a specific genre distinct from any kind of writing that attempts to find
a ‘third way’ of seeing things through a mix of postcolonial themes and post-
modern techniques.
Jean-Pierre Durix’s postcolonial reading of magical realism places the genre
within the context of what he calls ‘New Literatures’, a term he finds more
suitable than ‘postcolonial’ for literature produced in countries that have
undergone a process of colonization.18 He articulates a ‘hybrid aesthetics’ to
describe these new literatures: novelists experiencing a ‘multiple and contra-
dictory’ reality ‘feel the need to approach it from several – sometimes widely
differing – angles’ creating ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ genres. Durix proclaims magical
realism ‘one of the best-known forms of this generic hybridity’ (MGP 187), and
he attempts to define the ‘hybridity’ specific to magical realism in more precise
literary terms than Cooper. He differentiates between the use of the fantastic
in European literature and ‘New Literatures’: in the former the fantastic ‘serves
to protest against the tyranny of “fact” ’, in the latter it serves ‘to incorporate the
old values and beliefs into the modern man’s perception’ (MGP 79–81).
Durix admits that this geographic division of the fantastic is problematic, as
it is questionable whether one can still speak of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ in the post-
colonial version of the genre. Since reality in the ‘New Literatures’ wavers
between ‘the Western logos and an uneasy acceptance of ancient spirituality’,
works of this kind cannot really be called fantastic, as the fantastic depends on
the presence of a distinct unreal. Instead, says Durix, these texts are precisely
magical realist (MGP 102). In the European fantastic, real and unreal are
pitched against each other, but in magical realism there is not only ‘an inter-
weaving of the “realistic” and “fantastic” modes but also an implicit questioning
of the polarity on which such terms are based’, and thus ‘versions of reality are
presented in a less conflicting way’ (MGP 146). Durix, then, explicitly links the
resolution of antinomy in the magical realist text to a postcolonial cultural
hybridity, implying that the magical realist text provides a resolution of the
‘widely different angles’ on reality encountered in the postcolonial world.
To Durix the resolution of the antinomy of real and magic is key, but he
also narrows his definition of magical realism by stressing that it must have a
thematic engagement with the conflict between a local community and an
imperial authority. Thus he sees García Márquez and Rushdie as ‘prototypes’
of magical realism, but excludes Borges and Cortázar, whose works lack this
engagement (MGP 146). Durix provides a more specific definition of the
‘hybridity’ in magical realism than Cooper, but he also lists elements of gro-
tesque and picaresque as typical of magical realism, as well as features that
Cooper sees as postmodern, such as intertextuality and metatextuality; again,
however, these characteristics appear more circumstantial than necessary for
the central resolution of the antinomy in magical realism.
While Cooper and Durix find some typically postmodern devices in magical
realism, such as self-reflexivity and metatextuality, playfulness and irreverence
towards established cultural forms or categories, they have not been able fully
to integrate these in a definition of the genre. Frederick Louis Aldama argues,
however, that these particular devices do define magical realism. He approaches
postcolonial readings of magical realism critically, suggesting that they have
made the mistake of confusing literary and ethnographic components. He
traces this error back to Carpentier’s work, as well as to Fredric Jameson’s
reading, and sees it repeated in the work of various critics such as Gonzáles
Echevarría, Cooper and Durix. According to Aldama, such critics ‘reify’ the
literary text, on the one hand, and view the empirical world as a narrative on
the other. Aldama, in contrast, proposes a view of the literary, not as a ‘source
of information’ or ‘a conveyor of truth or falsity’ about the empirical world, but
as ‘a narrative with its own kind of rationale’, separate from the extra-textual
world.19 That is, as opposed to those critics focusing on cultural hybridity,
Aldama looks at magical realism as dealing with exclusively textual versions
of reality.
Aldama refers to magical realism’s ‘vibrant interplay between discourse and
story’, a characteristic that makes the genre a ‘rebellious aesthetic’ (PNC 19).
Magical realism derives from realism ‘the formal arrangements selected for
telling the story’, but adds to them the ‘mimesis-as-play’ of intertextuality,
metatextuality and self-reflexivity (PNC 37). According to Aldama, these ‘impu-
rities’ in the discourse are crucial to magical realism, offering a ‘how-to-read
magicorealism contract’ that prevents the reader from hesitating in the face of
the magical elements, allowing them instead to perceive ‘an everyday reality
that is seamlessly both real and unreal’ (PNC 37–39). Aldama thus also suggests
a definition of magical realism that hinges on the resolution of the antinomy
between the real and the magic, but claims that it is the intertextuality and
metatextuality of magical realism that brings about this resolution, ensuring
there is a ‘categorical difference between the invention of limitless possibility
within the novel’s pages and the reality outside’ (PNC 18–19). That is, the reso-
lution of antinomy in magical realism, to Aldama, does not extend to the differ-
ences between cultural versions of reality.
Nevertheless, Aldama situates magical realism within postcolonial literature
by default, focusing on US ethnic minority and British postcolonial literature,
and apparently discounting the possibility that the genre could exist in a non-
postcolonial context. Ultimately, he expresses the familiar view that the coexis-
tence of the real and unreal in magical realism is particularly suited to expressing
a specific cultural experience, because of the absence of an antinomy between

two views of the world (PNC 39). Thus, even though he insists that the transac-
tion is purely textual, he suggests a ‘rebellious’ side of magical realism that lies
in its ability to highlight its own artifice and therefore ‘transform perceptions of
the world’. Aldama’s reading is therefore quite similar to other postcolonial
readings of magical realism, yet it does raise some interesting questions about
the definitions of magical realism that we have seen so far. It appears that while
the antinomy between versions of reality could not be satisfactorily resolved by
cultural hybridity alone, the antinomy between textual versions of reality can be
resolved without a parallel cultural resolution. This suggests that definitions of
magical realism must be concerned with the way the text presents reality; merely
a representation of cultural ‘hybridity’, the inclusion of, or encounter between,
different cultural views, is not enough to distinguish the genre. However, it
seems that this resolution can be attributed to a whole range of literary devices,
depending on the critics’ point of view. Most critics, even if they are reading
magical realism as postcolonial, stress that many of these stylistic and structural
characteristics are postmodern.
Theo L. D’Haen suggests that the terms magical realism and postmodernism
denote the same type of literary mode, but that one is used predominantly in
Latin America and Canada, and the other in Europe and the US.20 D’Haen
concludes that magical realism is a subset of postmodernism, referring to Brian
McHale’s and Linda Hutcheon’s approaches to the postmodern.21 Certainly
these two theorists place a number of novels widely referred to as magical realist
within their consideration of postmodernism, and discuss many of the charac-
teristics attributed to magical realism (those very characteristics which critics
point out magical realism has in common with postmodernism). However,
neither offers a specific definition of magical realism as a distinguishable part
of postmodernism.
Hutcheon, however, explicitly labels postmodernism ‘ex-centric’,22 which
D’Haen identifies as the feature which situates magical realism within the
framework of postmodernism: magical realism appropriates the literary tech-
niques of ‘the centre’ or the colonial power, and uses them ‘to create an alter-
native world correcting so called existing reality’.23 However, in D’Haen’s analysis
of Coetzee’s Foe, Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children and Carter’s Nights At the Circus, it is not clear how, although these
novels speak from the margins and attempt to correct an existing view of
reality, they do so in a way that is specifically magical realist. Again we are
given a description of magical realist texts via a list of literary devices such as
intertextuality, metatextuality, deformation of time and space, bifurcation of
plot, and so on, that are identified as postmodern, and that allow these novels
to subvert existing views of reality. However, this subversion is also what critics
reading magical realism from a postcolonial perspective identify in the genre.
Thus, although D’Haen fails to provide a definition of magical realism, his
analysis indicates the fact that marginality and subversion may be seen as the
site where postmodernism, postcolonialism and magical realism intersect.
This is Linda Hutcheon’s thesis in an article analysing postmodernism and
postcolonialism: ‘The formal technique of “magic realism” (with its character-
istic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics
as one of the points of conjunction of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
Its challenges to genre distinctions and to the conventions of realism are
certainly part of the project of both enterprises’.24 This conjunction, however,
hinges on the fact that Hutcheon sees postcolonialism and postmodernism as
related by ‘a strong shared concern with the notion of marginalization, with the
state of what we would call ex-centricity’.25 However, such a ‘shared concern’ is
by no means a given: Jameson’s approach to magical realism problematizes
the positioning of magical realism precisely at this intersection. In addition, but
in contrast to Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad identifies magical realism with postmod-
ernism, something that for Ahmad is inherently problematic in the face of a
postcolonial realm that he defines as essentially political. To Ahmad, it is impos-
sible to reconcile the explicitly political concerns of the Third World and post-
modern ‘theories of the fragmentation and/or death of the Subject: the politics
of discrete exclusivities and localisms on the one hand, or, on the other – as
some of the poststructuralisms would have it – the very end of the social, the
impossibility of stable subject positions, hence the death of politics as such’.26
This leads Ahmad to dismiss the claim made by postcolonial theorist Homi K.
Bhabha that magical realism has become the ‘literary language of the emergent
postcolonial world’ as a ‘routine feature of metropolitan theory’s inflationary
rhetoric’.27 However, neither Hutcheon nor Ahmad actually consider magical
realism in any great detail, and certainly do not offer any adequate definition of
the genre.
Wendy Faris states that magical realism is ‘an important component of
postmodernism’,28 which she defines using Brian McHale’s distinction between
modernism as an ‘epistemological’ and postmodernism as an ‘ontological’ lit-
erary mode. To Faris, the ‘moment of invention, the realisation of the imagi-
nary realm’ is what signals that magical realism, as postmodernism, is concerned
with ‘questions of being’ rather than ‘questions of knowledge’, echoing
Gonzáles Echevarría’s and Spindler’s typologies. Faris refers to John Barth’s
essay ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in which he takes García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude to be the perfect example of postmodernism,
describing it as a ‘synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and
magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization
and caricature, humour and terror’.29 In addition, she lists a number of second-
ary specifications of magical realism, some by now familiar, which also allow
her to place it within the postmodern: metafictionality, linguistic playfulness
and self-awareness, repetition and intertextual reference, an anti-bureaucratic
agenda, a carnivalesque spirit and so on. Once more, however, while these
devices certainly appear in magical realist works, it is not obvious how they
are specific to magical realism. Despite these critics’ attempts, it remains unclear
how magical realism can be satisfactorily described as a particularly postmod-
ern genre. Indeed, efforts to align magical realism with postmodernism,
although interesting, have failed to provide a definition of the genre.
Realism and The Resolution of Antinomy
The closest Wendy Faris comes to a definition of magical realism is in her sug-
gestion that magical realism must be defined in opposition to realism, through
its inclusion of an ‘imaginative moment’: the fantastic or supernatural. Yet
magical realism remains linked to realism in that it ‘combines realism and
the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the
reality portrayed’.30 Realist descriptions, a physical experience of the magic,
and a literalization of metaphors allow the magical elements to ‘grow almost
imperceptibly out of the real’.31 In the end, Faris’s definition conforms to those
already considered: narrative characteristics allow the coexistence of the real
and the magic to be ‘organical’ or ‘imperceptible’, that is, without the appear-
ance of any disparity between them. Definitions of the genre remain vague
and unsatisfactory if they concern themselves only with contexts or list charac-
teristics without giving their specific function in the text, whether these be
‘anthropological’ postcolonial contexts or ‘ontological’ postmodern character-
istics. Rather, the idea of the resolution of the contradiction between the real
and the supernatural in the magic realist text appears to be not only the most
often cited characteristic of magical realism, but also its most distinguishing
feature. Unsurprisingly, one of the few fully developed and most convincing
definitions of the genre so far centres on this resolution: Amaryll Chanady’s
seminal Magical Realism and the Fantastic.
Chanady mainly surveys works of Latin American magical realism, including
novels and short stories by García Márquez, Carpentier and Asturias. Her
definition of magical realism is grounded in its opposition to the fantastic in
terms of its narrative treatment of the natural and supernatural. Chanady’s
starting point is therefore Tzvetan Todorov’s famous definition of the fantastic.
Todorov offers a symmetrical analysis of literary genres which places the fantas-
tic at the centre between the uncanny and the marvellous. In all three literary
forms, as Todorov puts it, ‘an event occurs in the “real” world which cannot be
explained by the laws of reality’.32 The thematic and narrative treatment of
this event, and the way this treatment determines the reader’s reaction, is key
to Todorov’s classification of the text. If the supernatural event is explained in
such a way that it is subject to the ‘laws of reality’, Todorov marks the text as
uncanny. If the event is accepted as supernatural the text is marvellous. Only
if the narrative treatment of the event causes the reader to hesitate between
a rational and supernatural explanation is the text fantastic.
Chanady emphasizes that the fantastic is essentially different from what

Todorov terms the uncanny and marvellous – categories which include fairy
tales, fantasy, horror, sci-fi and mysteries – ‘because two distinct levels of reality
are represented’ in the text.33 If the supernatural is explained or accepted the
text includes only one level of reality. Chanady’s definition of magical realism is
analogous to the fantastic but moves away from Todorov’s concept of reader
hesitation, instead locating an antinomy between these two levels of reality
within the text itself. While in the fantastic the implicit contradiction between
the natural and supernatural is unresolved, producing hesitation, in magical
realism ‘the supernatural is not presented as problematic’ (MRF 23). In fact,
says Chanady, in magical realism the antinomy ‘which exists on a semantic level’
is resolved by the text (MRF 36). That is, as Spindler indicates, specific charac-
teristics of the text itself resolve the conflict between the natural and the super-
natural. While Spindler only defines these characteristics as either the use of an
ethnic world-view or a matter-of-fact narration, Chanady identifies the use of
authorial reticence and focalizers as the particular devices that achieve this
resolution.
Chanady takes the famous episode of the ascension of Remedios the Beauty
in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example:
She watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flap-
ping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of
the beetles and the dahlias and passing through the air with her as four
o’clock in the afternoon came to the end.34
In this passage, Chanady notes the absence of an explanation for the magical
event, an absence she terms authorial reticence. Not only does the author
refuse to explain the supernatural, or show any surprise, but the narration
‘provides no information which would suggest an alternative reaction to the
supernatural’ (MRF 151). This authorial reticence implies, to Chanady, an
absence of a hierarchy between two codes of reality presented, and therefore
effects a resolution of the contradiction between them. In the fantastic the nar-
ration creates an atmosphere of mystery that underpins the reader’s hesitation,
as the supernatural is rarely described directly, but only implied or hinted at. In
magical realism, on the other hand, the supernatural is described in a detailed,
natural way, and this is essential to the resolution of its antinomy with the real.
Chanady explains that ‘the reader is carried away by the matter-of-fact descrip-
tions so that he does not have the opportunity of questioning the fictitious
world view’ (MRF 123).
To Chanady, the focalizer is the point of view from which characters and
actions are presented. In the above passage, the ‘focalizer [here the narrator]
places a supernatural event on the same level as an ordinary occurrence, and
the narrative voice fuses the two levels (the logically impossible ascension and
the prosaic washing on the line)’ (MRF 36). Chanady states that the magical
realist narrator and the focalizer must present a coherent Weltanschauung, but
she also stresses that it is the ‘consistency and verisimilitude within the fictitious
world’ which is key, not whether this Weltanschauung actually conforms to a
particular cultural world-view (MRF 36). Chanady elsewhere notes that most
of García Márquez’s supernatural motifs do not, in fact, have a connection to
an existing indigenous world-view. Thus, although magical realism can be
traced to Latin American syncretism, Chanady extends the term to refer to ‘any
fictitious juxtaposition of the natural and the supernatural’.35
In Chanady’s magical realism both authorial reticence and focalizer work
simultaneously to resolve the antinomy between the magic and the real.
Chanady’s definition of magical realism thus combines elements of Spindler’s
anthropological and ontological magical realism: the manner in which the
presence of a particular world-view works to resolve the antinomy between the
real and the magic is exactly through the use of a matter-of-fact narration.
Chanady’s essential definition of magical realism is the coexistence of the
natural and supernatural without antinomy, an idea that has, as we have seen,
dominated contemporary theories of magical realism in literature. Indeed, this
definition of magical realism certainly permits, even encourages, the prevalent
postcolonial readings of the genre. However, the division between the cultural
and the textual that Spindler’s typology suggests also indicates an inherent
problem in magical realism, which Aldama touched upon above. Aldama
stresses that magical realism, as a text, was ‘not a de facto site of resistance and
emancipation’ and that it certainly ‘does not change the course of history’
(PNC 41) – a textual resolution of antinomy does not necessarily equal a resolu-
tion of the antinomy between cultural world-views.
Indeed, Jameson’s definition of magical realism suggested that it was borne
out of a conflict between cultures. In addition, Jameson indicated that as such,
magical realism was precisely opposed to an aesthetic postmodern textuality
divorced from the ‘real’ world. Brenda Cooper’s attempt to reconcile Jameson’s
definition with an articulation of magical realism as genre that expresses
cultural hybridity through postmodern techniques highlights the inherent
contradiction in postcolonial approaches to the genre. Cooper is forced to
conclude that the hybridity of magical realism does not, in fact, necessarily
imply a straightforward political reading of the genre: ‘This mode contests
boundaries, seamless unities and ethnic purities and can therefore co-exist only
very uneasily with cultural nationalism’ (WAF 216). In the texts she considers
she often finds that the proposed alignment of realism and the colonial power,
on the one hand, and magic and a decolonizing force, on the other is, at best,
ambiguous. In fact, she has to admit that the ‘folkloric tradition’ of these novels
often ‘carries a conservatism and a cultural exclusiveness that also shuts down
the vision of the third eye’ (WAF 218). She explains this ambiguity by pointing
to the relatively privileged point of view of most writers of magical realism,
their position as ‘migrant cosmopolitans’, which inevitably implicates them in
Western capitalist culture. In fact, despite her best efforts to prove the contrary,
in her book about African magical realism, Cooper does little to move away
from a conclusion she draws in an earlier article: ‘The term “Magical Realism”
in its most common usage [. . .] is not linked to a specific ideological or theo-
retical framework and cannot be assumed to be politically enlightened’.36
Similarly, while Durix expressly narrowed the definition of magical realism
by adding the proviso that the text must include a socio-political content, he is
acutely aware of the inherent problems with such a condition. For, although
‘the presence of the two radically antithetic – but nevertheless equally essential-
ist – discourses in the same fictional structure results in a mutual questioning of
each one’s pretensions to totality and unproblematic ease’, the ‘seriousness of
the political discourse is duplicated and somewhat undermined by the equally
serious – at least on the surface – conventions of magic’ (MGP 188). Durix
argues for the liberatory potential of the ‘hybrid aesthetics’ of the ‘New
Literatures’, but while magical realism plays a major part in this aesthetics, he is
continually forced to concede that it is a problematic genre in the postcolonial
context. The magic is always in danger of undermining political readings of
the genre and demonstrating that magical realism offers nothing but a futile
inversion of existing hierarchies, ‘pandering to the tastes of Westerners eager to
read about quaint exotic worlds’ (MGP 188).
In fact, can the magic in magical realism be seen to embody any kind of
politics at all? Timothy Brennan’s critique of magical realist works in his
Salman Rushdie and the Third World is worth noting. Although he does not
attempt to define magical realism, his readings of One Hundred Years of Solitude
and Midnight’s Children highlight a central problem for magical realism in a
postcolonial context. He notes that the way these novels – magically, we must
note – end in apocalypse ‘ambiguously counters their passionate opposition to
censorship and their struggle for human rights in the public forum’.37 Brennan
repeatedly suggests that the magical elements seem to be contradictory to,
rather than facilitating, the socio-political content of these novels. In Midnight’s
Children ‘authorial creation’, or what we would call the magical content, is
sourced from Indian culture, folklore and myth and explicitly attempts to fulfil
India’s, in Rushdie’s words, ‘national longing for form’,38 suggesting a post-
colonial, nationalistic theme. However, Brennan notes that Rushdie’s novel also
repeatedly suggests that such invention or ‘fakery’ is problematic in this setting:
‘Although the naïve dilemma of “fakery” is a truism in fiction, in Rushdie it is
something more – a plague on political discourse, and so, in Rushdie’s case
(who combines the two), a double bind’.39 Indeed, this double bind between
realist political discourse, on the one hand, and authorial invention, ‘fakery’ or
magic, on the other, is at the heart of the possibilities and problems of magical
realism in a postcolonial context.
However, the problem posed by Cooper, Durix and Brennan is perhaps
the wrong one. Their analyses of the genre assume, as many critics do, that the
magic element of magical realism must be central to the genre’s perceived sub-
version of Western categories of real and supernatural. However, looking back
at definitions of the genre, the one narrative technique that has consistently
been privileged as essential to magical realism is the factual or matter-of-fact
tone. Wendy Faris highlights that this device is provided by the realism in
magical realism, and therefore realism must be part of the genre’s definition.
In other words, the term magical realism itself indicates not only the inclusion
of both natural and supernatural events without antinomy, but also the key role
played by the realistic narration in the resolution of this antinomy. It may be
true, as Zamora and Faris point out, that magical realism is an ‘extension of
realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the
same time as it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism
and literary realism’.40 However, to Zamora and Faris, as to most of the other
critics that we have considered, realism is key to a consideration of magical real-
ism not because the genre departs from realism, but because realism integrates
magic ‘into the rationality and materiality of literary realism’.41
Robert R. Wilson further explores how realism is central to magical realism
using the notion of literary space. Any ‘fictional world’ ‘invokes an experience
of place – of volume, distance, co-ordination, interiority and exteriority [. . .]
made possible by deictics and descriptive phrases that appear to place charac-
ters and things in relation to each other and to a larger context’. This space,
continues Wilson, can take three forms: 1) a world in which ‘all deictics and
descriptions operate as if they were being used in the extra-textual world’; 2) a
world in which all such indications of space are ‘generated in accordance with
self-contained axioms or “rules”’; and 3) a world where the descriptions of
space ‘are sometimes those of the extra-textual world, but at other times [. . .]
are those of another place which, if it were to exist purely, would be an enclosed
axiomatic game of the second kind’.42
While the first kind of fictional world corresponds to realism, and the second
to fantasy, magical realism belongs to the third category, a ‘fictional space
created by the dual inscription of incompatible geometries’ which allows the
coexistence of two distinct fictional worlds, following different rules, in an
‘enfolding’ of ‘two kinds of cause and effect, two kinds of organism, two kinds
of consequence, two kinds of time and space [. . .] even two modes of textuality’
(MS 71–72). To Wilson the ‘hybridness of space eruptions occur normally’
because the two worlds ‘interact, interpenetrate and interwind, unpredictably
but in a natural fashion’ (MS 71). This effect is attained by avoiding asking
certain questions and adopting a neutral narrative voice. What Wilson terms
‘hybridness’ is thus the resolution of the antinomy between the two worlds,
through precisely a matter-of-fact narrative.
Crucially, Wilson states that the two worlds of magical realism ‘like parabolic
trajectories, always approach each other but never actually merge’ (MS 73).
This is a point that appears to have been overlooked by many critics, but which
is, in fact, entirely necessary to the most common definition of magical realism.
As Chanady succinctly points out, ‘if the supernatural is not recognized as such,
there can be no magical realism’ (MRF 22). To some extent, we are back to the
territory staked out by Todorov: according to Wilson, if the supernatural is

explained through the laws of nature we are in the realm of realism, and if it
is accepted as part of a supernatural world, we are in the realm of fantasy.
However, in magical realism, just as in Todorov’s fantastic, neither resolution
takes place. Rather, as both Chanady and Wilson note, the two levels or realms,
the real and the magic, must remain separate. It therefore suddenly becomes
clear, that, paradoxically, while the resolution of antinomy is seen essential to
magical realism, the continued distinction between the real and the magic must
be equally crucial.
We are finally faced with the fundamental question of what is perceived as
real and as magic in magical realism, and how we differentiate between them.
As Zamora and Faris point out, the ‘term implies a clearer opposition between
magic and reality than exists within those texts [that are seen as magic realist]’.43
Most critics who read magical realism in a postcolonial context have simply
equated the real with a Western point of view and the magic with a non-West-
ern, ‘ethnic’ or indigenous point of view. While perhaps adequate for their
purposes, this cultural division is ultimately unsatisfactory. Chanady finds the
solution to this question in the realism of the genre. Not only is realism the key
narrative device for resolving the antinomy between the magic and the real; it
is also what defines the magic by establishing the ‘ground’ of the real against
which the magic appears as different. To Chanady, the magical realist author
‘implicitly presents the irrational world view [of the magic] as different from his
own by situating the story in present-day reality, using learned expressions and
vocabulary, and showing he is familiar with logical reasoning and empirical
knowledge’ (MRF 22).
The magic is therefore that which does not conform to the world-view of the
realist narrator, whether it be supernatural or simply implausible. Chanady
refers to Julio Cortázar’s story ‘Bestiary’, where a tiger is living in a house, side by
side with a family. The tiger’s presence is not supernatural, merely very unusual.
Chanady argues that this kind of narrative should be included under the label
magical realism: ‘since its [the tiger’s] presence is so implausible and inexpli-
cable [. . .] the reader sees it as something unreal, even if not supernatural’
(MRF 55). To Chanady it is not the particular nature of the magic that defines
magical realism but the way the structure of the narrative allows two separate
codes, one real, familiar or natural and the other unreal, extraordinary or
magic, to coexist. Crucial, however, is the fact that it is the realist narrative that
sets up difference between the real and the magic: ‘The term “magic” refers to
the fact that the perspective presented by the text in an explicit manner is not
accepted according to the implicit world-view of the educated implied author’
(MRF 22). To Chanady, the realist narration or form of magical realism signals
that it is a Western world-view, empirical and positivist, that determines what is
real and what is magic. At the same time, this form is applied indiscriminately
to all events, whether they are seen as real or magic within this very world-view,
which has the effect of apparently resolving the antinomy between them.
As we have seen, most critics considered above adhere to the idea that magi-
cal realism implies a resolution of the antinomy between the magic and the
real, allowing the two levels in the text to coexist in a non-hierarchical or equal
way. In addition, many readings imply that as Jameson suggests, the real and the
magic are representative of pre-capitalist and capitalist, native and colonial, or
non-Western and Western cultures or world-views. Such readings also suggest
that the resolution of antinomy in the magical realist text implies a subversion
of the Western world-view, or a decolonizing movement, expressed as a cultural
and generic ‘hybridity’. Yet there is surely an implicit contradiction here. If
there is to be any kind of hybridity in the magical realist text, the two world-
views, cultures or levels of reality also have to be perceived as distinct and sepa-
rate, as both Chanady and Wilson suggest. In fact, in order to define magical
realism it has to be differentiated in this way from simple realism or fantasy.
Furthermore, the particular relationship between the real and the magic has
to be defined technically or textually; the mere contextual presence of two
world-views is not enough to distinguish magical realism from any type of writ-
ing that deals with different cultures. Only the method proposed by Chanady
provides an adequate way of describing the unique way a magical realist text
works: resolving antinomy through a matter-of-fact realist narrative. However, if
this is the manner in which magical realism must be defined, Chanady is also
the only critic who provides a convincing account of how the real and the magic
are distinguished in the text. A simple contextual approach is unable to do
this, or to define magical realism adequately. However, Chanady’s method high-
lights a central problem for postcolonial approaches to the genre. If magical
realism’s perceived suitability for describing the postcolonial condition depends
on the resolution of the antinomy between the real and the magic, then if this
resolution depends on a realism that is explicitly connected with a Western
world-view, how successful can the genre ever be considered to be?
Yet it is striking how pervasive the view of magical realism as a decolonizing
genre is, despite the quite obvious problems with this approach. Michael Valdez
Moses takes magical realism to be a genre akin to the historical romance, its
magic as nostalgia for the pre-modern, precisely because of its essentially
Western perspective, but he also notes how writers of magical realism seem to
encourage the ‘utopian hopes’ of those who ‘look to magical realism [. . .] for
a radical alternative to the malaise they understand global modernity to be’.44
We will return to look at the reasons for this common approach, as well as for
its common problems, in the last chapter of this book.
As Christopher Warnes points out in his recent Magical Realism and the Post-
colonial Novel, there has not been any notable definition of the genre in recent
years that diverges substantially from Chanady’s model.45 Warnes recommends
a formal, ‘lucid and consistent definition and a close attention to the semantics
of structure’.46 However, he also affirms the formal properties of magical real-
ism we are already familiar with: ‘at key moments in each novel the supernatu-
ral is naturalised and integrated into the novel’s realism without being explained
away’ and ends up concluding, rather unsurprisingly, that ‘magical realism in

its postcolonial forms can thus be seen as a response to the “othering” that
accompanies Western colonialism, supported as it is in the modern period by
the universalist claims of reason’.47 Nevertheless, Warnes makes a very impor-
tant point. To a great extent the problem with postcolonial approaches to
magical realism lies in the lack of a proper formal definition of the genre.
Slemon, for example, by his own admission takes advantage of the genre’s ‘lack
of theoretical specificity’ (MRDP 409), and thus, as Warnes points out, reads a
selection of texts only loosely connected by a postcolonial theme as examples
of magical realism. However, it is not only a failure to offer a formal definition
that has been problematic in postcolonial approaches to magical realism, but
also the failure to engage with the fact that the only available working model of
magical realism may simply not be suitable for postcolonial readings.
What postcolonial approaches to magical realism have in common, which
is also their weakness, is that they begin with a socio-cultural or geo-political
contextual approach to the genre, or rely on contextual definitions of it. Not
only does this pose immediate problems for political readings of the genre, but,
as we have seen, it also fails to provide a satisfactory definition of magical
realism. Rather, as Warnes suggests, a formal approach is necessary in order to
provide a definition which can then be applied to any context. What if, then, we
were to begin by approaching the magical realist text purely on a formal, tex-
tual basis, as partly undertaken by Chanady and Wilson? That is, in an inversion
of many critical approaches to magical realism, we would begin by looking at
the real and magical elements in the text as separate from any extra-textual
context. This would allow us to consider what the real and the magic are in
themselves, and how they are related to each other. In fact, in Spindler’s terms,
we would look at the ontological properties of the real and the magic, rather
than their anthropological connections, in order to define magical realism.
Once this definition is established, however, we can move on to reconsider
magical realism in the context that it most prominently features in, that is, the
postcolonial.
This inversion of common approaches to magical realism in order to privi-
lege ontology over anthropology, or text over context, taken together with
Chanady’s suggestion regarding realism’s central role in the genre, suggests
another inversion of commonly held views of magical realism. Although
Chanady herself insists that the resolution of the antinomy between the real
and the magic is the key defining characteristic of magical realism, the distinc-
tion or separation of the magic and the real is, in fact, primary to her analysis.
What if, then, we consider this difference between the magic and the real to
be absolutely central to magical realism, indeed, to the ontological character of
the magical realist text? In fact, what if magical realism is defined not by the
resolution of antinomy between two distinct ‘codes’ of reality through realism,
but by the distinction between these two levels, in the face of a dominant image
of reality presented by the matter-of-fact realist narrative? The way that the
magic in magical realism is continually perceived as different, even though it is

narrated in a realist manner, then becomes the central transaction of the genre.
Such an approach would clearly have quite distinctive implications for readings
of magical realism, in particular postcolonial readings.
In order to approach magical realism most fruitfully via these two inversions
of common readings of the genre, we need a theoretical framework that pro-
vides an adequate ontology: one that allows the nature of the text to be consid-
ered separately from extra-textual reality, as well as giving the concept of
difference a central place. In order to reappraise the paradox presented to us
by Chanady’s definition of magical realism, namely the simultaneous difference
and non-disjunction between the real and the magic, this framework needs to
be able to articulate the conditions of both the real and the magic in the text,
without privileging one or the other, at the same time as articulating the differ-
ence between the two as primary. In addition, the theoretical model will also
need to enable us to consider afresh the relationship of the textual construct we
have defined in this way to the cultural, geographical and even political con-
texts that magical realism has emerged from. An ontological reconsideration of
magical realism will allow us to articulate such a relationship in a way which
avoids the reductive conclusions that magical realism is, through its dominant
realism, inevitably ‘on the side’ of Western, capitalist or colonizing powers.
Chapter 2
Gilles Deleuze and Magical Realism
Introduction: The Importance of Ontology

If we need an approach to magical realism that takes as its starting point an
investigation of the nature of the real and the magic as they appear in the text,
rather than beginning with any contextual explanation of these two elements,
the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze provides us with the theoretical framework to
develop such an approach. Gilles Deleuze’s ontology ostensibly revolves pre-
cisely around the inversion of the hierarchy of identity and difference, and, in
both in his own work and that which he co-authored with Félix Guattari, he
offers an ontological model in which the text and the extra-textual world are
seen as separate, autonomous entities, but which still allows for the articulation
of their relevance to each other.
Deleuze’s ontology rests on a few simple concepts, at the heart of which lies a
paradox: one Being with two distinct yet inextricable sides. To Deleuze, the real
consists of the actual and the virtual. The actual is that which exists in time and
space: matter and form. The virtual is an ‘abstract and potential multiplicity’
presupposed by space and time. Deleuze opposes this ‘pluralism of free, wild or
untamed difference’ to ‘specific difference’.1 In brief, specific difference, which
Deleuze traces back to Aristotle, is the difference between things, dependent
on the prior definition and identity of things themselves. To Deleuze, specific
difference is ‘only empirical, and the corresponding determinations are only
extrinsic’. In contrast, immediate, free difference is difference-in-itself – a ‘state
in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction’ (DR 28). The
virtual is therefore entirely self-differing: it is a ‘plane of immanence’ or a field
of intensity immediate to itself. Deleuze stresses that the virtual ‘must be defined
as strictly a part of the real object’ (DR 208–209). The real consists of the virtual
and the actual together. However, this twofold nature of reality is merely the
appearance of two aspects of the same thing: ‘Being’, says Deleuze, ‘is univocal’
(DR 36). This does not mean that everything is the same, but that Being is
the same for all instances of being: ‘Being is said in a single and same sense of
everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of
difference itself’ (DR 36). In fact, the virtual is properly the force of Being that
is actualized in a multiplicity of beings, which are all forms or modes of this
univocal Being. To Deleuze, difference, rather than identity, is therefore pri-

mary to Being.
Deleuze emphasizes the role of the virtual in an understanding of reality.
A view of reality that only takes the actual side into account, which allows the
virtual to be ‘reduced to a simple possible’ (DR 205), leads to error and illusion.
However, to Deleuze, this error does not come about without reason. The
virtual consists of pure difference-in-itself, which becomes actualized in
matter and forms. However, in this process, says Deleuze, difference-in-itself is
negated:
Difference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be cancelled;

this means only that difference is essentially implicated, that its being is impli-
cation. For difference, to be explicated is to be cancelled or to dispel the
inequality that constitutes it [. . .] it is cancelled insofar as it is drawn outside
itself, in extensity and in the quality which fills that extensity. (DR 228)
The difference-in-itself of the virtual is pure intensity, or rather, differences

in intensity without matter or form, but the actualization of this intensity into
matter and form turns difference-in-itself into actual things. Yet, since the vir-
tual and the actual are both part of the real, this is an inevitable transaction:
‘difference creates both this extensity and this quality [. . .]. Difference of inten-
sity is cancelled or tends to be cancelled in this system, but it creates this system
by explicating itself’ (DR 228).
This inescapable reduction of the virtual in its process of actualization leads
to us to make mistakes in the way we see and describe the world, and the rejec-
tion and correction of these mistakes is a central theme in Deleuze’s work.
Once difference-in-itself is actualized it produces ‘specific difference’, and it is
here that the long error of what Deleuze calls the ‘image of thought’ begins:
identity (actual) is privileged over difference (virtual) (DR 129). In Difference
and Repetition, tracing a line from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes to
Kant and beyond, Deleuze finds that this initial confusion underpins and links
such erroneous concepts as a transcendent origin or creator, the primacy of
the thinking subject (or Cogito), and, importantly for our investigation, what
Deleuze calls the ‘illusion of representation’ (DR 277).
In the face of this inevitable error of thought, how is it then possible to grasp
the true nature of reality? Deleuze proposes that while there is an actualization
of the virtual, there is also a counter-actualization or counter-effectuation of the
actual, whereby the actual can, in a sense, communicate with its virtual side.
Even when it has been actualized, every object still has a virtual side, an ‘excess’
of the virtual that is not explicated, but ‘left unaccomplished’ in actualization.2
Essentially, counter-actualization is a process of recognizing or thinking the vir-
tual side of actuality, but it is also, to Deleuze, a way of reaching the full poten-
tial of reality, or, on an individual level, to personal freedom. Counter-actualization
Gilles Deleuze and Magical Realism 21
is where ‘our greatest freedom lies – the freedom by which we develop and lead
the [virtual] to its completion and transmutation, and finally become masters
of actualizations and causes’ (LS 243). To Deleuze, counter-actualization, the
thinking of the virtual together with the actual and according difference its
proper weight, is therefore the only ethics and the aim of every individual and
of creation as such.
Deleuze and the Univocity of Being
Deleuze’s ontology thus provides us with the inversion of the hierarchy of

identity and difference necessary to a radical reconsideration of magical real-
ism. However, it also indicates the fundamental significance to Deleuze of
the ontological proposition of the univocity of Being. This significance is also
crucial to our theoretical model, as it is not only at the heart of Deleuze’s
approach to reality, textual and extra-textual, but is also key to negotiating the
paradoxical relationship of the real and magic as different yet non-disjunctive,
and even indiscernible, in magical realism. The importance of this concept
to the ethics of Deleuze’s philosophical project has major implications for a
redefinition of magical realism. However, this is an aspect of Deleuzian onto-
logy which has often been neglected by a prevalent view of his philosophy as a
celebration of the plurality of creation, freedom of desires and the liberation of
differences. In fact, a reading based on the univocity of Being is often at odds
with these familiar positions.
Two readers of Deleuze stand out as having afforded Deleuze’s univocal ontol-
ogy the centrality it requires, in contrast to readings of Deleuze as a philosopher
of the plural. In his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Alain Badiou asserts that
contrary to the commonly accepted image (Deleuze as liberating the anar-

chic multiple of desires and errant drifts) [. . .] it is the occurrence of the
One – renamed by Deleuze the One-All – that forms the supreme destination
of thought and to which thought is accordingly consecrated [. . .] Deleuze’s
fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to
submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.3
If we consider some of Deleuze’s earlier monographs, in which he elaborated

his ontological position, Badiou’s point is obvious: to Deleuze the multiple is
always a merely formal determination, while in essence Being is One (DC 25).
Deleuze finds an affirmation of this ontological unity of multiplicity in, for
example, Bergson’s idea of time,4 in Nietzsche’s eternal return,5 and in Spinoza’s
concept of substance.6
Such a reading of Deleuze as a philosopher of the One has profound implica-
tions, as Peter Hallward has argued. Hallward explicitly rejects socio-political
readings of Deleuze, for he sees Deleuze as a philosopher of the singular. To

Hallward, a singular philosophy
seeks to understand the individuation of all possible beings and experiences

as part of one and the same productive process [. . .] [a] single productive
energy that saturates, in essentially the same way, every dimension of existence
and experience.7
The Deleuzian concept of Being is therefore an example of a singular philoso-

phy: a self-differing creative force, immanent to itself. This creative force is
expressed in formally multiple beings entirely unrelated to each other, defined
only by their reference to a Being that is One. To Hallward this is a necessary
consequence of the ontological privilege Deleuze affords difference-in-itself,
which ‘creates rather than relates what it differs’.8
Hallward contrasts a singular with a specific thought: a philosophical system
in which individuals are defined by their relationships with each other, their
environment and themselves. The specific is essentially subjective, ‘a philoso-
phy of the irreducibly social subject, the subject-with-others’.9 Hallward con-
cludes that while many critics see Deleuze as an advocate of specific diversity
and plurality, of ‘radical democracy’ and ‘minor identities’, in fact, ‘invariably,
“multiplicity” with Deleuze is the predicate of a radical, self-differing singular-
ity’. In Deleuze’s singular philosophy ‘the multiple, always, is impersonal and
ahistorical, and has nothing to do with the aggregation let alone the negotia-
tion or mediation of personal affections or interests’.10
In contrast, many readings of Deleuze and Guattari, which echo Constantin
Boundas’s often quoted position that ‘the ritornello of their minor deconstruc-
tion coordinates the manifesto of their radical pluralism’,11 prioritize Deleuze’s
works with Guattari, which specifically deal with society, politics, economics and
psychology. Michael Hardt defines the ‘fundamental elements of Deleuze’s
project’ as an ‘attack on “the negative” as a political task’ and ‘a suggestive
glimpse of a radically democratic theory’.12 Brian Massumi reads Deleuze as
envisioning a society almost impossibly plural: ‘Since anarchy-schizophrenia
welcomes chance, a society tending in its direction possesses a nearly infinite
degrees [sic] of freedom’.13 Certainly, one cannot deny that this part of Deleuze’s
oeuvre concerns itself more with modes of worldly organization than ontology,
and in this concern it certainly offers valid and useful models of the world
around us.14 However, what Deleuze continually does in his works with Guattari
is to account for the ontological basis of every worldly organization, that is, the
role of the interaction of the virtual and the actual in shaping our reality. As
Badiou suggests, all of Deleuze’s work is an exploration of how all existence
expresses the One-All or Being. The sheer number of contexts in which Deleuze
does this, however, suggests Badiou, is a reason why critics tend to see him as a
proponent of pluralism (DC 29).
Deleuze insists that what he and Guattari are practising is ‘pure philosophy’,
something which they explain as attempting to ‘save the infinite by giving it
consistency: it [philosophy] lays out a plane of immanence’ (WIP 197). A philo-
sophical plane of immanence, also called the ‘plane of consistency’, is nothing
but thought cutting through the virtual, ‘capturing’ a slice of it. In their joint
projects Deleuze and Guattari proceed to demonstrate how all structures in the
actual, so called assemblages, are conditioned by the virtual, by thinking various
planes of the virtual which relate to these structures. Confusingly, they assign
different terms to these planes in different contexts such as the abstract
machine, the body without organs or the line of flight. Importantly, however,
whatever it is called, this virtual plane is never separate, neither prior nor ante-
rior to any of the actual structures – social, economical, psychological or lin-
guistic – that Deleuze and Guattari consider.
It is important to note three aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s endeavour.
First, Deleuze and Guattari never abandon the basic principle of the unity of
the actual and the virtual and the univocity of Being. Second, they valorize
those assemblages which make the virtual more apparent or more active within
the actual; and third, the ultimate aim of their project is an articulation of the
virtual movement which is presupposed by all of the actual structures they inves-
tigate. Throughout their writing this aim is made clear: what they designate
variably as the molecular, micropolitical, rhizomatic, nomadic and so on, is
constantly articulated as more positive, because ‘closer’ to its virtual part, than
the molar, macropolitical, arborescent or sedentary. Most valued is the abstract
machine, the body without organs, or the line of flight, which all designate the
virtual plane in itself. While the actual and the virtual are always seen as one,
there is a continual imperative not only to move from those actual constella-
tions in which the virtual is less active or apparent to those in which it is more
so, but ultimately also to effect a counter-actualization that implies a thinking of
the virtual side of Being in itself. Hallward points out Deleuze’s ‘distinction
between two general kinds of actuality, two orientations of the creature’; that is,
the difference between the forms of actuality that are oriented to life in the
world, ‘e.g. through personal fulfilment, social interaction, political integra-
tion, responsible communication, ethical concern etc.’ and the forms which
‘set out to become adequate to the virtual events which sustain or inspire them’
and are thus oriented ‘towards a being out of this world’.15
Deleuze and Redemption
Hallward suggests such a tendency towards the virtual is a redemptive move-

ment in Deleuzian thought. While the personal, the political, the specific – that
which seems to be at the centre of most interpretations of Deleuzian thought –
all reside within the realm of the worldly or actual, redemption lies exactly in
the virtual – that which is impersonal, apolitical and aspecific, and in Hallward’s
terms ‘out of this world’. Badiou similarly states that the aim of Deleuzian
thought is to go beyond worldly life: ‘for individuals to attain the point where
they are seized by their preindividual determination and, thus, by the power of
the One-All – of which they are, at the start, only meagre local configurations –
they have to go beyond their limits and endure transfixion and disintegration
of their actuality by infinite virtuality’ (DC 12–13).
There is certainly a ‘politics’ of Deleuzian thought, insofar it privileges
certain ways of being in the world, but this is always superseded by an impera-
tive to understand that which this world presupposes. Readers of Deleuze who
favour the plural and political, seem to consistently neglect the full implications
of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’. There is, as Deleuze and Guattari
make clear, on one hand, a relative deterritorialization in the actual, and on the
other, an absolute deterritorialization from the actual to the virtual. When they
speak of the political or revolutionary, it is in the sense of going beyond the
actual social, political and revolutionary as such, towards a purely creative force
presupposed by social or political formations and structures. As Badiou insists:
The question posed by Deleuze is the question of Being. From beginning to

end, and under the constraint of innumerable and fortuitous cases, his work
is concerned with thinking thought (its act, its movement) on the basis of an
ontological precomprehension of Being as One. It is impossible to overem-
phasize this point, consistently occulted by critical or phenomenological
interpretations of his work. (DC 20)
For example, the often invoked Deleuzian concept of becoming can be seen as
this kind of redemptive movement from the actual to the virtual. While Deleuze
and Guattari describe becoming in many different ways (TP 232–309), it can be
summarised as the process of individual deterritorialization, or the counter-
actualization of an individual (although the individual is not necessarily a
‘person’) precisely towards a pre-individual state. It is, however, not always one
single motion. Deleuze and Guattari trace a progression of becomings:
Exclusive importance should not be attached to becomings-animal. Rather

they are segments occupying a median region. On the near side, we encoun-
ter becomings-woman, becomings-child [. . .] On the far side, we find becom-
ings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even becomings-imperceptible
[. . .]. Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-impercep-
tible on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the
imperceptible is seen and heard [. . .]. The imperceptible is the immanent
end of becoming, its cosmic formula. (TP 248, 252, 279)
Certainly the centrality of the idea of Being as One for Deleuze implies
an imperative to a ‘redemptive’ movement in his philosophy, as suggested by
Hallward: the need to overcome the illusions of the actual and reach the full
potential of Being through thinking the virtual. Deleuze gives possible models
for this redemption in his concepts of counter-actualization, becoming-imper-
ceptible, or absolute deterritorialization. What Hallward crucially points out is
the radical even though paradoxical difference of the virtual from the actual in
Deleuze’s philosophy, and the implicit valorization of the movement towards
this virtual in his works, including those authored with Guattari. However,
Deleuze makes it clear that counter-actualization always begins in the actual,
that it presents the possibility of thinking the virtual in this world, rather than,
as Hallward claims, out of it. To Hallward redemption is only possible by an
abrogation of the actual or worldly. Hallward posits the actual as the ‘ “Given”
[. . .] as opposed to the “Real” [. . .]’,16 and concludes that Deleuze’s philosophy
articulates ‘the unqualified dependence of the actual upon the virtual, the pure
redundance of the actual ’.17 In fact, to Deleuze, the very possibility of counter-
actualization, which is not simply a virtualisation, is, as it were, the redemption
of the actual as such – the redemption of the actual from redundancy. Deleuze
not only insists that the virtual is real, but also emphasizes that the actual is a
necessary part of Being: ‘the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way
that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself,
to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualised’ (B 97). The virtual
is not primordial, and the actual derivative; rather they form an inextricable
‘circuit’, which the movement of Being perpetually traces:
there is coalescence and division, or rather oscillation, a perpetual exchange

between the actual object and its virtual image: the virtual image never stops
becoming actual. The virtual image absorbs all of a character’s actuality,
at the same time as the actual character is no more than a virtuality [. . .].
The actual and the virtual coexist, and enter into a tight circuit which we are
continually retracing from one to the other. (DII 114)
That is, Deleuze’s philosophical method continually involves the actual as much
as the virtual. In fact, we have no choice but to begin any inquiry into the nature
of Being from the actual. Badiou points out that ‘the starting point required by
Deleuze’s method is always a concrete case’ (DC 14). And therefore he finds in
Deleuze not an abrogation of the world but ‘a sort of unwavering love for the
world as it is’ (DC 44).
If Being is One, and the virtual is always part of the actual, redemption or
counter-actualization is a matter of recognizing and understanding the virtual
in the actual. The actual without the virtual gives rise to illusion, because it
‘does not attain the ground of its own truth’ as Badiou puts it (DC 47). In the
face of this illusion, Hallward concludes that ‘if “equal, univocal being is imme-
diately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary”, then our
task is to eliminate everything that mediates or re-presents this being’.18 In fact,
the idea of redemption hinges on a non-hierarchical distribution of univocal
Being: univocal Being is, in itself, redemption. Because Being is immediately

present in everything, there is no need to eliminate anything: the imperative is
rather to see and understand, that is, to think, this immediate presence. That is,
starting from a position in the actual, to reveal and rediscover, and thus redeem,
the actual from the perspective of the virtual.
Thinking the virtual is what philosophy offers us one way of doing, by casting
a ‘plane of consistency’ over chaos; it is what Deleuze and Guattari do in their
work, studying how the actual and virtual interact. Thought, however, is not
only philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari describe philosophy, science and art as
three paths of thought that all confront the chaos of the virtual in various ways:
‘The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distin-
guished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought
through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these thoughts
is better than another, or more fully, completely, or synthetically “thought” ’
(WIP 198). Philosophy creates a plane of immanence or consistency to concep-
tualize a slice of infinity, and science, in contrast, creates a plane of coordinates,
and thus references and limits the infinite in order to better understand the
actual. However, art
involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through

a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open onto an infinite
cosmos [. . .]. Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in
order to rediscover, to restore the infinite [. . .]. Art wants to create the finite
that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition. (WIP 197)
The centrality of the idea of the univocity of Being to Deleuze thus has pro-
found implication with regard to the Deleuzian theory of literature, as art.
Since it is informed by Deleuze’s univocal ontology, Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘political’ project is ultimately about going beyond the limits of the actual, and
their approach to art follows a similar trajectory. Deleuze’s collaborations
with Guattari, perhaps in particular Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, have also
inspired political readings of Deleuze’s approach to literature. However, the
literary ‘revolution’ that Deleuze and Guattari speak of is one, like their
‘politics’, which extends beyond the situation of the here and now. What they
call a ‘political literature’ in Kafka, a so-called minor literature, is driven by
deterritorialization or becoming. The virtual part, or abstract machine, of the
literary text dismantles representation and produces a criticism of ‘concrete,
socio-political assemblages’ which is more effective than any direct political
message:
this method of active dismantling doesn’t make use of criticism that is still
part of representation. Rather, it consists in prolonging, in accelerating,
a whole movement that already is traversing the social field. It operates in a
virtuality that is already real without yet being actual [. . .] [it] transforms
what is only a method (procédé) in the social field into a procedure as an infi-
nite virtual movement.19
Thus literature exceeds the limited field of politics in the actual:
In reality writing does not have its end in itself, precisely because life is not something
personal. Or rather, the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-
personal power. In doing this it renounces claim to any territory, any end
which would reside in itself [. . .]. The line of flight is creative of these becom-
ings. Lines of flight have no territory. Writing carries out the conjunction,
the transmutation of fluxes, through which life escapes from resentment of
persons, societies and reigns. (DII 37–38)
What distinguishes art from philosophy and science is the unique way it brings
together the actual and virtual in thought. Art ‘does not actualize the virtual
event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body, a life, a universe’
(WIP 177). We saw that the movement of Being was essentially double: while
philosophy follows one ‘side’ of the movement of being, from the actual or the
given ‘states of affairs’ to the virtual, science follows the other side of the circuit,
from the virtual to the actual, or from ‘chaotic virtuality to the states of affairs
and bodies that actualize it’ (WIP 155–156). Art, however, ‘embodies’ the whole
circuit in such a way that the virtual and actual become indiscernible. Deleuze
describes this function of art in his work on cinema:
this point of indiscernibility is precisely constituted by the smallest circle, that

is, the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with
two sides, actual and virtual at the same time [. . .] it does not suppress
the distinction between the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side
taking the other’s role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal
presupposition, or reversibility.20
The way art creates zones of indiscernibility between actual and virtual is key to
an understanding of the role of art in Deleuzian ethics. Deleuze often articu-
lates this indiscernibility or ‘becoming-imperceptible’ as an embrace of or
immersion in the world, a surpassing of the human in an inclusive sense.
[To become is] to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in
this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator. One is then like
grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming,
because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has
suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between
things and growing in the midst of things. One has combined ‘everything’
(le ‘tout’). (TP 280)
What art does is to allow us to think the univocity of Being through an immer-
sion in the world – precisely without necessarily renouncing the actual as
Hallward would suggest. Thus art, for Deleuze, is one of the most accessible
models of counter-actualization or redemption as it provides us with a way of
thinking the virtual as Being: ‘What is an essence as revealed in the work of
art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what
constitutes being, what makes us conceive being’.21 Thus, not only is Deleuze’s
ontology central to his theory of art, but art is also key to his ontological
inquiry.
Series and Systems
Literature, then, is one of the forms of art that, to Deleuze, allows us to think
the virtual through counter-actualization. Deleuze describes counter-actualiza-
tion as the affirmation of a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (LS 240). Badiou argues that,
since, in Deleuze’s philosophy, all beings are essentially unrelated, and only
refer back to Being ‘one has to think the non-relation according to the One,
which founds it by radically separating the terms involved. One has to stead-
fastly rest within the activity of separation, understood as a power of Being’
(DC 22). The only ‘relation’ between, or synthesis of, beings is just this non-
relation or disjunction itself. Insofar as Being is difference-in-itself ‘displaced
within being’ (DR 304), it is this power of disjunction which is the very power
of Being that makes beings exist. Therefore an understanding of disjunctive
synthesis is also a way of thinking the virtual difference-in-itself that is Being.
Deleuze explains disjunctive synthesis further in terms of his concept of
series. To Deleuze, the structure of reality can be seen as a system of series.
The virtual consists of series of differential elements, or what Deleuze calls
singularities, while the actual is made up of series of terms consisting of matter
and form. However, the notion of series is also central to Deleuze’s reading of
literature. As Hallward puts it, the univocity of Being has a methodological
implication: ‘If all that exists exists in the same way, then there can be only one
mechanism of understanding or perception’.22 Art is not a copy of reality or a
secondary being, but shares the same ontological structure as reality itself. In
fact, series allow us not only to understand the process of counter-actualization,
but also give us the tools of analyzing how the virtual can be properly, structur-
ally, ‘embodied’ in literature.
Series, to Deleuze, are created through three kinds of syntheses, each arrang-
ing elements in a different way. The simplest synthesis is connective, where a
succession of similar elements is contracted into a homogeneous series through
resemblance. For example, a series of fruits such as orange – lemon – satsuma,
is connected by the resemblances between elements: their appearance, their
taste, their provenance and so on. Then there is conjunctive synthesis that con-
nects more or less different elements through coexistence and coordination,
making heterogeneous series. For example, the series of my lunch consisting
of a sandwich – an orange – reading a newspaper is both coexistent in time

and coordinated as the concept ‘my lunch’. Conjunctive synthesis also works to
connect series – both homogeneous and heterogeneous – into systems by
making them converge through a common element. Here, the series of fruits
converges with the series of lunch through the common element of orange.
Finally, there is the synthesis of disjunction, which also connects elements
into series and series to each other, but only through difference. Any example
of such a series is immediately revealed to be entirely inclusive: anthill – water –
bungy-jumping. Each series is defined by the differences between the terms
that make it up. The communication between series is, in turn, the relation of
the differences between the elements of one series and the differences between
elements of another. You can add any other disjunctive series to the one above.
What ensures the communication between the series is never resemblance or
identity but the very disparity between them. This disparity Deleuze calls a ‘dark
precursor’, ‘paradoxical object’ or the ‘object = x’; that is, difference-in-itself
working as a ‘differentiator’ in a system of series (DR 117). Recall Badiou’s
explanation of disjunctive synthesis. The object = x is virtual difference-in-itself,
the force of univocal Being, and as such it relates all things to each other only
through their relation to itself: it makes them resonate as part of the One Being,
rather than because of their respective identities. Indeed, Deleuze posits that
ultimately the virtual as such is the object = x for all series, making all series
communicate through itself. In this sense, disjunctive synthesis is also central to
Deleuze’s ontology, as the very mechanism of univocal Being as difference.
While connective and conjunctive syntheses build a system of convergent
series, disjunctive synthesis, through difference, creates a system where diver-
gent series communicate. However, if an object = x is introduced into a conver-
gent system it makes the series of that system diverge and ramify. Indeed,
disjunctive synthesis is what Deleuze calls the ‘the truth and destination’ of the
other two syntheses. Connective and conjunctive series are dependent on
the identity of their elements, either through simple resemblance or through
the difference between them which is subject to a coordinating identity of
some sort. Disjunctive synthesis, in contrast, is not only free from this depen-
dence on identity, but works in such a way to make the difference-in-itself
inherent in connective and conjunctive series become suddenly apparent and
visible. The appearance of an object = x in a system of homogeneous or hetero-
geneous series instantly performs a disjunctive synthesis, making series become
‘resonant’ with other, divergent, series because they now ‘connect’ through
difference (LS 262–263). Add an anthill to the series of my lunch and it is
immediately transformed to an entirely different proposition.
As we know, difference-in-itself is virtual, and while it is wholly a part of reality
it is often obscured by the actual. We also know that the nature of the actual is
such as to make difference subject to identity. Thus connective and conjunctive
syntheses, based on difference-between-things, operate entirely in the actual:
series are connected and converge through resemblance or identity, in time
and space. In contrast, disjunctive synthesis, founded on difference-in-itself,
works in, or by, the virtual. From the perspective of the actual, divergent series
are perceived as incompatible, unconnected, and do not form part of a system.
However, the virtual object = x, since it connects series only through difference,
allows for divergent series to coexist and connect, and this very coexistence
makes the virtual thinkable in the actual, by making series resonate, diverge
and ramify.
This may seem rather intuitive, but Deleuze does allow that disjunctive syn-
thesis has a practical effect, perceptible in the realm of the actual. Every system
of disjunctive synthesis has a virtual object = x ensuring communication between
series, and while this is always imperceptible within an actual system, the ‘path
it traces’ in the system is visible ‘in reverse’ as the function it performs within
the system: the ‘connection’ of the series. As such it can be thought in terms
of an actual identity, and the relation it gives to the series in the system can be
seen as resemblance, although these are merely ‘statistical effects’ of its initial,
invisible function. This resemblance, and the identity that it creates, is always
external to the system, because only pure difference is at its core (DR 119).
However, these ‘statistical effects’ are precisely the resonance of the virtual in
the actual, which allow us to think disjunctive synthesis in the serial system that
is literature.
The way that Deleuze works with series in literature is connected to his theory
of language and sense. Language consists of a series of propositions (or words)
and a series of things, or, a series of signifiers and a series of signifieds. However,
to Deleuze, the sense produced by language is not simply the direct reference
of one of the series to the other. It is rather a resonance between series, effected
precisely through disjunctive synthesis. The two series of language do not actu-
ally correspond to each other, and therefore allow the continual displacement
of terms of one series in relation to the terms of the other series. Deleuze asserts
that there is always an excess in the series of propositions, there are always more
words than things, since the elements of the series of words are part of a totality,
language, and do not exist independent of their differential relations within
this language, whereas things come into being progressively (LS 58). This excess
in one series, seen as lack in the other, works as the object = x of language, ‘by
means of which the series communicate, without losing their difference’.
Deleuze likens this object = x to Lévi-Strauss’s ‘symbolic value zero’, a value
‘itself void of sense and thus susceptible of taking any sense, whose unique func-
tion would be to fill the gap between signifier and signified’ (LS 59). To Deleuze,
the object = x ‘has the function of articulating the two series to one another, of
reflecting them in one another, of making them communicate [. . .] of assuring
the bestowal of sense in both signifying and signified series. For sense is not to
be confused with signification; it is rather what is attributed in such a way that
it determines both the signifier and the signified as such’ (LS 61).
Nevertheless, the ‘statistical effect’ of the virtual object = x appears as
reference or resemblance. Because of the inevitable illusion that the actual
gives rise to, if we consider language purely from an actual perspective, it seems
straightforwardly referential. However, if we consider the function of the

virtual object = x, we grasp that this referentiality is essentially an illusion, and
that meaning is necessarily dependent on the system in which it is created.
As we saw, an object = x can take on an identity as a result of its function in a
system. The object = x in language can therefore be recognized as a word which,
because it is simultaneously an excess in one series and a lack in the other, is
equally present in both; in it the signifier and signified coincide, because the
word appears to create its own signified in its very lack of extra-linguistic
referent. The word which is recognizable as an object = x is a word which loses
its simply referential sense, or which has no sense to begin with. The object = x
as a word is what Deleuze calls an ‘esoteric’ or nonsensical word, a word that,
precisely because is divorced, in and by a text, from any direct signification
can take on any sense (LS 79).
What, then, are the effects of such words in literature? How is the resonance
and divergence of series apparent in a text? Deleuze applies his theory of series
to literature on many occasions, most extensively in his books on Proust and
Kafka. Deleuze gives perhaps the clearest example of the resonance between
series created by disjunctive synthesis with reference to Proust’s À la recherche
du temps perdu. Two series of events and situations, Combray of the past and
Combray of the present, are initially the result of connective and conjunctive
syntheses: elements connected serially by coexistence in time and space, and
series joined by resemblances between events. However, it is only through the
appearance of an object = x that their differences and variety becomes visible
and resonant. The madeleine is the object = x, ‘something which can no longer
be defined by an identity: it envelops Combray as it is in itself’ (DR 122). The
madeleine as an object = x, because of its function in the text, loses the identity
of a madeleine as such; it no longer signifies the madeleines in the present and
past Combrays. This makes the two Combrays resonate across space and time,
and causes an ‘epiphany’ to take place between the two series (DR 121).
Although the object = x is always virtual in its function – the connection between
series through difference – it is visible as an actual thing, here the madeleine,
as a result of this function, since the resonance of convergent series that it
causes is perceptible as a new meaning. New, because ultimately the Combray
elicited by the madeleine is neither the Combray of the past or the present, but
an entirely new creation.
However, disjunctive synthesis also allows divergent series to communicate
and coexist. Deleuze describes how Lewis Carroll uses portmanteau words such
as ‘frumious’23 to act as objects = x and connect two divergent series. Deleuze
notes that ‘the necessary disjunction is not between fuming and furious, for
one may indeed be both at once; rather, it is between fuming-and-furious
on one hand and furious-and-fuming on the other. In this sense, the function
of the portmanteau word always consists in ramification of the series into which
it is inserted’ (LS 55). Here, disjunctive synthesis contracts two divergent series,
fuming-and-furious and furious-and-fuming, ‘in the successive appearance of
a single one’ (LS 199). Therefore its effect is a third outcome which unites two
divergent meanings, allowing them to coexist.
The Deleuzian notion of series thus explains how counter-actualization is
‘a synthesis which affirms the disjunct as such and makes each series resonate
inside the other’ (LS 204). It shows us how counter-actualization means that the
virtual has an effect in the actual, and that it is therefore possible to think the
virtual in the actual. In addition, it gives us a practical set of tools to apply to
literature. We saw in Deleuze’s examples that disjunctive synthesis has a double
effect in a text: it makes convergent series resonate with new meaning, and it
allows divergent series, and therefore divergent meanings, to coexist at the
same time.
Series and Magical Realism

In view of this Deleuzian theory of series, we can now return to magical realism.
As we have seen, a realist narration is central to magical realism. This narration
was seen by many critics to make the magic of the genre appear real, while
Chanady pointed out that it also, importantly, determined what was seen as real
or not. We can now consider how a realist narration could be described in
Deleuzian terms. Note that we are here concerned with specifically the realist
element of magical realism and what has been seen as its key functions and
characteristics. What is here referred to as realism is thus not to be seen as
entirely synonymous with the general term realism, a term which has its own
range of definitions.24 However, the realism of magical realism shares some
key components with realism at large, components which make it identifiable
precisely as realism: a neutral, objective tone, a focus on empirical detail,
in particular the detail of everyday life, a historical time and geographical
setting.25
We saw that the realist narration in magical realism was most often character-
ized by critics as ‘matter-of-fact’ and that the main function of this tone was
to make the magical events of the text appear as ordinary, natural or real. This
brings to mind the ‘reality effect’ that Roland Barthes famously ascribed to
realism. He noted that realist narratives include passages of detailed descrip-
tion that seem without function within the structure of the text: they are not
justified by any role in the plot, action, or development of characters or themes.
They seem rather to take their cue from historical discourse, where ‘concrete
detail’ has the function of authentication.26 Philippe Hamon’s essay in Lilian
Furst’s thorough overview Realism, provides a longer list of textual characteris-
tics which contribute to this authentication process, in order to satisfy the
demand of the empirically minded reader: ‘I believe only what I see’.27 Hamon
shows that the realist text is heavily structured according to this demand for
authentication. The need for ‘concrete detail’ shapes a text that appears as a
mosaic of frequent descriptive passages, and that privileges a content which is
suited to such description: places, events and characters that are systematized
or categorized. Hamon lists, for example, domestic interiors, ritualized events
such as meals or feasts, ordered parts of society such as villages or towns. In
addition, he suggests that the theme of family history within a socio-political
context is favoured by the realist genre because it provides validation on both
the level of character and of setting.
This appears to be a description fitting the realism in magical realism identi-
fied by Amaryll Chanady, a realism produced by a narrator who is ‘situating the
story in present-day reality, using learned expressions and vocabulary, and show-
ing he is familiar with logical reasoning and empirical knowledge’ (MRF 22).
Crucially, in Deleuzian terms this highly systematized detail of the realist narra-
tive can be seen as structured by connective and conjunctive syntheses. Series of
items are coordinated by location, series of locations by social organization,
series of characters are connected by family ties, and their actions are con-
nected not only temporally, but also conceptually through socio-economic or
psychological circumstances. Thus a heterogeneous series of events emerges
through a conjunctive synthesis subject to coexistence in historical time and
space, and forms a coherent plot.
In fact, the main structure of the realist text appears as two ‘super-series’,
that of the narration and that of the events. These series are composed of
‘sub-series’, such as scenes, characters, settings and the narrative elements that
relate to them, which are all convergent. In addition, the events of a realist text
all conform to ‘the laws of nature’. Indeed, to Deleuze, such universal laws are
part of a system of convergent series. Deleuze states that ‘the laws of nature’
are merely an ‘empirical principle’ governing a ‘domain’ of the actual, which
‘is a qualified and extended partial system, governed in such a manner that the
difference of intensity which creates it tends to be cancelled’ (DR 241). ‘The
laws of nature’ are therefore part of a system that is not self-differing and not
disjunctive. Furthermore, the two super-series seem to be convergent with each
other, in the same way that the two series of language appear to refer to each
other. As we saw, this ‘illusion of representation’ is false but inevitable if we
only consider the actual part of language or narration. That is, without the
divergence or difference of the virtual, the series of narrative and events
will appear to resemble one another. This effect of the language system that
Deleuze calls ‘the illusion of representation’ is in essence the same effect that
Barthes names the ‘referential illusion’ in realism, and it is an effect inherent
to a convergent system.
However, while this convergent system of the realist narration is central
to magical realism, effectively providing the authenticating ‘matter-of-fact’ tone
that makes both the magic and the real appear real, magical realism also
includes a necessarily incongruent element: the magic. Chanady convincingly
argues that the magic appears as different because it does not fit into the
world-view indicated by the ‘learned’ and ‘rational’ narrator, who can be identi-
fied through a detailed and thus authenticating realist narrative. We can now
reformulate this idea using Deleuze’s thought: the magic appears as different
because it is a divergent element in the otherwise convergent series of realism.
It does not fit into a system of reality that follows empirical laws: it is divergent
from the ‘domain’ of the ‘laws of nature’. This is why realism is key to magical
realism. It sets up the ‘system of convergence’ against which the magic is
different or divergent, but crucially, it is this divergence that makes things
happen in a unique way in the magical realist text, a divergence that is virtual
difference-in-itself. In the particular system that is magical realism, the virtual
‘becomes visible’, or thinkable, as the magic event, just like in Proust’s Combray
passage it took on the ‘identity’ of the madeleine.
However, the narration, continuing to be realist, also appears to authenticate
the magic: magical events are described in the same way as the real events,
using the same authenticating detail. This creates a discrepancy between the
way the magic is perceived as divergent from ‘the laws of nature’, and the way
magic is described as if fitting within these laws. Because of this discrepancy
the illusion of representation is exposed. When both the series of narration and
events were convergent, there appeared to be a relationship of representation
between them. Now that the series of events includes a divergent element that
is not ‘mirrored’ as a divergent element in the narration, this representation is
put into question. That is, if the narration would indicate that this element was
in some way strange or deviant, as it does in stories of the fantastic or uncanny,
this discrepancy would not be apparent. We have to stress that what is seen as
real and magic is set up by the text. Thus it does not actually matter if author,
reader or even fictional characters (as opposed to the focalizer or narrator)
believe or perceive the magic to be ‘true’ or as ‘actually taking place’. It remains
divergent from the world-view, or system, established on the realist level of
the text.
By means of this very textual discrepancy, it becomes obvious that, as Barthes
would say, the supposed referent is ‘slipping away’: the narration is authenticat-
ing something which cannot be authenticated, that does not belong within the
framework of thought that authentication per se indicates. Thus the magic
exposes the non-correspondence of the narration and events. At the same time,
it also exposes an excess in the signifying series: the authenticating devices of
realism appear extraneous when used to describe magic, because authentica-
tion is part of a ‘partial system’ that does not include magic, in which magic is a
lack. In this way, magic appears as an object = x in the text. It is, in effect, an
‘esoteric’ unit in the text: non-referential and nonsensical. It becomes clear
that the magic can take on any meaning, or rather, that it creates its own sense
within the system of the text. Thus magic ‘superimposes’ a disjunctive synthesis
on the connective and conjunctive syntheses of realism. The convergent series
of realism are then able to take on new resonance, diverge and ramify. Magic
therefore not only creates its own sense, but as a virtual object = x, creates the
sense of the text, making its series ‘communicate with each other’. Practically,
this resonance and divergence, this communication with the virtual, translates
as new and multiple meaning. As we saw in the examples from Proust and
Carroll, meaning created by the relationship or resonance between the series in
the text itself, rather than the apparently representational meaning of realism.
The magic realist text thus seems to be counter-actualized, yet it also retains a
realist narrative. This means that it retains the structure that underpins the
referential illusion. It continues to authenticate its events, and thus continues
to produce the illusion of representation, even in the face of the disjunctive
synthesis that makes it resonate. In fact, there are two very different movements
in magical realism: that of disjunctive synthesis and virtual resonance, and that
of realism and representation.
Why, then, does the counter-actualization of the magical realist text not
obliterate the illusion of representation completely? To explore this we can
compare magical realism to minor literature. To Deleuze and Guattari, one of
the main characteristics of a minor literature is ‘the deterritorialization of
language’ (KM 18). A language is territorialized when it is ordered and codi-
fied, conceptually, socially or politically. Such a ‘major’ language is appropri-
ated by minor literature, in which ‘language stops being representative in order to
now move toward its extremities or limits’ (KM 23). Language, when it directly
reverberates with a virtual intensity, no longer has any referential meaning, but
is only a ‘sequence of intensive states’, a ‘pure and intense sonorous material’
opposed to ‘all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it’
(KM 21, 6, 19). This is an experimental language put to ‘strange and minor
uses’, which prevents straightforward representational interpretation (KM 17).
Magical realism never reaches this stage of directly intense language, because
of the dominance of its realism. Realism is exactly a territorialized language,
because it reflects a particular order of thought. While the magic in magical
realism may make the text resonate in new ways, it never deterritorializes
language completely in the way minor literature does. However, Deleuze and
Guattari also consider literature which ‘doesn’t succeed in bringing itself into
full effect – that is, in rejoining the field of immanence’ (KM 87). To Deleuze
and Guattari, although it starts out on the right path, Kafka’s ‘The Metamor-
phosis’ is ‘blocked’. The ‘becoming-animal’ of Gregor Samsa is a deterritorial-
ization of the human and his place in society and the family, which is a step
towards counter-actualization. However, Gregor is reterritorialized by his
family, forced back into a social order unable to accommodate him, and there-
fore ‘goes to his death’ without ‘following a line of escape’. To Deleuze and
Guattari, the story ends up being too much of a ‘metaphor’ – that is, a represen-
tational rather than a minor type of text – because it is not ‘rich enough in
articulations and junctions’ (KM 38).
If we compare this consideration of minor literature to the concept of
serial structures, it seems that the counter-actualization of a text is a complete
deterritorialization of language, through a disjunctive synthesis that causes a
ramification or proliferation of series, to the extent that language ‘takes flight’.
Texts of minor literature are ‘worth nothing except in themselves and [. . .]
operate in an unlimited field of immanence’ (KM 86). The proliferation of

series, or multiplication of meanings, is such that no meaning remains, apart
from this field of immanence; that is, the pure thought of the virtual. These
texts are then entirely singular, as Hallward would say, and ‘an exemplary
definition of the champ littéraire [. . .] which transforms the related, actual
world into an immanent composition whose value is precisely that it has no
worldly value’.28
However, it also becomes clear that disjunctive synthesis can be stalled by
a reterritorialization of the text. Magical realism is said to be characterized by,
on the one hand, the differentiation of the magic and the real by a realist
narration, and, on the other, by a resolution of the resulting contradiction
between these two codes through that self-same realist narration. Thus, in con-
trast to an entirely deterritorialized text, it would seem to be closer to writing
which is a ‘blocked’ minor literature, such as ‘The Metamorphosis’. Indeed,
recall that analogies have been drawn between Kafka’s story and magical
realism. On the other hand, a disjunctive synthesis is without doubt present in
magical realism; the magic element certainly does have an effect. Deleuze and
Guattari say of ‘The Metamorphosis’ and other of Kafka’s ‘animal’ stories, in
which they trace a similar partial line of flight, that they ‘show a way out that
[. . .] [they] are themselves incapable of following, but already, that which
enabled them to show the way out was something different that acted inside
them’ (KM 37).
Furthermore, the reterritorialization of magic is only implied by the sup-
posed resolution of the antinomy in the magical realist text. Perhaps, as sug-
gested earlier, the differentiation of the magic and the real has to be seen as
the primary characteristic of magical realism. If this is so, then the reterritorial-
ization of the magic is not necessarily inevitable. In the next chapter we will
explore this proposition further, considering the extent to which any resolution
or equivalent coexistence of the real and the magic can actually be seen as
present in some key magical realist texts. However, before we do, we will intro-
duce some of the possible implications of a Deleuzian rethinking of magical
realism for the prevalent contextual readings of the genre, by considering the
link that Peter Hallward makes between postcolonial theory and Deleuze’s
philosophy.
Hallward and the Postcolonial Problem
We have thus far seen magical realism as anchored inexorably in realism, in the
illusion of representation, but as also displaying a movement towards counter-
actualization, which thinks the virtual realm presupposed by the actual. How
does this influence our readings of magical realism? As we considered earlier,
magical realism presents particular problems to postcolonial critics. While most
see the magic as a subversive element, there is still an uneasiness regarding the
merits of magical realism in a postcolonial context. This stems from the very
fact that the magic functions as a virtual object, or, in Peter Hallward’s terms,
from the fact that magical realism tends towards the singular, rather than the
specific.
In Absolutely Postcolonial and elsewhere, Hallward rethinks postcolonial theory
and texts from the perspective of the singular and the specific.29 It is important
to note that Hallward posits both the singular and the specific against the
specified. The specified should not be confused with the specific, although it
also is a mode of individuation dependent on relationality. The specific is
actively subjective: that is, a choice of relation by the subject itself. It is not
inherently oriented towards a certain political or ethical position. The speci-
fied, in contrast, is passive and objectified: a relation imposed from outside.
It is ‘a way of thinking of individuals [. . .] as individuated by certain intrinsic,
invariant and thus characteristic properties, innate or acquired, racial or sex-
ual, national or cultural, physical or spiritual’.30
The postcolonial movement, for obvious reasons, seeks to overcome speci-
fied, determined identities (such as colonizer–colonized or oppressor–
oppressed), and the singular and the specific are both ways of thinking being
as de-specified in this sense, but in very different ways. The specific achieves
de-specification because it reveals the specified object to be a ‘free subject’, able
to make its own active relational choices. The singular on the other hand is
de-specifying because it denies the existence of relationality as such. In the
singular, the individual is determined neither by static categories, nor by active
relations, but purely by the creative whole or the One of which it is a part. To
Hallward, it is crucial to consider whether a text operates as singular, specific or
specified in the context of postcolonial literature. A text which expresses the
specified, expresses political, ethnic and sexual identities as rigid and essential.
A specific text, on the other hand, exposes these identities as fluid, and ques-
tions the relational processes that lead to identity in the first place. The specific
text, however, retains a political or social dimension: to Hallward it is ‘funda-
mentally militant’, but as opposed to the specified it deals with ‘how over what’
(AP 248). In contrast to the socio-political dimensions of both the specified and
the specific text, the singular text is ‘a productive autonomy’ (AP 15); denying
even the existence of relationality, the singular text is entirely ahistorical, aso-
cial and apolitical. Instead it is an impersonal affirmation of the immediate
presence of a univocal creative force (AP 15–18).
Hallward makes the observation that while the priorities of the postcolonial
are mainly presented as specific, theories of the postcolonial are, in fact, more
of an expression of singular thought (AP 20). In postcolonial theoretical texts
Hallward notes the ‘ritual invocation of the ubiquitously specifying categories of
gender, ethnicity, and community affiliation’ (AP 22). Indeed, we have seen
that in postcolonial readings of magical realism the relation of the text to the
historical, social and economic situation from which it is seen to be produced is

stressed. However, says Hallward, this invocation of the specific belies the fact
that major works of postcolonial theory are committed to an explicitly deterri-
torializing discourse in the Deleuzian sense: theirs is ‘a discourse so fragmented,
so hybrid, as to deny its constituent elements any sustainable specificity at all’
(AP 22).31 We can compare this to the deterritorialization of language in minor
literature through the proliferation of series, to the extent that it becomes only
an expression of the singular virtual.
Hallward analyzes the so-called ‘Holy Trinity’ of postcolonial theory as
thinkers of the singular. He finds Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity
an example of pure Deleuzian difference without binary terms. In Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak’s denial of the possibility of a retrieval of the subaltern sub-
ject, he sees a singularization of the subaltern: making it the site of absolute
difference and deterritorialization. He also argues that Edward Said’s concep-
tion of cultural identity as a ‘contrapuntal ensemble’ is singular, as it is depen-
dent on an idea of global totality; that is, again, a univocal creative agency. What
unites all three theorists is ultimately the notion of a singular creative force
beyond politics, nationality or culture that is presupposed by any political or
cultural enunciation (AP 24–28, 51–58). It is not so much Hallward’s singular
readings of these theorists that is the main point here, as his conclusion that
this singular tendency, as he says about Spivak, ‘sits a little uncomfortably with
the desperately urgent political issues [their] work so often evokes’ (AP 31).
Indeed, in Hallward’s own readings of postcolonial literary texts, by Eduard
Glissant, Mohammed Dib and others, time after time the presence of the singu-
lar comes at a price of denying the practically political, and he convincingly
demonstrates how the singular mode of writing is not commensurable with con-
sidering the practical trials and tribulations of human life, let alone political
questions.
How, then, can we apply Hallward’s notions of the specified, the specific and
the singular to magical realism and a Deleuzian reading of it? As we saw, realism
appears to be based on a particular way of thinking about reality, or rather,
organized as a particular orientation of the actual, in Hallward’s own terms.
Hallward identifies the specified as a realm ‘where the demarcation of an indi-
vidual (subject, object or culture) follows from its accordance with recognized
classifications’ (AP 40) and where ‘what counts is the conformity of actors to a
presumed nature, and the consequent supervision of the relative authenticity of
this conformity’.32 Indeed, it becomes apparent that realism, with its structure
of convergent series, is an example of the specified. On the other hand, of
course, the disjunctive synthesis that the magic as object = x causes is certainly
a singular operation. Through the object = x all elements of the textual system
relate only to the virtual. Representation is exposed as an illusion, and the text
thus moves towards becoming a singular entity, an autonomous system creating
sense or meaning only as an effect of its resonance with the virtual. It thus
seems that realism is, potentially, despecified through disjunctive synthesis.
We can then position this analysis of realism and magical realism in a postco-
lonial context using Hallward’s terms. Realism is generally seen as a type of
narrative complicit with colonization. According to Bhabha, colonial discourse
‘resembles a form of narrative whereby the productivity and circulation of
subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and recognizable totality. It employs
a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to
realism’.33 Realist narrative in literature is thus ostensibly politicized: it is seen
as a part of a ‘dominant discourse’, the discourse of the colonizer. Said, whose
notion of Orientalism is central to ideas about colonialism and discourse, indeed
refers to Orientalism as a ‘radical realism’: ‘rhetorically speaking, Orientalism
is absolutely anatomical and enumerative: to use its vocabulary is to engage in
the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts’.34
Compare this ‘anatomical and enumerative’ discourse to the authenticating
devices of realism we considered earlier. Therefore the relation of postcolonial
literatures to realism is problematic: it is often felt that realism needs to be
replaced with a new, liberating discourse in the fight against colonialism.
Indicative of the line taken by many surveys of postcolonial literature, Ashcroft
et al. in The Empire Writes Back, identify the main strategies available to writers
who want to replace a dominant discourse as abrogation and subversion through
appropriation.35 Clearly, magical realism, in the postcolonial context, would be
an example of appropriation, since it uses realism. Indeed, it does also appear
to subvert realism to a certain extent, insofar as it questions both its specifying
characteristics and its representational mode.
However, if we view magical realism as a text which also tends to the singular,
we must question what this subversion of realism as a dominant discourse
actually entails. As we saw, the specific and the singular text move beyond the
specified in two very different ways. If we consider realism as specified and com-
plicit in the dominant discourse of colonialism, we find that a subversion of
realism through the specific or through the singular would have two very differ-
ent effects. A specific discourse questions identities that are seen as essential or
authentic by considering the relational framework behind these specified iden-
tities, while a singular text questions notions of essence and authenticity only
insofar it moves away from a framework that allows such notions. Thus the
specific, while subverting the specified, remains in the field of the relational,
and therefore remains socio-politically oriented. In contrast, the singular text
does not engage with the specifying discourse at all, and thus subverts the
specified purely because it subverts the relational, and therefore the social or
political, as such.
We can thus see that if magical realism is an example of a singularizing text, it
is problematic for those critics who wish to see it politically subversive. In fact, it
seems to occupy a paradoxical position that is typical of the postcolonial, accord-
ing to Hallward. It appeals to those who call for subversion of the dominant
colonial discourse, because it is a subversion of realism. We have noted that
the genre seems to encourage such readings. However, if magical realism is
singular, then it is not a subversion that is unproblematically political. Indeed,

the magic does appear to be ‘sitting uncomfortably’ with a practically political
agenda. Magical realism may therefore be typically postcolonial because of this
double bind between the real and the magic, the specific and the singular, but
this a double bind that cannot be adequately articulated by postcolonial theo-
ries alone.
Chapter 3
Models of Magical Realism
Introduction: A Model of Magical Realism –

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Gabriel García Márquez himself, like many authors, objects to the term magical
realism, but, as Regina Janes says of his seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude, ‘in
modern usage, the text itself has shaped the definition [of the term]’.1 A vast
amount of critical material is available on the novel and even a brief overview
reveals a startling number of approaches and interpretations. This may be seen
as part of the reason for the novel’s great appeal, but a closer look at various
readings also highlights the problematics of magical realism as a genre, echo-
ing the critical concerns we looked at in the Introduction. Many approaches to
One Hundred Years of Solitude consider the representation of history and politics
as primary to the novel, and see the magical element as wholly subordinate
to this aspect. Such readings are inevitably suggested by the central part the
novel plays in contemporary Latin American literature, and are influenced by
Carpentier’s definition of magical realism. According to Vargas Llosa:
The book’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that everything in it – not only
events and scenes, but also symbols, visions, spells, omens and myths – is
deeply rooted in the reality of Latin America, feeds off it and reflects it with
relentless precision as it transfigures it.2
Here, magical realism is considered a tool in the search for a distinctive and
positive Latin American identity in the face of external ideas of what this
identity should be, in particular through a return to the myths and stories of
Latin America, whether they be native, colonial or modern. Magical realism is
therefore seen as a political statement, even as a literary parallel to the Cuban
Revolution. As the Cuban Revolution was the peak of a period of perceived
decolonization and liberation in Latin America, allowing a new freedom for
writers, so One Hundred Years of Solitude was seen as central to the ‘liberation
through language’ of the Latin American literary Boom.3 While this period of
optimism and liberation was short-lived in Latin America, the connection
between magical realism and the politics of decolonization and liberation has
lived on as the genre has been taken up by writers all over the world. Indeed,
Shannin Schroeder, in his overview of the genre in the Americas, reads One
Hundred Years of Solitude as founded in Latin American reality, but sees magical
realism as a formal encoding of any decentred or marginal position.4
Notably, both a Latin American and a global postcolonial view of magical
realism define it as a new way of describing a particular social or cultural situa-
tion and therefore see it as a historical or political literary genre. Furthermore,
it is often the magic, in particular, which is seen as conveying the political force
of magical realism. This is also true for readings of García Márquez’s novel.
What critics often imply is that the anti-realist elements of One Hundred Years of
Solitude are also its anti-colonial elements. Zamora, for example, finds it uses
‘fantastic events and characters to address the abuses of contemporary political
and social institutions’ and myth to recreate history from a new perspective.5
On the other hand, many critics also point to the inherent disjunction
between the novel’s historical and political content and a magic that challenges
Western ideas of representation, meaning and truth. The novel’s elements of
magic seem to negate not any political message, and even themselves, through
their own ambiguity, and here the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude poses a
particular problem. Higgins notes that ‘Paradoxically, [García Márquez]
attempts to translate reality into words while casting doubt on the feasibility of
such an undertaking’.6 Yet, as Williamson points out, the view that the novel
presents an autarchic fictional world ‘creating through the act of narration
special conditions of development and meaning which enable the fictive imagi-
nation to achieve a free-floating state of pure self-reference akin to the exhila-
rated innocence of children at play [. . .] cannot explain the political and
historical allusions in the novel’.7 The very multiplicity of possible readings of
One Hundred Years of Solitude poses a problem for critics: on the one hand there
is meaning, on the other it is so prolific that it negates itself. This tension is
clear in Regina Janes’s extensive analysis of the novel. She suggests that it
‘shatters what seemed to be a centre in order to bring the wider historical, cul-
tural, metaphysical, and literary implications of the narrative to the surface’,8
and thus points to one of the central problems for interpretations of magical
realism. If magical realism shatters the centre to such an extent that there is
considerable difficulty in achieving a coherent reading, how can it at the same
time be seen as carrying a particular message?
The contradiction lies in the fact that magic seems to break with the politi-
cally charged world that realism sets up in One Hundred Years of Solitude, thus
appearing to be a ‘subversive force’, at the same time as failing to provide any
politically useful rearticulation of that world. Williamson notes that the novel
does not necessarily support an equation of magic with liberation, for ‘if one
examines how magical realism actually functions in the narrative, it will become
clear that there is an intimate connection between it and the degenerative
process described in the novel; indeed magical realism can be shown to be
a manifestation of the malaise that causes the decline of the Buendía family’.9
Models of Magical Realism 43
If magic is seen as part of the world of Macondo, it is difficult to see it as a

positive or subversive force; nor is it easy to classify it as a unique expression of
a native or pre-colonial society. Janes points out that the myths in the novel have
little to do with the pre-colonial civilization: ‘There is no pre-Colombian local
history, no Tupac Amaru or Macahueles, not even El Dorado’.10 The language
is exclusively Spanish, there is no use of native words, and no attempt to revive
or celebrate a native culture.
In fact, any attempt at reading a coherent political message into One Hundred
Years of Solitude must revise the suggestion that the magic is a force for re-
imagining national identity, for decolonization or for any kind of political sub-
version. Gerald Martin provides a convincing political reading of the novel, but
at the expense of its magic. Martin reads the Buendía family as a portrait of
the ruling classes of Latin America whose magical world-view prevents them
from understanding their involvement in their own history. However, ‘once the
characters become able to interpret their own past, the author is able to end on
an optimistic note. The apocalypse of the Buendías is not – how could it be –
the end of Latin America but the end of neo-colonialism and its conscious or
unconscious collaborators’.11 Indeed, to Martin, magic is not even central to
the novel: ‘seen in this light, the novel seems less concerned with any “magical”
reality than with the general effect of a colonial history upon individual
relationships: hence the themes of circularity, irrationality, fatalism, isolation,
superstition, fanaticism, corruption and violence’.12 In fact, Martin’s political
reading only works because it concentrates on the realism of the novel.
Thus, while there may be political elements in García Márquez’s novel, one
has to ask whether they are at all connected with the magic in the texts. Martin’s
reading, centred on realism, seems to ignore or suppress the unmistakable
magical elements of the novel. On the other hand, without its anchoring in
the real, One Hundred Years of Solitude easily appears as simply a fictional account
of the making of fictions, exposing nothing but its own limitations. In fact, this
is a double bind typical of magical realism: it is clearly and undeniably rooted
in time and place, engaging political readings, and yet it also includes an
element which, while offering hope for liberation from dominant ways of
thinking, functions in such a way as to make any kind of political engagement
ambiguous at best.
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in Deleuzian Terms:

The State of Macondo
Instead of privileging either the magic or the realism in the genre, reading
magical realism through Deleuze provides a means to rethink the real and the
magic as two orientations of the same Being. Deleuze’s ontology suggests that,
instead of considering magical realism as a genre that attempts to unite two
entirely different world-views or textual modes, it is possible to view the magic
and the real as two sides of the same thing, shown to be, at the same time,
radically differing. Indeed, in the previous chapter we saw how both the real
and the magic could be seen as organized by series. However, the series of the
real and of magic were very different. While realism is an ordered system of
convergent series connected by resemblance and contiguity, magic appears as a
divergent element in this system, ramifying and proliferating series by differ-
ence alone.
One of the most noted qualities of One Hundred Years of Solitude is its matter-
of-fact style, now almost universally seen as one of the defining characteristics
of magical realism. Critics refer to the novel’s ‘deadpan’ or ‘neutral’ tone and
its narrator that does not pass judgement, show surprise, or offer interpreta-
tions.13 The other oft-quoted stylistic characteristic of One Hundred Years of
Solitude is its richness of ethnographic detail, its ‘local colour’, which vividly
conveys the lives of the inhabitants of Macondo.14 This detail captures people’s
everyday life, including mundane household chores, habits of dressing, eating
and sleeping, and even bodily functions, but it also anchors One Hundred Years
of Solitude in both geography and history, whether it is by describing the pre-
paration of a local dish, the social conventions or the political machinations of
the region: ‘With scrupulous fidelity, the narrative constructs a fictional reality
that is recognizably costeño [of the coastal area in Colombia] in its historical,
geographical, ethnological, social and cultural detail’.15
These elements are absolutely central to the novel as Gene Bell-Villada points
out: ‘For all its fantastical exaggerations, and its natural or political catastro-
phes (those stereotypical Latin American experiences), the narrative centre
of One Hundred Years of Solitude is its faithful and convincing account of the
domestic routines and vicissitudes of the Buendía clan’.16 In addition, ‘the pub-
lic sphere in One Hundred Years of Solitude includes the social movements, the
government actions, the technological changes (railroads, movies, telephones),
and the ecological developments, and also those organized rituals such as wakes
and group mourning, festive orgies and carnival, all of which affect Macondo
life at every possible level and give the book its outer boundaries and broad
shape’.17 It is notable how Bell-Villada’s analysis, suggesting that the Buendías
provide the narrative centre of One Hundred Years of Solitude, while Macondo
society determines the novel’s outlines, conforms to Philippe Hamon’s list of
the ‘authenticating’ features that shape the realist novel: families, villages and
towns.
This ‘matter-of-fact’ tone and ‘local colour’ of One Hundred Years of Solitude
indicates that the novel is describing a real world in a realist way; in Deleuzian
terms we could say that it is structured as a system of convergent series. The
description of the Buendías and their house in the first chapter of One Hundred
Years of Solitude is typical of the novel: We learn that ‘Úrsula and the children
broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and caladium, cassava and
yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants’ (OHYS 4–5), and that the house ‘had a
small, well-lighted living room, a dining room in the shape of a terrace with
gaily coloured flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree,
a well-kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in peaceful
communion’ (OHYS 9). It is clear how the elements of this description form
convergent series, some connected in lists of resemblances, like that of vegeta-
bles or animals, some coordinated by their use or place, like the interior details.
They are all brought together by the Buendía house, the pivot of this ordered
domestic system. It is the convergence of series that is crucial here. The ‘matter-
of-fact’ list of vegetables, animals, chores and domestic features appear more
real for their very precision, indicating that the narrator has been there, seen it
and counted the chickens. It is this convergence that we recognize as ‘reality’
because our worldly reality is indeed a system of convergent series.
The ordered system of the Buendía household is the centre of the ordered
world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The house is part of a series of locations
that make up the village of Macondo, which is in turn a point of convergence
for several series of geographical points. Thus the reality effect, that is, the
impression of a textual representation of a real, recognizable location, in a real,
recognizable geographical position is here furnished by several interconnected
systems of convergent series. In terms of the village, we have a series of places:
the Street of the Turks, the red light district, the river, the West Indian quarter,
the jungle. The village is itself firmly placed within a series of regional features:
impenetrable mountains to the east, with the ancient city of Riohacha beyond,
the swamps to the south, the sea to the west, and the jungle to the north.
The world of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its convergence describes what
is, to Deleuze, a fundamental human condition: ‘The human being is a segmen-
tary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling,
getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented. The
house is segmented according to its rooms’ assigned purposes; streets, accord-
ing to the order of the city’ (TP 208). Deleuze’s work with Guattari, in its focus
on the assemblages of the actual world, provides us with concepts to analyse this
world of convergent series or segmentarity further. However, various modes
of social organization, what Deleuze and Guattari call social assemblages, are
segmentary to different degrees, some more ‘supple’, some more ‘rigid’. One
social assemblage that is ‘exceptionally rigid’, whose segments are clearly delin-
eated and fixed, is the State (TP 210–211). The space of One Hundred Years of
Solitude conforms to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the space of the
State, which is ‘striated, by walls, enclosures, roads between enclosures’ (TP 381).
The action of segmenting space in this way is a process of territorialization,
that is, dividing space into so many specific territories. The story of the
settlement and development of Macondo is in many ways an example of how
the State is the principle of territorialization that organizes striated or seden-
tary space, in opposition to what Deleuze and Guattari call smooth or
nomadic space. Nomadic space is not divided by walls and there are no pre-
established paths that guide movement of people or goods. In opposition to
the territorializing action of the State upon land, the process creating nomadic
space is deterritorialization. As an example of nomadic space, Deleuze often
mentions the desert or sea, spaces without divisions, boundaries and fixed
points, and in One Hundred Years of Solitude the jungle surrounding Macondo is
such a smooth space. José Arcadio Buendía, as he leaves his home village,
is confused by the jungle which lacks paths or reference points. However, as
they settle, the Macondians create a new territory within the nomadic jungle,
establishing a new State.
Not long after its founding, Macondo begins trading with the outside world
and becomes a destination for several waves of migrants, and in conformity with
the State described in A Thousand Plateaus begins to capture flows: of popula-
tion, of commodities and of money. Throughout its cycles of destruction and
regeneration, Macondo, as the State, ‘never ceases to decompose, recompose
and transform movement’ (TP 386). Indeed, while the chronology of One
Hundred Years of Solitude has often been seen as circular, it is, in fact, a strictly
linear affair. This is not to say that there is not an element of repetition in One
Hundred Years of Solitude. However, rather than being a feature of cyclical time,
this is typical of how the social machine of the State works: by continually
capturing or territorializing flows. In the same way as the Buendía house and
Macondo village act as coordinating elements for series of points in space, they
are also pivotal elements for series of points in time, acting as indicators of the
passage of linear time. Each cycle of degeneration and renewal that the house
and the village go through are described in detail. The initial descriptions of
the house and village identify the Buendías as farmers in the coastal region of
Colombia, but also as living in the post-independence era in the late nineteenth
century. The changes that the house goes through always indicate a progression
in time: each time it is repaired we learn of details like a pianola, a gramo-
phone, or a new bathroom that indicate a particular moment in history.
Similarly, descriptive series recount the introduction of the railway, auto-
mobiles and electricity in the village, as the novel clearly traces the progress of
the early twentieth century. The history of the State, say Deleuze and Guattari,
is always about segments and classes, rather than masses or the flows of people
(TP 221). Thus any new arrivals in the village are quickly fitted into the State
organization, as merchants (the early new arrivals, the Arabs, the Turks), as
labourers (the people that the Banana Company brings in), even as sanctioned
marginals (the French matrons). Equally, the flow of time is captured in One
Hundred Years of Solitude by its convergent series of descriptions, segmenting it
into snapshots or successive moments in history, forming a linear series which
moves inexorably from beginning to end. That is, the repetitions of the novel
themselves form series which by the variation between elements betray the pas-
sage of time.
A Regime of Signs and the Apprenticeship of Signs

What we have been describing here appears to be the world represented in the
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a system of convergent series, typical of
the actual, and organized like the social assemblage of the State. However, to
Deleuze, representation is an illusion. Under the ontological doctrine of the
univocity of Being, as Hallward notes ‘No art is imitative, no art can be imitative
or figurative, because art is Real, and vice versa’.18 In fact, One Hundred Years of
Solitude, or rather, the realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is part of a whole
regime of signs (TP 111–148), which underpins the illusion of representation,
as well as guaranteeing it through the ‘reality effect’.
A regime of signs, say Deleuze and Guattari, is a system of language and
world, of linguistic form and content, together. That is, a regime of signs is a sys-
tem in which the ‘referent’ and the ‘sign’ combine laterally, without the hierar-
chical relationship of representation. Rather than prioritizing one or the other,
to consider how a regime of signs works is to look at the order of this language-
world system as one, analyzing how language and non-linguistic assemblages
work on the same principles of organization. The question is what the relation-
ship between these linguistic and non-linguistic components is, if it is not one
of representation. As we saw, the ‘content’ of One Hundred Years of Solitude
appears to be organized in a convergent, segmented way under the principle of
the State. In fact, this organization belongs not to an external State of Macondo,
which is then represented by the form of realism, but to a regime of signs which
includes a specific form of expression, realism, as well as a specific content, the
State of Macondo.
Deleuze states that there are many and various regimes of signs; the one
which allows us to make the important connection between the State and the
realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude is that of subjectification. Here we need
to go back to some of Deleuze’s thoughts on how the ‘illusion of representa-
tion’ emerges. Deleuze traces this illusion back to a fundamental philosophical
concept which he considers a basic error: the Cogito, or the idea of the think-
ing or reasoning subject. Both the State and the regime of subjectification are
dependent on, or even borne out of, the Cogito. To Deleuze, the Cogito
‘expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby expresses the
possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which reflects
the subjective identity’ (DR 133). It is thus the idea of the Cogito that allows
for the idea that an independent and coherent subject can perceive a separate
and discrete object, a condition necessary for representation. However, the rea-
soning subject does more than just allow for the idea of the understandable and
describable object, says Deleuze, it sanctions it and guarantees its ‘reality’.
The State, according to Deleuze and Guattari, as opposed to a primitive
society of tribal or despotic rule, is dependent on its own sanction, that is, a
sanction not from an external deity or a supreme sovereign but from the
people. Such sanction is only realized if the State is perceived as a separate
site of reason, just like the Cogito. Since reason, by definition, resides in the
reasoning subject, it has to sanction its own subjection to the State (TP 376).
The existence of the State is therefore dependent on the reasoning subject
performing a double role: the legislator, the State, and its subject, the people.
This doubling, however, gives rise to an illusion, making the State, rather than
the subject, appear as the ultimate source of reason. Similarly, the regime of
signs of subjectification, in contrast to the regime of signs of signification, where
the meaning of signs is assured by a god or despot, is dependent on the subject
to sanction or guarantee its own utterances or expressions. In the same way
that the State is perceived as a source of reason because of a doubling of role of
the reasoning subject, so an expression is perceived as rational or real by a
doubling of the thinking subject, the Cogito, into an ‘I’ who speaks – the sub-
ject of the enunciation or author-subject – and an ‘I’ who is spoken – the subject
of the statement or narrator-subject. Deleuze states: ‘Then from the subject of
enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound
to statements in conformity with a dominant reality’ (TP 129). ‘Dominant real-
ity’ is precisely the ordered reality of the State, the ostensible source of reason.
Indeed, the subject of the statement conforms to the State precisely through a
realist narrative, appearing, as Chanady says, ‘familiar with logical reasoning’
(MRF 22). Thus the subject of the statement or realist narrator becomes a sign,
or guarantee, of the reality of any expression by the subject of the enunciation
or author (TP 129).
This doubling of the subject is precisely what drives the ‘reality effect’: the
narrator appears as if he has been there, seen it all. Therefore, under the regime
of signs of signification any expression that follows the organization of the State
will appear as a site of reason and will thus appear to represent reality, although
they are in fact, part of one and the same system. In the realism of One Hundred
Years of Solitude we can detect this mechanism. There appears a kind of shadow
of a Cogito, an author, external to the text, immediately also implying an
external object or referent. It appears as if the subject-author, doubled as
the subject-narrator of One Hundred Years of Solitude is describing an objective
external reality (Macondo and its inhabitants) using reason.
In fact, however, the narration and reality are part of the (convergent) series
of the same system: ‘subjectification as a regime of signs or a form of expression
is tied to an assemblage, in other words, an organization of power that is already
fully functioning in the economy, rather than superimposing itself upon con-
tents and relations between contents determined as real in the last instance’
(TP 130). The State organizes space and time in the same way that the regime
of signs organizes expression. In fact, the State of Macondo is the ‘content’ of
the regime of signs of which the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the
‘form’. Yet this illusion of representation is not primary to the nature of things,
but a secondary effect of a particular order. Deleuze and Guattari consider the
elements of any expression, signs, as deterritorialized. Signs do not actually
resemble reality, they are removed from the territory of things themselves.
However, the regime of signs of subjectification captures these signs just as
the State captures deterritorialized flows. It makes signs signify, and what is
more, through this significance, ordered in convergent series, conform to the
order of the State. Writing under this regime of signs, of which the realism of
One Hundred Years of Solitude is an example, is writing that means ‘reterritorial-

izing oneself, conforming to a code of dominant utterances, to a territory of
established states of things’ (DII 74). In contrast, to Deleuze, a sign that has not
been reterritorialized is immaterial, that is, virtual. It does not mean or desig-
nate anything but reveals the essence of its nature, and this essence is nothing
but Being as difference (PS 41).
If realism, then, is writing that conforms to the territory of the State and is a
system of convergent series, then the insertion of a divergent element into that
system has greater implications than merely undoing the realist form. Indeed,
the magic in One Hundred Years of Solitude seems to imply great subversive
potential. In the previous chapter we suggested that the magical element,
because of its divergence, performs a disjunctive synthesis in the system. This
disjunctive synthesis causes the convergent series to diverge and communicate
with each other in new ways, which has the effect of proliferating meaning
in the text. However, disjunctive synthesis is also a counter-actualization, that is,
a way of thinking the virtual side of reality that reveals both the text as a produc-
tion of the real, and difference-in-itself as the condition for that real. What then
does this mean in terms of the regime of signs?
To answer this question we have to consider how the magic works as a diver-
gent element in One Hundred Years of Solitude, whether it actually does perform
a disjunctive synthesis in the text, to what extent this can be seen as a counter-
actualization of the regime of signs, and finally what implication this may have
for the readings of magical realism. There is, interestingly, no precise definition
of what the magic of One Hundred Years of Solitude and magical realism actually
entails. There are, of course, famous episodes that are always quoted, but with
little explanation as to exactly why these are magical. It is almost seen as a given
that they are magical, that every reader perceives them as such. Examples are
Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to heaven, the trickle of blood that finds Úrsula
across the village, or the rain of flowers after José Arcadio’s death.
It has been said that the narration in One Hundred Years of Solitude ‘eliminat[es]
the barrier between objective and imaginary realities [. . .] creating a total fic-
tional universe’19 and that it ‘fus[es] the real and the fantastic’.20 However, state-
ments asserting that the narrator stays composed in the face of events ‘that
would seem to warrant a more aroused and partisan verbal statement’21 surely
suggest that the reader is actually surprised at this unperturbed treatment of
events. Indeed, the critics’ insistent reaffirmation of the narrative neutrality,
even when describing the magical, betrays the magic’s difference from and
incongruity with this ‘credible’ narrative. The incongruity is there because the
realism of magical realism is much more than just a matter-of-fact narrative.
The realism is part of a regime of signs, in which magic appears as different
from the established order of things. The regime of signs sets up the world of
One Hundred Years of Solitude as our world, not ‘Middle-earth’ or outer space.
The same physical laws apply in Macondo as they do here and now, they just get
– noticeably – broken. It is often said that the status of magic is equal to that of
the real in magical realism because the characters perceive it to be real. This
is not so either. Even if the Macondians believe that the magic is real in so far
as it actually takes place, that it is no trick or illusion, the magic is not the
same as everyday reality around them. Not everyone levitates in Macondo: it is
not a rule of this world that humans fly. Similarly, not everyone is followed by
butterflies, not everyone is clairvoyant, and not everyone becomes a ghost or
ascends to heaven. While seen as ‘really happening’, these events surprise and
elicit comment from the Macondians, who flock to see the magic flying carpets
of the gypsies or to gawp at the miracle performed by the priest.
Thus the first thing that we can say about magic in One Hundred Years of
Solitude is that it is indeed divergent from the convergent series of the real: it
strays from the ‘network gridding of the possible’ (TP 212). However, as we now
know, the real here is not a matter of an external reality, but of elements which
appear as the ‘content’ of a regime of signs. Interestingly, the regime of signs
that One Hundred Years of Solitude operates under does not seem to shift signifi-
cantly throughout the novel (excepting the end, as we shall see later). That is,
the narrator continues to guarantee the author’s expression, the text, insofar as
we are not given to believe that he has suddenly ceased to be the reasoning
subject of the narration, even when what he tells us clearly does not conform to
dominant reality.
The first instance of magic in the novel is little Aureliano’s strange powers.
At the age of three he
went into the kitchen at the moment she [Úrsula] was taking a pot of boiling
soup from the stove and putting it on a table. The child, perplexed, said from
the doorway, ‘It’s going to spill.’ The pot was firmly placed in the centre of
the table, but just as soon as the child made his announcement, it began
an unmistakable movement towards the edge, as if impelled by some inner
dynamism, and it fell and broke on the floor. (OHYS 15)
This event is clearly divergent from dominant reality. Úrsula, witnessing the
episode, is alarmed since it is not ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. In contrast, the narrator
is matter-of-fact, as if the event stood to reason. However, the event diverges
from the domestic series of ordered items with fixed places and functions. Not
only does the pot not stay put, literally; it momentarily loses its identity as an
inanimate, domestic object, displaying an ‘inner dynamism’. The action of the
pot also diverges from the series of causality: there is no reason why Aureliano
predicts the pot’s action and why it falls, and it is of no importance to the linear
progression of the plot of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Indeed, many of the
magic events in One Hundred Years of Solitude are premonitions and omens,
events that appear significant, yet are strangely ineffectual and meaningless.
A premonition makes Úrsula scrub the house clean in preparation for
Aureliano’s return, but this turns out to be futile as he is taken straight to jail.
Before her own return to Macondo, an empty flask ‘became so heavy it could
not be moved’ and ‘a pan of water on the worktable boiled without any fire
under it for half an hour until it completely evaporated’ (OHYS 36). Before
Úrsula’s death, as in the very last days of Macondo, orange disks are seen in the
sky. None of these portents has any direct usefulness for anyone; they yield no
practical information.
Yet because the ‘reasoning’ tone of the narrator is intact, in the face of their
very lack of reason, the magical events appear all the more significant. The
reality effect is still there, even though its contents are zero. On the one hand,
their referent exposed as null, signs appear as they really are: deterritorialized,
that is, not directly referential. On the other, the realist narration remains and
the magic omens still appear as if they are significant, that is, they appear as
symbolic. Symbols, say Deleuze and Guattari, are precisely deterritorialized
signs (TP 111–148). However, symbolic meaning still conforms to reason, and
is still part of the regime of signs, because it is always reterritorialized, or given
meaning, by the persistence of a narrator-subject conforming to the order of
the State. Thus while a symbolic sign is indeed deterritorialized, it is, according
to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘negatively deterritorialized’. These magical omens,
while they deterritorialize realism to a certain extent, seem to be immediately
reterritorialized by the regime of subjectification. It seems that there are more
kinds of signs than simply the territorialized signs of the State and deterritorial-
ized virtual signs.
In his Proust and Signs Deleuze traces an ‘apprenticeship’ of signs, a process
of learning the truth about signs, starting with the most material signs, or signs
oriented towards the actual, and ending with the virtual signs of art – the signs
that reveal the ‘essence’ of Being as difference. There are various kinds of actual
signs, says Deleuze, which appear to have different relations to their meaning,
although, of course, any relation to a meaning outside the sign is ultimately
an illusion. In Proust and Signs there is a progressive understanding of how the
various actual signs work which eventually leads to a revelation of the virtual
signs of art, and the destruction of this illusion. The first step is a realization of
the falsehood of an ‘objective’ interpretation of signs, that is, considering signs
to have purely referential meaning. This is also the realization of the inade-
quacy of realism: ‘A literature is disappointing if it interprets signs by referring
them to objects that can be designated (observation and description), if it sur-
rounds itself with pseudo-objective guarantees of evidence and communication
(causerie, investigation), and if it confuses meaning with intelligible, explicit,
and formulated signification (major subjects)’ (PS 33). That is, if it is a litera-
ture that assures the meaning of signs through authentication. This ‘disap-
pointment’ leads onto the next step of the apprenticeship of signs – ‘subjective’
interpretation: finding meaning by the association of ideas, that is, by linking
signs and ideas by resemblance or contiguity. Meaning is no longer necessarily
authenticated by dominant reality, it is guaranteed instead by the reasoning
subject itself. However, the subject remains, and thus signs still remain part
of the regime of signs. The magical omens in One Hundred Years of Solitude are
therefore a kind of magical sign that force such a ‘subjective’, symbolic or asso-
ciative reading upon us.
This deterritorialization of the sign, while it does not get rid of meaning,
opens up the possibilities of meaning. In Deleuzian terms, the divergence
introduced into the convergent system of realism by the magical event or sign
has the effect of proliferating series and ramifying the system. Now, rather than
appearing to directly mirror reality, the series of One Hundred Years of Solitude, at
the points of magic, set off new series of associations. One of the famous
instances of magic in the novel, the trickle of blood following José Arcadio
Buendía’s death, immediately appears symbolic. Closer scrutiny reveals that
read symbolically the event gives rise to a series of possible interpretations. The
trickle
came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street,
continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps
and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner
to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house,
went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlour, hugging the
walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide
curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the bego-
nias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an
arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came
out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to
make bread. (OHYS 135)
What this magic event does is to literally traverse several of the series of One
Hundred Years of Solitude – the village, the house and the family – connecting
and ramifying them. Thus, rather than having one specific significance, it
makes series resonate through the association of ideas: it could mean that
ultimately José Arcadio’s mother was to blame for his death by making him
what he was, that the ‘bad blood’ of his crimes affected the whole community,
or perhaps, simply that his death hurt his mother more than it benefited any-
one else. However, in itself, the trickle of blood does not signify anything, its
referent is null. It is an object = x, that precisely because it has no sense, can
take on any sense (LS 79).
We have to remember, however, that this resonance, these interpretations or
associations, are just statistical effects, as Deleuze would say. Yet, it is precisely
because the statistical effect of resemblance persists that a subjective interpreta-
tion persists. For what is symbolic meaning but the connection between ideas
through resemblance or contiguity, that is, the reterritorialization of the sign
into the convergent system of series of the State, through reason? Thus, any
series of associations, any connections between series, any possible meanings,
are segmented and convergent. The possible meanings of the magical events
surrounding José Arcadio Buendía’s death are still connected to the actual, and
the State, because they are, precisely, the meaning and not the essence of the
magical sign. Such magical signs are still only the first step of the apprentice-
ship of signs.
If some magical events only deterritorialize the sign, others deterritorialize
not only the sign but also its non-linguistic part. We can see this in what is
one of the most quoted magical events of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which
embodies some of the most typical magical realist characteristics of the novel:
the ascension of Remedios the Beauty. The narration is unwaveringly realist, it
is neutral and unmoved by the events, and there is no explanation sought or
provided. The episode is described using a wealth of detail and is anchored in
the physical world: just before she takes off it is noted that Remedios is unusu-
ally pale; then we see, just as Úrsula does, ‘Remedios the Beauty waving good-
bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning
with her the environment of the beetles and the dahlias and passing through
the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end’ (OHYS 243).
The details of the sheets, the garden, and even the time, are all authenticating
the scene, placing the magic in the midst of the convergent realist series of
the Buendía house. The magic, however, does not belong to any of these series.
It diverges from the domestic details of the sheets and flowers, from the mun-
dane activity of folding, the washing, from the Buendía’s view of Remedios as
a useless retard, from the series of the birth-to-death descriptions of the
family members, and, finally, from the laws of nature.
However, Remedios is more than just deterritorialized as a sign through
her magical ascent to heaven; she is deterritorialized as a character, that is, as
a non-linguistic element of the regime of signs. She does not fit into the
segmented order of the State of Macondo: ‘Remedios the Beauty was not a
creature of this world’ (OHYS 202). She resists the order of the State, rejecting
the conventions of society in matters of clothing, as well as behaviour and
education. She rejects the series of the family, turning down all her suitors.
Remedios the Beauty resists the territorialization of the State, and ultimately
embarks on her own line of flight – literally. She leaves the segmented territory
of Macondo, and disappears into the smooth space of the sky. Nevertheless,
Remedios still seems to be connected to the stratified earth by the thin thread
of meaning. As an object = x the magical character of Remedios the Beauty
creates resonance, which can be seen in the many attempts at reading her
character and her departure from earth as symbols of innocence, virginity and
solitude. Avril Bryan, considering the portrayal of the myth of virginity in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, reads Remedios’s innocent purity as an antithesis to
Amaranta’s twisted preservation of virginity, and Remedios’s ascension as the
only way to keep the beauty and purity of the symbolic virgin: she never suc-
cumbs to her suitors, and she never ages.22 Others have seen Remedios as a
symbol of ‘the sterility of the concept of purity as a model for human conduct’.23
She has also been seen as a symbol of the barren solitude of the Buendía women
and, by extension, their class, in contrast to the fertility of the lower class, or
‘amoral’, women of Macondo.24 Thus Remedios’s ascension traverses several

series of the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and each of these points of
connection pulls her back into convergence through resemblance. She becomes
meaningful, symbolic, another expression of the State. If as a sign she is nega-
tively deterritorialized, as a character she is only relatively deterritorialized.
Indeed, most of the magic in One Hundred Years of Solitude goes some way in
deterritorializing both the ‘expression’ and the ‘content’ of the regime of
signs of realism and the State, but falls back into the symbolic and the subjec-
tive. The ending of the novel, however, takes deterritorialization a step further
than the negative or relative deterritorialization of a sign or character: it effects
a total deterritorialization of the text. Central to this ending is the character of
Melquíades, undoubtedly a deterritorialized character; as part of a nomadic
gypsy gang, he is without proper territory. He does not have to resist or flee
the segmentarity of Macondo as he is never captured by the State in any way.
He brings science and reason to Macondo, it is true, but he also brings magic
and confusion. He seems to possess an immense knowledge that is more of a
flux than segmented pieces of information. He is also, notably, outside linear
time and history.
The timelessness of Melquíades’s room as well as his many returns from the
dead has been paralleled with the perceived circularity of time in Macondo.
However, the repetitions of the novel betray a progressive history, and
Melquíades’s victories over the ravages of time are, in fact, antithetical to these
degenerating cycles. The repetitions show us the changes that Macondo under-
goes, but Melquíades stays the same. Yet Melquíades’s timeless magic is such
that he always appears in a state of flux. That is, he is always aging and he is
always dying, yet he always returns from death just to appear to be decaying
again. We can draw parallels between the historic time of Macondo and
Melquíades’s timelessness and Deleuze’s idea of time in terms of the actual and
virtual. The time of the actual is that of the present: it is the time of bodies
and matter, a measurable and divisible time. It is time as we know it, which
allows us to see history as a series of segments, or consecutive presents, where
‘past and future are two dimensions relative to the present in time’ (LS 186). In
contrast, virtual time is indivisible and immediate. It is past and future simulta-
neously: ‘Always already passed and eternally yet to come [. . .] [the] pure empty
form of time, which has freed itself from its present corporeal content’ (LS 189).
Thus Melquíades, always dead and eternally dying, belongs to the timeless
simultaneity of pure time. In the room that he is given in the Buendía house
after his first death, it is ‘always March [. . .] and always Monday’ (OHYS 355).
After his second death it is padlocked for a long time, but when Aureliano
Segundo finally opens it ‘there was not the slightest trace of dust or cobwebs,
with everything swept and clean’ (OHYS 188). Melquíades’s existence outside
linear time is crucial to his prophetic powers: he is able to see past, present and
future simultaneously, as his parchments reveal in the end.
Melquíades’s prophesy can be seen as the ultimate divergent element in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, an object = x for the whole novel. It does set some
resonances in motion: offering a range of possible meanings, exposing the con-

tradictions of the novel that we considered at the beginning of this chapter.
Then it goes a step further and reveals itself as fiction in such a way that
it reveals the essence of the sign of art: its own production. The magic of
Melquíades’s prophesy, together with the biblical hurricane that ends the
Macondians’s time on earth, constitute the absolute deterritorialization of the
novel. The State of Macondo and its local representative, the Buendía family,
are totally destroyed. Already before the cataclysm the nomadic jungle is invad-
ing the segmentary space of the village, breaking walls, wiping out boundaries,
as well as eradicating social structures – commerce and government have left,
and the life of the remaining humans is increasingly chaotic and driven by
instincts rather than social codes. The wind, when it comes, finishes off the core
of Macondo, the Buendía house: it ‘tore the doors and the windows of the
hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations’
(OHYS 422). As magical events, the revelation of Melquíades’s prophecy and
the apocalyptic wind are deterritorialized signs. However, their potential
reterritorialization as symbols is in itself deterritorialized, as the doubling of
the subject of the novel, the provider of reason and association, collapses in
the mise-en-abyme of the novel’s ending. As Aureliano reads the parchments, the
story of Macondo written by Melquíades, reader and the read, narrator and the
narrated are conflated. The sign can still be reterritorialized symbolically, rea-
son can still capture it, organize and striate it – because of the persistence of
the subject. However, the magic of the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude
obliterates not only the extra-textual referent but also the narrator-subject, in
that it makes the two indistinguishable. Through this ending, McMurray says,
the ‘fictional universe appears to engender itself from within, eliminating all
elements of the real world outside the novel, including the supposed omni-
scient, or real author’.25 ‘Content’ and ‘expression’ no longer appear as world
and copy, the fictional universe is revealed as an autonomous part of the real
universe. The text’s sense is revealed as Deleuze’s ‘essence’, no longer a mean-
ing dependent on the referent object or the reasoning subject. Rather it is the
text itself. Suddenly writing appears as, in Deleuze words, ‘becoming, becoming
something other than a writer, since what one is becoming at the same time
becomes something other than writing’ (DII 55): writing becomes a production
of the real.
Thus One Hundred Years of Solitude takes us through a kind of apprenticeship
of signs, from the illusory referentiality of realism, via the plural but still conver-
gent meaning of the symbolic to the essential signs of art which reveal the struc-
ture of reality itself. The signs of art give us something that life, in its actuality,
cannot give us – a view of the world, of Being in its creative action of becoming.
This is because essence, says Deleuze, is not something seen but a kind of
superior viewpoint, an irreducible viewpoint that signifies at once the birth of
the world and the original character of a world. It is in this sense that the work
of art always constitutes and reconstitutes the beginning of the world, but
also forms a specific world absolutely different from the others and envelops
a landscape or immaterial site quite distinct from the site where we have grasped
it. (PS 110)
It is important to note that while art that reaches this level of absolute
deterritorialization has the power to reveal ‘the beginning of the world’, it also
forms a world which is ‘quite distinct’ from the one in which it originated.
Indeed, while absolute deterritorialization means an insight into the ontologi-
cal conditions of territory, it also means achieving an ‘irreducible viewpoint’
without any territory.
The premises upon which the above reading of the magic in magical realism
as a sign of art revealing the conditions of Being rest are those of a singular
concept of Being. Deleuze’s ‘irreducible viewpoint’ is nothing but a singular
position: the place, necessarily within Being, where the conditions of Being
become clear. This position, as Deleuze points out, is distinct from the situation
or state of affairs in which we encounter it, precisely because it is not transcen-
dent, but is a part of reality unto itself: a part of reality structurally different
because it is absolutely oriented to the virtual, yet existing or being in the same
way as the state of affairs from whence it was grasped. The inevitable conse-
quence, as Hallward succinctly insists, is that:
The purpose of art is not to represent the world, still less to cultivate or enrich
our ‘appreciation’ of the world, but to create new and self-sufficient composi-
tions of sensation, compositions that will draw those who experience them
directly into the material vitality of the cosmos itself.26
The magic elements, as signs of art, are non-relational, impersonal, and

ahistorical, and distinct from the characters, relations, places and events
from which they have sprung. In fact, in One Hundred Years of Solitude absolute
deterritorialization takes place only through the total annihilation of the State
of Macondo. It is as if the virtual conditions of Being can only be revealed at the
price of the coherence of beings. On the other hand, as we saw in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, much of the magic is never absolutely deterritorialized, but falls
back into the symbolic or subjective. In the remainder of this chapter, we will
further consider the relationship between the magic and the real in magical
realism, and whether it necessarily ends in destruction, by having a look at three
key texts of the genre in English.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981):

The State as Identity
Helen Carr argues that ‘Angela Carter’s novels became much more acceptable
in Britain after the discovery of South American magic realism: her readers
discovered that she was writing in a genre that could be named and to whose
apparent random mixture of fantasy and reality some order could be assigned’.27
It is true that the term magical realism has in a sense been imported and
imposed on writers in English since this ‘discovery’. In the decade following the
one in which the Latin American literary Boom reached the English speaking
world (One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in English translation
in 1970), numerous novels in English that gained critical acclaim as well as
popularity were being labelled as ‘magical realism’. Certainly this was partly due
to publishing houses strategically placing their products in a genre with a
proven sales record. However, the term also provided a fruitful, if problematic,
critical tool.
Midnight’s Children clearly demonstrates the central problematic of magical
realism. It is ostensibly and undeniably anchored in the historical and the polit-
ical, a novel about individual and collective national identity. However, it is also
permeated by magical events that have often been read as part of the search for
identity in the novel. The argument generally follows this pattern: Rushdie’s
use of magical realism shows us in practice how the imagination offers us ways
of making sense of the world.28 Referring to Linda Hutcheon’s concept of
‘historiographic metafiction’, which she uses to describe writing with a ‘theo-
retical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs’,29 critics assert
that the novel’s magical realism, by foregrounding the commonality of the
processes of making history and making fiction, allows us to understand how
all identity is created by the processes of the imagination. Midnight’s Children is
seen to demonstrate this by magically paralleling the history of India not only
with the personal history of Saleem Sinai, but also with his account, in the pro-
cess of being created as we read, of both histories.
Furthermore, recalling Carpentier, the magical realism of Midnight’s Children
is seen as particularly suited to describing the postcolonial situation in general
and India in particular. The richness of the novel, the way it attempts to ‘con-
tain’ the whole subcontinent and its cultural hybridity, its carnivalesque style,
the heterogeneity of its language and its syncretization of the mythical and the
historical are all seen as ways of expressing the hybridity, multiplicity, and
syncretism of the reality of the postcolonial situation. Indeed, as in the case of
One Hundred Years of Solitude, this is seen as the specific political potential of
magical realism. However, the focus has shifted from magical realism’s ‘fusing
of the genres of the real and the surreal as a “strategy of liberation” ’30 to the
‘forms of diversity and multiplicity’ that magical realism is seen to introduce
into the text.31 As Elleke Boehmer states, it is because of its inclusiveness that
magical realism is seen as an oppositional, anti-authoritarian, anti-colonial
genre: ‘Magical realism [is] enamoured of its own overabundance, performing
its tricks of hyperbole, melodrama, parody and fantasy, sometimes for its own
sake, but also in order to make a point about the mongrel nature of the world
in the face of imperialistic forces, and the value of the Many over the One’.32
However, there is a contradiction in this position, similar to the one found in
critical approaches to One Hundred Years of Solitude. As Timothy Brennan asks:
‘How does the writer account for both the many and one – how capture a sense
of the new unities while finding the allegiances on which identity thrives?’33
That is, there is a contradiction in the novel between the search for identity
and the enactment of identity as imagined and multiple, which echoes the
problems that Hallward’s analysis of postcolonial theories in his Absolutely Post-
colonial uncovered. On the one hand, ‘nothing is more orthodox in the post-
colonial domain than an insistence on the multiple, particular, heterogeneous
nature of contexts and subject positions’ (AP 21), while on the other, ‘in every
postcolonial study worthy of the name, any carefully delineated border of
periphery and metropole, colony and empire becomes blurred, de-territorialised,
and unbounded’ (AP 34). Indeed, the narrative exploration of national and
personal identity in Midnight’s Children can be seen as a dramatization of the
postcolonial project which attempts to define such identity at the same time as
paradoxically rejecting any fixed identities.
Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children is rooted in realism.
Indeed the thematic and structural similarities between the two novels are
striking and well documented. Both are family sagas spanning generations
against the backdrop of a community’s destiny; both focus on domestic settings
and details, while also providing rich descriptions of the geographical and his-
torical milieu. Indeed, Midnight’s Children, is, if anything, more overtly grounded
in space and time. While Macondo is merely recognizable as Colombia in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the setting of Midnight’s Children
is explicitly the Indian subcontinent in the decades running up to and following
Independence. In Rushdie’s novel historical events are continually recounted,
and the named settings – Kashmir, Bombay, Delhi, Pakistan and Bangladesh –
are elaborately described. The serial and segmented structure of the State is
recognizable in the novel’s central domestic setting, Saleem’s family home, and
in its abundant familial connections and hierarchies. Despite resembling One
Hundred Years of Solitude in the frequency of its prolepses and analepses, the
passing of linear time is even more undeniable in Midnight’s Children. Indeed, as
in García Márquez’s novel, frequent glimpses of future events keep the narra-
tive moving relentlessly forward, despite its many detours. The authentication
process is central to the novel, although continually foregrounded and ques-
tioned by the narrator. Saleem, appearing self-consciously in his own narrative,
describing his act of writing this story, is nothing but a thinking – because
doubting – subject. The regime of subjectification is, in fact, affirmed when
Saleem questions the accuracy of his recollections. His very insecurities about
certain historical facts allow us to feel he is a trustworthy eyewitness to his own
story. Thus the much-discussed metafictionality of Midnight’s Children is not as
subversive as is implied by critics reading it as ‘historical metafiction’. Yes, the
novel does draw our attention to the processes of fiction and history alike in
these self-conscious passages, but it does not break with the basic principles of
the regime of signs that realism exemplifies. We become aware that history and
fiction share a common origin – the subject – but the object and the subject, the
world and its representation, persist.
As in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the State is the ordering principle of the
realism of Midnight’s Children both in terms of the serial structure of time and
space, and as part of a regime of signs. However, in Midnight’s Children, through
the focus on the parallel between the national and personal, the State also
appears as the regulator of identity. That is, the State is explicitly India, which
is, in turn, explicitly tied to the identity of the narrator. Indeed, the State and
its order, the regime of signs, are shown as a necessary prerequisite for identity,
national or personal. Against this order, the magical sign of art is divergent, and
thus distinct from the principles of identity. Importantly, Deleuze’s theoretical
framework indicates that the central conflict in Midnight’s Children is not so
much between the plurality of the masses and the idea of a unified India, as is
commonly held, as between the possibility of identity, be it hybrid and multiple,
and the breakdown of an order that upholds that possibility. That is, an order
that makes possible the distinctions, categories and divisions – the segments –
necessary for identity.
The magic of Midnight’s Children centres on the children and their abilities.
While the narrative is often hyperbolic, it does not include as many instances
of ‘incidental’ magic as One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, there are, as in
García Márquez’s novel, many instances of premonitions and omens, some
seemingly just as meaningless: ‘comets were seen exploding above the Back
Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood’ (MC 136).
Many of the premonitions, however, are more systematically reterritorialized as
symbols by the State than they were in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In fact, this
is a notable effect of the search for national identity, as Midnight’s Children fore-
grounds the importance of myth in the national project. We must here note the
important difference between magic and myth. Magic, as we saw, involves a
deterritorialization of meaning. While the magic in magical realism may well
have mythical origins, myth, in contrast to magic, is part of an order of meaning
territorialized by the State. In Midnight’s Children many of the omens are
explicitly linked to the myths of India:
Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost of the
Rani of Jhansi, rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana, doing
things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good Christian
woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb of Lord Jesus
is found in Kashmir. On the tombstone are carved two pierced feet and a
local fisherwoman has sworn she saw them bleeding [. . .] the new-born secu-
lar state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity, in
which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant . . . so that people were
seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom reverted
to their old ways. (MC 245)
In this passage freedom is exposed as myth alongside the multi-denominational

myths of the past. However, while the magical children, the ‘fantastic heart’
(MC 195) of the novel, seem to have all the hallmarks of a national myth: a
pantheon of new gods to bring the plurality of India together, they are, in fact,
with regards to the national project anyway, entirely ineffectual. Saleem, for all
his grand plans, is exemplary in this: as Goonetilleke notes, he is not able to
achieve anything with his supreme magical powers, he uses his gift for useless
and valueless things, and is characterized by surprising passivity.34 It is not
through revealing the inherent myth-making of the nation that the midnight’s
children pose a threat to the State and to identity, but through their magic,
their very lack of meaning and thus identity. Indeed, myths are useful to
the State, while magic, on the other hand, is not; quite the opposite. Hence the
children’s forced sterilization and loss of powers.
In Deleuzian terms the magical midnight’s children are all lines of flight or
radical deterritorializations of identity, and even of the human as such. They
are all, to some degree, ‘becoming-other’. Recall how the concept of becoming
is a counter-actualization of the individual, a process that has nothing to do
with multiplying ‘possible identities’, as Brian Massumi claims,35 but which
means going beyond the boundaries that make up identity, and the order of the
State as well as the laws of nature. Becoming-woman (and man again) and
becoming-animal (-fish or -bird) are only some of the children’s magical abili-
ties, but they are all divergent elements in the convergent series of the real.
There is, ‘from Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and
re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land’, violating the order of
space, and the ‘Benarsi silversmith’s son [. . .] given the gift of travelling in
time’, violating the order of time; but there is also ‘at Budge-Budge outside
Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting
physical wounds’, defying the illusory difference between representation and
reality (MC 198–199). The magical becomings of the children are collectively
united in Saleem, their ‘All India Radio’ operator (MC 166), an object = x in
the system of convergent series that is the State of India. The object = x, intro-
ducing pure difference into the system, does indeed allow such an India to be
a multiplicity, but in Deleuzian, that is, singular terms. Therefore it is emphati-
cally not the kind of multiplicity that could underpin the hybrid yet particular
identity that the Indian national project, and indeed the postcolonial project,
is looking for.
However, going beyond identity or the human can be dangerous, as Deleuze
tells us (DII 105; TP 229), and indeed some of the children die or are harmed
because of their magical capabilities. Perhaps they are all doomed from the
beginning, as the State clearly deems them a severe enough threat to destroy
them. Saleem, as the nexus of the magic in the novel and India, is the site of a
battle between the ordering forces of the State and the magic of the children.
It becomes clear that the more deterritorialized Saleem becomes as a character,
the less effectual he becomes as a subject. In fact, because of its divergence from
realism, the magic of the novel appears, rather than a political tool, as Saleem’s
loss of identity and thus political agency. When Saleem is brained by the family
heirloom spittoon and loses his memory, he enters a state of extreme deterrito-
rialization. He becomes like the enlightened Buddha ‘capable of not-living-in-
the-world as well as living in it’ (MC 349). However, he retains the magic power
of a fantastic sense of smell, and is coopted into the secret service of the
Pakistani army. It appears to be Saleem’s lack of identity and the lack of identity
of his fellow soldiers that prevents them disobeying their orders even when the
full horrors of the invasion of East Pakistan become clear. In fact, the more
deterritorialized they become the more they seem unable to make a stand
against the realities they witness. Their flight into the Sundarban jungle – a
smooth nomadic space just like the jungle surrounding Macondo – makes them
all go through individual deterritorializations, and emerging from the jungle
they choose to deny the horrors before their eyes. They
saw so many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our
boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles
with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of
the city being massacred by the hundreds [. . .] slit throats being buried in
unmarked graves [. . .] lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were
raped, and raped again before being shot. (MC 375–376)
We see clearly here that the magic is literally ineffectual in the face of real
horrors. The deterritorialized soldiers, in particular Saleem, lack the power to
do anything but deny these atrocities, which, in themselves are described using
a realist, not a magical mode.
As we near the end of Saleem’s narrative his deterritorialization also appears
as personally dangerous, as his identification with India as a multiplicity becomes
more explicit:
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before
me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone
everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine [sic]. I am
anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if
I had not come [. . .] each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus
of us, contains a similar multitude. (MC 383)
This is a vision of a multiplicity which is a ‘slipping between things and growing

in the midst of things’ (TP 280). However, it is not compatible with the defini-
tion necessary for a national or personal identity, but, in contrast, it is a way to
‘rid ourselves of ourselves’.36 This is the point at which writing becomes a dis-
tinct world rather than a representation of the world, as Deleuze and Guattari
describe it in What is Philosophy?:
Characters can only exist, and the author can only create them, because they
do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part
of the compound of sensations [. . .]. We are not in the world, we become

with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming.
We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero.
(WIP 169)
As in the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, this transaction leads to an apoca-
lypse. Saleem cracks up into six-hundred-million specks of dust, into the
six-hundred-million rich crowd of India. As Saleem ‘passes into the landscape’
of India, the novel becomes not a representation of India as a nation but the
production of an ‘India’ as a world, a singular multiplicity.
We can compare Hallward’s consideration of the contradictory project of
postcolonialism with Timothy Brennan’s sustained critique of what he sees
as the failure of Midnight’s Children to provide models of national identity.
Brennan notes that the narrator’s ‘sweeping claims to be the imaginative
source of history, eventually lead to a repudiation of the individual as a moral
being’,37 and that an ‘all-inclusiveness finally undermines the idea of national
distinctions themselves, which are orderly and bordered. “Everything” means
not just India. If neither Saleem nor Padma create “true” national images, it
is because the truth of postwar nationalism is international’.38 In one sense,
Brennan does not take his critique far enough, for the ‘all-inclusiveness’ of
Midnight’s Children is not about internationalism but about a multiplicity
which supports neither individual nor national identity, neither Saleem
nor India, but which reveals the singular creative power that writes this
multiplicity.
The metafictionality of Midnight’s Children thus does not lie in the frame nar-
rative about the ‘telling’ of the novel’s story, but in the ‘becoming molecular’ of
Saleem. It is only when the difference between narrator and narrated, subject
and object, disappears, as in the final apocalypse in García Márquez’s novel,
that ‘writing becomes something else’ (DII 55). Again, however, it seems that
such an absolute deterritorialization of the text is incompatible with the territo-
riality of realism. Midnight’s Children, via Hallward’s concept of the singular,
demonstrates the implications of the magical sign of art. While the sign of art
reveals the conditions of Being, it also reveals the non-relation of all individual
beings, and is therefore incompatible with the idea of identity. In retrospect we
can see that the magic of One Hundred Years of Solitude, rather than assert a Latin
American identity, ultimately subverts the possibility of identity: hence the
contradiction encountered by critics. However, the contradiction remains,
because while One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children end in the
annihilation of time, place and identity, magical realism, as we have noted, is
definitely rooted in place and history. Is this realism necessarily entirely contra-
dicted and destroyed by a magical becoming-molecular? The next two novels
we will consider are also about identity, but, as opposed to One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Midnight’s Children, do not end in apocalypse.
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984):

Reterritorialization through Relation
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, in contrast to Rushdie’s novel, is written

firmly from the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘margins’ of the postcolonial world.
However, there has not been a shortage of comparisons between the postcolo-
nial and the feminist struggles, and indeed Carter makes this point herself.
Seeing language as ‘power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of
domination and liberation’,39 Carter considers her writing as a ‘decolonising of
language and our basic habits of thought’.40 Reminiscent of many descriptions
of magical realism in the postcolonial context, and readings of both One
Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, Carter feels the need for the
‘creation of the means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experi-
ence than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language
previously existed’.41 Mentioning García Márquez, she claims to feel affinity
with Third World writers ‘who are transforming actual fictional forms to both
reflect and precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves’.42
While the magic in Nights at the Circus cannot be categorized as belonging to
a specific non-Western culture, à la William Spindler’s anthropological magical
realism,43 the novel displays significant similarities to One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Midnight’s Children in terms of the treatment of both the real and
the magic. It is firmly set at the very end of the nineteenth century in London,
St Petersburg and Siberia, evoking vivid images of the first two settings in
particular: Victorian London through descriptions of the main character
Fevvers’s childhood home, the brothel, and St Petersburg through glimpses of
both the extreme poverty and extreme opulence given in between events at
the circus. As Day has pointed out, the novel is ‘formally and generically
quite traditional’ and follows the linear progression of the adventures of the
protagonists. Day also notes the rich historical contexts that often remain unno-
ticed: references to historical figures like the entertainer Dan Leno, to Alfred
Jarry, Toulouse-Lautrec, Freud and Marx, as well as a subtext of the women’s
rights movement and leftwing political activism of the time.44 The novel lacks
the explicit family structure and domestic settings of the aforementioned nov-
els, although Fevvers’s upbringing in a brothel provides a kind of substitute.
However, in Nights at the Circus the rigid segmentarity of the State is not so much
located in the family, as, perhaps surprisingly, in the circus. The particular ter-
ritorialization performed by the State that Carter is interested in is, of course,
male domination. In fact, the way Carter creates a local representative of the
State in the circus with its capitalist exploitation, its hierarchy and its segmen-
tarity, makes it clear that she is aware of the pitfalls of some of the characteris-
tics attributed to magical realism. Similarly to both García Márquez’s and
Rushdie’s novels, Nights at the Circus has been described as carnivalesque in
style. As discussed in the Introduction, the carnivalesque is one of the features
that cannot be seen as essential to magical realism. However, the perceived

subversion of boundaries in magical realism, as well as the hyperbolic tenden-
cies of many magical realist novels, have made critics link the carnivalesque and
magical realism. In fact, it is precisely the misreading of magical realism as per-
forming merely a carnivalesque operation by introducing magic into reality
that contributes to the perception of the genre as a failure. As Ga˛siorek points
out, Carter is well aware that the carnivalesque inversion of categories, such as
magic and real, oppressor and oppressed, male and female, has only a limited
subversive power: it does not question these dichotomies as such, and after the
laughter of the carnival has died down, the old order easily returns.45 The magic
in Nights at the Circus, however, is an element that is divergent both from the ordi-
nary rules of society and their temporary carnivalesque inversion in the circus.
In fact, the organization of Carter’s circus is segmented according to a strict
hierarchy: circus manager, audience, performers, with the latter in turn divided
into men, women, animals. Its space is striated to reflect these divisions in a sort
of inverted cone of concentric circles (the structure of the circular stage) where
the further away from the centre you are, the higher up in the hierarchy you
find yourself. Importantly, therefore, the circus (which can include any of the
theatre stages Fevvers has performed on) is the arena in which Fevvers – the
woman – is objectified, where she has her identity constructed for her. We can
recall Hallward’s concept of the specified here. A specified identity is passive
and objectified, based on a relation imposed from outside. It is here, on stage,
in the centre of the cone, that Fevvers’s identity is specified by those who come
to see her: as angel, as freak, as impostor, as sex-object and so on, all predicated
on the order of the circus-State where the specifying gaze always belongs to
those further up the hierarchy: the audience and the man. Indeed, Fevvers
seems entirely dependent on her performance and her audience for an iden-
tity: even her interview with Walser is very much a performance of the persona
she has made for herself, and later, lost in Siberia, she seems to crumble and
fade without the gaze of an audience.
However, Fevvers is also the central element of magic in the novel: a woman
with wings, not born but hatched, and with no navel to show for it. She is a
becoming in the Deleuzian sense, recalling that for Deleuze, becoming is never
an imitation, but two things entering a zone of imperceptibility (TP 274).
Fevvers is both woman and bird. What Mary Russo interprets as a grotesque,
redundant body,46 Paulina Palmer correctly sees as a sign of Carter’s ‘interest in
exploring a “completely new order of things” ’.47 Fevvers has both arms and
wings, and as Walser muses, ‘she, by all the laws of evolution and human reason,
ought to possess no arms at all, for it’s her arms that ought to be her wings!’48
She doesn’t imitate the bird in flight either, meandering through the air,
somersaulting as no bird, nor human trapeze artist could conceivably do. She is
an element divergent from the laws of nature, a line of flight traversing the
series of both the human and the avian.
She is the object = x of the text, something she, in fact, ‘performs’ by being
anything to anyone that sees her: the identities she is given are like the ‘statistical
effects’ of her presence in the system of reality around her. Although she is
constantly, and sometimes violently, reterritorialized, she is at core entirely
deterritorialized. Nights at the Circus is not explicitly metafictional like One
Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, but it foregrounds narration
in its first section by making Fevvers tell her own story. In fact, the novel dem-
onstrates that textual self-reflexivity is not a necessary element of magical real-
ism. The magical element, Fevvers, is both the subject and the object of her own
narration; it is clear from the outset of the novel that she is making her own
reality. At the same time, however, the omniscient narrator guarantees the
dominant reality of her setting, and her inclusion in it. Indeed, Fevvers illus-
trates quite succinctly the contradiction between the singular position and the
wish for a relational identity. That is, as an object = x, she is not bound by any
convergent system such as the State or the laws of nature, and is, as it were, auto-
productive. However, she is also therefore entirely non-relational. The only way
to attain relationality is by reterritorialization, that is, entering into a configura-
tion of relations that is by essence territorial. In order to find a place in the
world, a definition of herself, Fevvers has to perform, she has to insert herself
into the order of the State through the circus and reterritorialize herself in the
gaze of her spectators.
Fevvers thus allows us to see the central dilemma of magical realism with
greater clarity: magic occupies a position where the binary divisions of any
domination scenario are erased and where any rigid organization is destroyed,
thus implying a liberation from such specifying structures. However, it also
implies the impossibility of the kind of relations necessary for individual iden-
tity. In Nights at the Circus Carter dramatizes this dilemma further through the
group of Clowns. The identities of the clowns are ostensibly and unashamedly
constructs, but underneath there is no true self, no original. Nevertheless, the
clowns feel that their awareness of the specified nature of their identity, their
choice of the construct, as it were, is a form of freedom: ‘I have become this
face which is not mine, and yet I choose it freely’ (NC 122). However, they
also demonstrate the dangers of absolute deterritorialization, similar to those
encountered by Saleem in Midnight’s Children. First Buffo, their leader, in his
madness and in a flurry of numerous performed identities, ‘deconstructs’ him-
self to his death. Later, the clowns as a group perform themselves to oblivion.
Carter seems to imply here, as Day observes, the danger of a non-material, ahis-
torical and transcendental principle (that is, a singular principle) that is pre-
supposed by identity: enacting or embodying this principle ends in chaos and
destruction.49
What Carter seems to advocate is the necessity of constructing a territorial
identity. While both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children ended
in total annihilation, Nights at the Circus includes a kind of personal apocalypse,
but ends with a reconstruction of identity. This apocalypse, or rather extreme
deterritorialization, takes place in the smooth space of a wintry Siberia. The
train that Fevvers and Walser are travelling on, a mini-State dividing people and
animals in ordered segments, is literally shattered into pieces. This precipitates
Walser’s total loss of identity through trauma, like Saleem’s amnesia, as well as
Fevvers’s loss of a performative space and thus her main way of creating iden-
tity. In the end, however, they both find new identities through their love, that
is, by establishing a relation to each other. Walser starts off comfortable in his
role as an adventurous, independent man who possesses a specifying gaze both
in his role as a man and as a journalist: he writes down and thus determines the
identities of the objects he investigates. Carter has him go through a complete
becoming-other in his madness, in order to allow him to emerge a ‘new man’; an
identity he receives by subjecting himself to Fevvers’s gaze. In the last pages of
the novel he offers an alternative narrative of himself, in her unique style. Fevvers,
in turn, having been lost and bedraggled, finds ‘herself’ again in his eyes. As they
meet, he, still in a precarious mental state, looks at her uncomprehending and
she suffers ‘the worst crisis of her life: “Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what
I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?” ’She only regains her confidence and
identity when she spreads her wings and sees ‘the eyes fixed upon her with aston-
ishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was’ (NC 290).
Clare Hanson reads this conclusion of Nights at the Circus as a pessimistic
message: one can redraw one’s own identity but always at expense of someone
else’s. Fevvers finds herself again, but only through remoulding Walser’s image
of her, and to Hanson the end of the novel is thus only a reversal rather than a
deconstruction of the power relations that make up identity.50 In a sense this
is true, since we are certainly not given an alternative to the construction of
identity through a system predicated on delineation and boundaries, on territo-
rialization. However, Carter offers a rather upbeat ending from the point of view
of Fevvers, as she has chosen her performance and her spectator. She has thus
been able to escape her specified identity through what Hallward would call a
specific position. Yet Carter does not allow this to be an entirely unproblematic
solution for Fevvers. Walser’s question whether she really is the ‘only fully-
feathered intacta in the history of the world’ is met with the enigmatic ‘Gawd,
I fooled you!’ (NC 294) and the resounding laugh that closes the novel. This
laugh seems yet again to set in motion Fevvers’s endless circulation as the object
= x, making her resonate with all the identities she has ever been given, as we
have to re-open the question ‘what is she?’ In fact, the magic does not necessar-
ily lead to destruction or dissolution, but the mechanisms that keep things
together, that allow the characters to return from the brink of apocalypse, from
total deterritorialization, are those of reterritorialization and of the State.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987): The Imperative

to Reterritorialization
Toni Morrison’s Beloved makes clear the imperative of reterritorialization per-

haps more poignantly than both Midnight’s Children and Nights at the Circus.
In the former we encountered the horrors of the real, against which the magic
appeared as ineffectual, whereas in the latter, the territorial appeared as a way

to resolve the non-relationality of the magic. In Beloved such relational territori-
alization is precisely a way the horrors of the real can be faced, but at the
expense of the deterritorialization of magic.
Beloved has been repeatedly described in terms by now familiar to us: it is a
blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and fable, the liter-
ary and the oral, and it thus rejects identity as fixed, critiquing not only racist
but also black nationalist notions of black identity.51 By allowing a multitude of
voices and styles to blend without any one taking precedence, the novel rejects
the idea of authenticity.52 Furthermore, as Maggie Sale states, ‘Not only does
Beloved foreground its own construction as history and fiction, but it asserts that
all historical narratives participate in a similar fictionalizing’.53 In the face of the
atrocities of slavery, an ‘unnatural reality’, the novel reimagines the real to
‘redefine history, language, and the purpose of art itself’.54 However, the ten-
sion between identity and magic we have seen in the novels considered above is
also very apparent in Beloved; Peach complains that while the novel favours
‘community, the moral responsibility of individuals to each other, the reclama-
tion of traditional black values and the importance of the ancestor’, it is also
‘drawn to the dramatic potential of enigma, distances, spaces, dislocation, alien-
ation, gaps and ellipses’ that seem to contradict these.55 Yet in its ending it
is more like Nights at the Circus than Rushdie’s or García Márquez’s novels, as
Conner has noticed: ‘In contrast to the spectacular apocalyptic conclusions
that characterize so much of late twentieth-century fiction – one thinks of the
conclusions of Gravity’s Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Chil-
dren – apocalypse in Beloved [. . .] ushers in not annihilation, but renewal’.56
Much has been made of the structure of Beloved, which reveals the past in a
fragmented manner through the characters’ memories, often in several ver-
sions. Certainly there is a more direct polyvocality in Beloved than in One
Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight’s Children, even Nights at the Circus, but as
opposed to Fevvers’s auto-narration in this novel, the voices in Beloved work
more like Saleem’s rational narrator in Midnight’s Children. The voices included
in Morrison’s novel are more indebted to the ‘classical’ slave narrative than
many critics allow, giving the novel the authenticity of accounts by eye-witnesses
to and, crucially, victims of the events that they recount.57 As readers, while we
have to work at it, we can piece together a fairly coherent linear progression of
events from the time during slavery at Sweet Home to the present of the frame
narrative in post-abolition Cincinnati.
Morrison has indicated that she wants her writing to speak the ‘unspeakable’,
and many critics have interpreted the character of Beloved as this unspeakable,
thus reading the magic of the novel as a way of articulating horrors that have
been repressed. However, Morrison does a much better job at actually just
speaking these horrors in the ostensibly realist passages of the character’s
reminiscences. Sethe’s memory of her milk being stolen by her new master’s
nephews, while he watches and takes notes, and her subsequent flogging, or
Paul D’s memory of the utter humiliation suffered by having to wear the bit at
Sweet Home, as well as the physical and sexual abuse he experienced as part of
a chain-gang in Georgia, and many more such episodes, are striking precisely
because of their unflinching realism. Without these realist episodes, Beloved
would not be perceived as such a significant character, for she only attains
her ‘identity’ as a repressed memory through her resonance with these realist
passages, in particular the horror of Sethe’s murder of her own daughter.
Notably, this, the central passage in the novel, is entirely realist. However, before
we consider Beloved, we need to understand the realism of the novel better, for
it nevertheless seems to have an extra dimension to it, not present in the other
novels discussed so far.
The recollected episodes of slavery and escape often emerge from the
involuntary memories of the characters, and the link to Proust has been made
on occasion.58 Sethe tries hard not to remember her days of slavery, and is often
successful: ‘The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the
nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard’; but then some-
thing will trigger her memory: ‘The plash [sic] of water, the sight of her shoes
and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping
in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling,
rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that
farm that did not want to make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in
shameless beauty’.59 In Proust and Signs, Deleuze considers the signs of involun-
tary memory that the narrator in of À la recherche du temps perdu experiences
as part of the ‘apprenticeship of signs,’ as a step towards understanding
the signs of art. However, these signs of memory are still only a beginning:
‘Reminiscences in involuntary memory are still of life: of art at the level of life
[. . .]. On the contrary art in its essence, the art superior to life, is not based
upon involuntary memory’ (PS 55). What the signs of memory do, however, is
foreground the difference inherent in the process of art:
The essential thing in involuntary memory is not resemblance, nor even identity, which
are merely conditions, but the internalized difference, which becomes immanent. It is
in this sense that reminiscence is the analogue of art [. . .]: it takes ‘two differ-
ent objects,’ the madeleine with its flavor, Combray with its qualities of color
and temperature; it envelops the one in the other, and makes their relation
into something internal. (PS 60)
That is, the signs of involuntary memory introduce a break in the text, by show-
ing up the difference between the narration and the narrated, shattering the
illusion of representation. However, reminiscences do not go as far as the signs
of art, since they are, says Deleuze, less ‘dematerialized’ and still depend on
associations, and are therefore easily reinterpreted ‘objectively’ – as realism –
or ‘subjectively’ – as symbols (PS 64). The device of memory thus accounts for
Beloved’s ‘self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs’,60 as it does
in Midnight’s Children, but again we see that such a characteristic is not what
defines the magic of magical realism.
Indeed, the memories of Sethe and Paul D are reterritorialized within the
linear narrative of the story of Beloved, as passages of realism. However, they do
seem to have an almost autonomous, physical presence. As Sethe explains to
her daughter, Denver, ‘Some things just stay [. . .]. Someday you be walking
down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear.
And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you
bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else’ (BD 43). These involun-
tary ‘rememories’ are the legacy of slavery, and, as has been often noted, seem
to be as real and persistent as the scars on Sethe’s back. They are, we could
argue, the remnants of a different regime of signs within the regime of subjec-
tification that governs the realism of the novel. Indeed, the frame narrative of
the novel is set in a world segmented and ordered like Macondo. At the centre
is the family, however small, and the domestic setting, and then the black
neighbourhood in Cincinnati, placed the ‘right’ side of the all-important line
dividing North and South. The year is 1873 and both the benefits and the disap-
pointments of abolition are dramatized by the various characters inhabiting
this setting. Certainly the third-person matter-of-fact narration of this frame
setting establishes the authenticating voice of realism. However, while the voices
of the characters remembering their past also speak under the regime of signs
of realism, they describe a different kind of regime. Slavery can be seen as
part of what Deleuze calls a ‘despotic regime’, as opposed to the State, which is
part of the regime of signification (there may have been a State for the white
slave-owners, but clearly from the slaves’ perspective there was no sanction
of their subjection through reason). In brief, in this regime all signs are sanc-
tioned by the despot, all signification imposed from this ‘signifying centre’.
(TP 111–148) Rather than the constant reterritorialization of flows that charac-
terizes the State, the despotic regime is an extreme territorialization (although
it may be very local – applied only to the slave population for example). In
Hallward’s terms, it is a system under which individuals are entirely specified.
The racist discourse that underpins the specification of blacks as slaves is dra-
matized most explicitly in Beloved by Schoolteacher, the new master of Sweet
Home, who has his nephews measure the slaves, writing down their ‘animal’ as
well as ‘human’ characteristics. However, the specification of slaves as animals,
as childlike, or as inhuman is constant throughout the character’s recollections.
Their memories are part of their extreme territorialization, remnants of the
despotic regime erupting in the present. What Beloved emphasizes in the real-
ism of these memories is thus identity as specified. The extremity and violence
with which it has been specified is clearly an imperative to despecify: and this
imperative is akin to the persistence in postmodern literature ‘not only of desire
for elimination of domination, inequality and oppression but also of desire for
transcendence itself’, as DeKoven points out in her discussion of the novel.61
In a sense, then, the despecifying magic of Beloved feels more necessary in
Morrison’s novel than it ever did in the others, and the battle between a speci-
fied identity, a new acceptable identity, and the non-identity of the singular,
becomes far more explicitly a matter of extreme importance for the survival of
the individual.
The memories of the past, the eruptions of the despotic regime, lead to
Beloved’s appearance in the novel. Sethe’s struggle with her memories seems
to evoke this magical character, although her appearance cannot be easily
explained. In fact, the very ‘slipperiness’ of Beloved that any reader or critic of
the novel has to battle against is due to her magic, her absolute deterritorializa-
tion, her function as an object = x. As Phelan points out, she is ‘stubborn’, she
won’t yield to interpretation; however one rearranges her character, something
does not fit.62 No symbolic or real status that critics have attempted to pin on
her ever quite holds: whether she is seen as the ghost of Sethe’s murdered baby,
a runaway slave, the mother–daughter bond incarnate, guilt come alive, or the
collective memory of the Middle Passage. These possibilities are merely reso-
nances evoked as she traverses the convergent lines of the realism of the
novel.
Harris incisively reads Beloved as not a person but a ‘thing’ without any
personality traits or any morality, unleashed and unrestrained, limited only by
the imagination. She is ‘the personification of desire, thus epitomizes the
demonic’.63 Indeed, say Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are ‘demonic’, a term
they specifically place outside the order distinguishing the divine and the
satanic. Beloved may be a becoming-human of desire, but at the same time as
she is also a becoming-other, a becoming-ghost, of the human. According to
Heinze, ‘Beloved can never be fully conceptualized because she is continually
in a state of transition’,64 rather like Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Beloved is always in flux because she has no identity of her own. Just as her
skin is entirely smooth and unlined, so she is a smooth, deterritorialized entity.
In a sense, she is like Fevvers insofar as she accepts the (pseudo-)identity that
others give her (as they speculate on who she is), and she also precipitates the
becoming-other of another character. Beloved enters into a zone of impercep-
tibility with Sethe: ‘She imitated Sethe, talked the way she did, laughed her
laugh and used her body the same way down to the walk, the way Sethe moved
her hands, sighed through her nose, held her head. Sometimes [. . .] it was
difficult for Denver to tell who was who’ (BD 283). However, their mutual deter-
ritorialization seems to spin out of control, enter into the territory – or rather
the lack of it – where things are torn asunder, as in the case of Saleem or
Macondo.
Conner reads Beloved as a creature of the ‘sublime’, which he explicitly links
to the annihilation of self and the disruption of individual and community.65 As
Corey has noted, after Paul D leaves the house it enters a ‘liminal period when
time seems to stop’,66 as if it becomes a piece of the ‘timeless place’ from which
Beloved has ‘come back home’ (BD 214). We can compare this timelessness to
that of Melquíades’s parchments, as it embodies, quite literally, a simultaneous
experience of the events of 1873, Sethe’s memories, as well as the suffering of

the Middle Passage. This absence of time is implicitly connected with death.
The place to which Sethe’s daughter ‘went’ and the Middle Passage are united
as an experience of death, and Sethe, in the present, seems to enact it, being
sucked dry of life. Again we are made aware of the dangers of total deterritori-
alization, the total loss of identity.
Beloved, as the magic element in the novel, is thus clearly not an element that
allows any kind of individual healing after the horrors of slavery. She is not only
ineffectual, like Saleem, but deadly. She causes Sethe to go through a personal
‘apocalypse’: the loss of her sense of identity. However, at the end of the novel,
the singular Beloved is exorcized by the community, re-establishing relations
with Sethe and her family, bringing her back into the land of the living – the
territorial State – as well as bringing her back, explicitly through Paul D, to
the possibility of an identity. As Conner indicates, Paul D’s return to Sethe is the
joining of two people in order to find their identities, something like Walser
and Fevvers at the end of Nights at the Circus. Paul D ‘put[s] his story next to
hers’ and by telling her that she, not Beloved, is her own ‘best thing’, a glimmer
of self appears in Sethe’s response ‘Me? Me?’ (BD 322), as if she has only just
become aware again of her existence separate from Beloved. To Conner this is
indicative of the regeneration of the self and the community in the face of the
in-human and other-worldly sublime. Conner also points out how order, law
and boundaries are contradictory to the sublime.67 Indeed such a reading
of Beloved in terms of the sublime is comparable to what we concluded from
Midnight’s Children and Nights at the Circus: the magic is a movement antithetical
to the search for identity. In Beloved, the imperative for such a search becomes
far more clear: in the face of an extremely specifying, despotic, regime of signs,
despecification becomes a question of survival. The magic of the character
Beloved provides such a despecification for Sethe through a precarious process
of losing all identity, one, however, which ultimately allows her a reconstruction
of identity.
What our readings of Midnight’s Children, Nights at the Circus and Beloved
suggest, then, is that the problems encountered by critics of magical realism
stem from a misunderstanding of the nature of the magic and the real. The
historical or social content of magical realism does not reside in its magic.
Instead these aspects of magical realism are rooted in its realism. It appears that
the two main elements of magical realism refer to what Hallward usefully desig-
nated as two different poles of the ontological orientation of things in Deleuze’s
thought: towards the actual or towards the virtual. The very structure of realism
means that it is oriented firmly towards the actual. This structure is apparently
mirroring a world of fixed territories and a rigid organization. In fact, however,
realism is not a representation of an external world so organized, but as an
expression of the same organizational principle, a regime of signs. This regime
determines meaning as well as ordering society, in the State. Thus realism is
relevant, albeit not by means of representation, to society, history, geography
and politics. In distinct contrast, the magic of magical realism is radically

divergent from the ordered series of the realism. It appears deterritorialized
and free of the strict organization of the actual. The magical events defy deter-
mination by place or function, and can be seen to ‘move’ across the series and
segments of the realism. Importantly, however, the magic, in its divergence, is
removed from not only the details of daily social life depicted by realism, but
also from its engagement with the negotiation of identity, and indeed, with any
historical or geographical situation.
However, despite its divergence from the territorial world of realism, the
magical elements certainly seem to have some kind of effect, not the least in
the apocalyptic destruction of the society of Macondo in One Hundred Years of
Solitude and of Saleem’s identity Midnight’s Children. In Nights at the Circus and
Beloved, on the other hand, we saw that the presence of magic need not have
such wholly destructive implications. Rather, for Fevvers and Sethe, the magic,
while in itself antithetical to a reconstruction of identity, seems to act as a kind
of impetus or catalyst to this reconstruction. If a Deleuzian analysis has revealed
the magic as antithetical to the realism of magical realism, it will also allow us
to consider in what way the magic can be reappraised as effectual in this way,
in an ahistorical, apolitical framework. In fact, it is the very fact that the magic
is removed from society and history, indeed, from the human, that enables it to
act as a sign of art.
Chapter 4
Magical Realism and the Signs of Art
Introduction: The Magical Signs of Art

In magical realist texts we have looked so far the magic appears to be situated
in a realm apart from any human milieus, and yet, the magic is nevertheless
patently present and definable. It is clear that the virtual realm of magic, even
though removed from the ‘real world’, is not ineffectual. Instead it can be
thought of as a supplement, which adds a dimension to the magical realist text
that cannot be gained through realism. However, to fully understand what this
supplement entails, the magic has to be read as part of an ontological order
completely distinct to that of realism. The Deleuzian ontological model of
actual and virtual as two sides of One Being is thus invaluable to negotiating the
contradiction or double bind inherent in magical realism, between a realism
that invites contextual readings, and a magic that is radically different.
To Deleuze, the unique power of art lies not in its representing the world, but
creating a world anew, and by doing so revealing the very conditions of any
world. This unique power can be found in the magic of magical realism. In
contrast to the historical and political realm of realism, magic allows us to think
a dimension presupposed by the historical and political, and therefore free of
the limitations of fixed territoriality and rigid organization characterizing these.
To Deleuze, the aim of thought is to understand the true nature of reality, the
one Being that has two sides, the actual and the virtual. Only by properly think-
ing the virtual can we understand how both the actual and the virtual are two
sides of the same thing. Recall that Deleuze and Guattari delineate three ways
of thinking the virtual: science, philosophy and art (WIP 198). Importantly,
these three paths of thought all allow us to think further than the actual which
usually conditions our thoughts and obscures the virtual from us. To Deleuze,
as virtual Being actualizes itself in matter and form it becomes limited and
fixed. Thus, from our point of view, as we are such actual beings in the here
and now, the virtual initially appears as a disordered, infinite chaos, which, as
Deleuze and Guattari say, is difficult to think:
We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more dis-
tressing than a thought that escapes itself [. . .]. We ask only that our ideas
are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the
association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective

rules – resemblance, contiguity, causality – which enable us to put some order
into ideas, preventing our ‘fantasy’ (delirium, madness) from crossing the
universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire.
(WIP 201–202)
Recall that the realism of magical realism reflects the structure of the actual,
and only the actual. Indeed, the ‘laws of nature’, which apparently order the
realist experience, are to, Deleuze, merely a set of such ‘protective rules’ gov-
erning our thought in the realm of the actual, rules that indeed, exclude winged
horses, fire-breathing dragons – or any other magic. However, art can also
allow us to venture beyond these protective rules, and by the process of counter-
actualization to restore a piece of the virtual chaos, precisely by allowing us to
imagine, to think, all sorts of magical events.
We have to remember here the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for the
status of art as being. If everything that is, is in the same way, art is not a
secondary type of being, but yet another creation. The movement of counter-
actualization is never a representation, or image of the virtual, but rather,
thought of the virtual. Art enables us to think the virtual by recreating rather
than representing the infinite, by embodying the infinite in a new and unique
creation, that can stand alone. What art does, say Deleuze and Guattari, is to
preserve itself:
What is preserved – the thing or the work of art – is a bloc [sic] of sensations,
that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. [. . .]. [It] could be said to exist
in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas,
or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. (WIP 164)
Indeed, what is crucial to Deleuze is that the work of art is unique precisely
because of the way it allows us think the virtual, and that this implies, inevitably,
leaving the subject behind and considering a realm that is not personal or even
human.
The absence of the human from art central to Cinema 2, one of Deleuze’s
most comprehensive considerations of the workings of an art form. Here he
posits the condition for the counter-actualization of cinema, in the so-called
crystalline image, as the negation of what he calls the motor-sensory schema
(C2 122–150). The motor-sensory schema is precisely the human subjective
system of rules that protects us from the chaos of the virtual. Our actual, organic
body has to sort the information it gains from the senses pragmatically in order
to function in the world. To illustrate this, Deleuze and Guattari quote Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason:
‘If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, some-
times heavy . . ., my empirical imagination would never find opportunity
Magical Realism and the Signs of Art 75
when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar’1 [. . .] at

the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur – that of
heaviness whenever we hold cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we
look at it – as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs
that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with
the past. (WIP 202)
Through our motor-sensory schema we order the world convergently. We do so

by selecting perceptions that fit the ‘protective rules’ necessary for our being in
the actual here and now. What the realism in magical realism does is precisely
to recreate the selective processes of the motor-sensory schema: by mimicking
the details of a personal, eye-witness account, it creates the ‘reality effect’, or
what in Deleuzian terms could be called the ‘motor-sensory effect’. This is a
poor substitute for what Deleuze would call art, for in contrast to realism, what
‘true’ art can do is to create something independent of any motor-sensory
schema, any person or subject.
In Cinema 2 Deleuze distinguishes between what he calls organic (that is,
linked to the motor-sensory schema of an organism) narration and what he
calls crystalline or crystal narration. Organic narration has the characteristics
that we have previously recognized as those of realism: the real ‘is recognizable
by its continuity [. . .] and by the laws which determine successions, simultanei-
ties and permanences: it is a regime of localizable relations, actual linkages,
legal, causal and logical connections. It is clear that this system includes
the unreal, the recollection, the dream and the imaginary but as a contrast’
(C2 123). In such narration characters react to situations through their motor-
sensory schemata in a ‘realistic’, or what Deleuze calls ‘truthful’ way. However
disordered it may be, the narrative basically follows chronological time. As we
already know, such narration is founded entirely in the actual, and indeed, the
magic appears as a divergent element in such a system. On the other hand, in
crystalline narration ‘the actual is cut off from its motor linkages, or the real
from its legal connections, and the virtual for its part, detaches itself from its
actualizations, starts to be valid for itself’ (C2 123). It is not the case, then, that
the images of the crystalline narration are purely virtual, but rather that they
reveal as distinct the virtual as it subsists alongside the actual. Crystalline images,
the constituent parts of the crystalline narration, are, crucially, both actual and
virtual. In the crystalline narration, actions, reactions and situations, just as in a
disjunctive system, appear unconnected and anomalous. Time is no longer
chronological, but the pure empty form of time of the virtual that we encoun-
tered in the magic of Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The opposi-
tion between organic and crystalline that Deleuze sets up in Cinema 2 can thus
be paralleled to our earlier distinctions between the real and the magic.
In order fully to comprehend Deleuze’s crystalline image we need briefly to
consider his use of Henri Bergson and Bergsonian concepts of time in his own
ontology. Deleuze describes Bergsonian philosophy in such a way that it maps
onto his own ontological thought, and he finds the Bergsonian concepts of
duration and space parallel to his virtual and actual. Bergson’s élan vital
corresponds to the creative Being which ‘at every instant separates into two
movements’: duration and space, virtual and actual. Inevitably, however, as the
élan vital extends into matter it ‘loses contact with the rest of itself’ (B 104), that
is, the virtual is obscured by the actual, leading to an illusory and erroneous
view of Being. Just like Deleuze himself, Deleuze’s Bergson urges us ‘to go
beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience’ (B 27).
This can only be done by understanding the concept of duration. The form of
duration is the ‘pure past’, which we must reach through ‘pure recollection’.
The past is not merely that which has been and gone: ‘We have great difficulty
in understanding a survival of the past in itself because we believe that the
past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus confused Being with
being-present’ (B 55). To Bergson, however, the past exists ‘all-together’ and
‘all-at-once’, like Deleuze’s virtual. Deleuze uses this Bergsonian framework in
Cinema 2 to describe the crystalline image, and the interaction between virtual
and the actual that it embodies. Duration, the pure past or time ‘all-at-once’,
is always coexistent with the present of matter and form, which, as present, is
always passing on. It is this coexistence that is precisely made visible, or rather
‘thinkable’, in the crystalline image: ‘The present is the actual image, and its
contemporaneous past is the virtual image’ (C2 76–77).
How can we properly think this duration? Deleuze tells us that the condition
of the coexistence of the virtual and actual in the crystalline image is indiscern-
ibility. The crystalline image works like all creation, it is the actualization of
the virtual: an effective splitting of Being into virtual and actual. But it is also,
crucially, a counter-actualization: a coming back together of the actual and
virtual, affirming the univocity of Being. This takes place precisely through the
indiscernibility of the two sides of Being: ‘The crystal-image is, then, the point
of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while
what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the
very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself’
(C2 79). The practical effect of this is what differentiates the organic or actual
image from the crystalline one. The rules of the motor-sensory schema are
no longer functional, but are replaced by ‘non-localizable’ relations: ‘motor-
sensory linkages [. . .] give way to a succession of varieties subject to their own
laws of passage’ (C2 5). As we have already seen, the magical signs in magical
realism, at the point of maximum deterritorialization from realism, gain the
freedom of multiple meanings, unchained to a referential or even an associa-
tive series, that is, free from what Deleuze calls ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’
interpretations.
However, Deleuze insists that ‘This is not at all a case of “each has its own
truth”, a variability of content. It is a power of the false which replaces and
supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompos-
sible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts’ (C2 127). It is thus,
for the crystalline image as well as the magical sign, not a matter of a freedom
of interpretation, but a whole new regime of meaning. The image, rather than
being ‘truthful’, becomes fundamentally ‘falsifying’; that is, what Deleuze calls
a simulacrum, not a representation of anything, but a whole new creation in
itself. As all the rules of convergence of the organic narration, or realism, are
negated, ‘we run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility:
we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situa-
tion, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and
there is no longer even a place from which to ask’ (C2 7). Recall that indiscern-
ibility is also what characterizes Deleuzian becoming: a process of deterritorial-
ization which means entering into a zone of imperceptibility with what one is
becoming. Indeed, the crystalline sign is a becoming-indiscernible of the sign:
when the sign has detached itself from the motor-sensory schema, when it has
become fully non-human, it is no longer possible to perceive the sign as true
or false according to the convergent rules of the actual. The implication of
indiscernibility is the revelation of a different ontological order, or a new regime
of signs; a crystalline or magical regime of the signs of simulation, in contrast to
the realist regime of signs of signification.
In the last chapter we encountered the apprenticeship of signs that Deleuze
discovers in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a process of understanding
various kinds of signs, from the most actual – so called worldly signs – to the
most virtual – the signs of art. Only the signs of art are, like crystalline images,
free from the motor-sensory schema, but it is necessary to go through the other
signs of the apprenticeship in order to reach an understanding of these. Recall
that when a divergent element, an object = x, is introduced into a convergent
system, it makes all series, convergent as well as divergent, communicate and
resonate anew through difference itself. The sign of art as such an element
allows us to see all signs as connected but only through difference. We saw how
divergent series created a kind of resemblance or resonance as a ‘statistical
effect’. In the same way the signs of art create a kind of ‘unity’ of the work of art
when, in fact, ‘there is no totality except a statistical one which lacks any pro-
found meaning’ (PS 125–126). Deleuze contrasts this kind of statistical ‘unity’
with the unity obtained by traditional logical thought. Rather than parts being
linked together and forming a whole through patterns, order or laws, parts
become valid on their own, in themselves, precisely because they do not corre-
spond to a whole at all, but are different in themselves.
Deleuze also uses Bergson’s concepts to articulate his theory of the signs of
art. The sign of art is properly ‘time regained’, that is, Bergsonian duration,
or pure time regained; ‘because time, ultimate interpreter, ultimate act of inter-
pretation, has the strange power to affirm simultaneously fragments that do not
constitute a whole in space, any more than they form a whole by succession
within time. Time is precisely the transversal of all possible spaces, including
the space of time’ (PS 129–130). Thus Deleuze can insist that the signs of art
constitute a ‘superior viewpoint’, superior because it is no longer a particular
viewpoint but a ‘thousand various noncommunicating viewpoints’ resonating

through difference only. In fact, this multiple viewpoint is the ‘revelation’ of
Being as One – we see the connection, or properly the ‘oneness’ of disparate
beings without any order, transcendent unity, or totalization. Art provides an
enactment of the virtual in its chaotic reality: ‘The world has become crumbs
and chaos’ (PS 111).
We have suggested that the magic of magical realism has a non-human qual-
ity to it. Here we note that a becoming non-human, a negation of the motor-
sensory schema, is precisely what informs the power of the signs of art. The
non-human becoming of the magical sign of art is a crucial step in the appren-
ticeship of signs, negating the convergent rules of the actual, and allowing
for the indiscernibility of the crystalline image or the signs of art, that is, its
counter-actualization. In magical realism the moment of indiscernibility is the
moment when, as at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the divergence of
the magic makes itself felt in the whole text, when suddenly it is no longer
possible to tell what is real and what is imaginary. It is at this moment that
the ‘revelation’ of the signs of art becomes apparent. The magical sign allow us
to see not only itself but also all realist signs as part of the same creative process
of Being. This creative process of Being is precisely revealed to be the timeless
simultaneity of pure time, or duration. It is duration that allows the real and
the magic to become indiscernible even though they are entirely divergent,
because duration brings together the different without unifying or erasing their
differences. Magical realism then appears as a way of thinking virtual Being –
the virtual magic appearing as the paradoxically different yet indiscernible
double or supplement to the actual real.
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002): Becoming

Non-Human at Sea
Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is a noteworthy work of recent magical realism
both because of its critical and popular success, and because of its differences
from as well as its similarities to its magical realist predecessors. The novel was
almost universally lauded by critics, despite passing rumours about plagiarism
(interestingly, allegedly from a Latin American work described as a novel of
magical realism, the Brazilian Moacyr Scilar’s Max and the Cats). While most
critics liked the novel overall, they felt that its chief strength lay in its main
section, which recounts the story of a boy shipwrecked on a lifeboat with a tiger.
Most reviews criticized the frame narratives for some weakness or other, ulti-
mately perhaps for just not living up to the quality of the middle section.
Life of Pi opens with an outer frame narrative, where the implied author
describes events surrounding his work on the book, followed by an inner frame
narrative dealing with the protagonist Pi’s childhood in Pondicherry, setting up
the circumstances of the unusual shipwreck. Then follows the longest section of
the novel, describing Pi’s tribulations at sea. The novel ends with a coda where
Pi offers an alternative story of his experiences at sea. The initial frame narra-
tives are interesting for two reasons. First, they ostensibly provide the realist
impulse of the novel, and second, they set up what can be seen as a cultural
context – both aspects which can be seen as rather superfluous to the central
story of the novel. It is notable that the narrative strand that initially seems to be
central to the novel, Pi’s attempt to embrace Islam, Hinduism and Christianity
at the same time, turns out to be confined to the frame narrative. In the main
section there are no references to this particular experience of Pi’s apart from
a few mentions of prayers and rituals. In fact, any specific religious or cultural
background becomes redundant in the face of his struggle for survival, there-
fore also making the careful initial set-up of these particulars in the novel seem
redundant. However, before we consider the importance of the situation of the
cultural particulars relative to the placement of magic in the novel, we need to
consider what the magic, as well as the real of the novel, consists of.
The magic of Life of Pi is not the incidental magic of One Hundred Years of
Solitude, nor the continuous magical thread in Midnight’s Children. It appears in
the main section of the novel in its entirety and nowhere else. It consists partly
of the extraordinary survival of a boy at sea for 227 days, but mainly of the not
supernatural, but, to say the least, distinctly implausible presence of a Bengal
tiger (called Richard Parker due to a ‘clerical error’) throughout the story of
Pi’s survival. The tiger is one sustained element of magic that remains present
in an otherwise realist narrative for some 200 pages. It seems to echo magical
realism’s Latin American roots, reminding us both of Borges’s Dream Tigers and
the tiger prowling the large country house in Julio Cortázar’s story ‘Bestiary’.2
However, this sustained magic does not mean that the narrative relinquishes
its realism at any point. On the contrary, the narration throughout the middle
section of the novel, in the face of the presence of the tiger, remains unwaver-
ingly detailed and empirical. Martel’s novel on the whole remains, as Martel
himself notes in an interview, simple and linear, without any ‘stylistic trickery’3
and, as Steve Street points out in his review, Martel ‘takes pains with
verisimilitude’.4 Pi’s experiences on the lifeboat, both in terms of the animals
and of his survival tactics, are described with care. In fact, the inclusion of the
frame narrative does seem to serve one specific purpose as regards the narrative
detail of the main section of the novel: we find out why Pi knows so much about
animal behaviour – he is the son of a zoo keeper. This knowledge is indispens-
able to him on the lifeboat, and also indispensable to providing the narrative
with a pseudo-scientific discourse that works as one of the authenticating devices
of realism. Unsurprisingly, several critics have compared Life of Pi to Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, and Martel’s novel does use some of Defoe’s classic realist
devices: the practical details of the ordeal, the tale told by an eyewitness. Even
as he, like Saleem in Midnight’s Children, professes the fallibility of his memory,
Pi’s eyewitness account creates a ‘reality effect’ by the very particularity of the
details that are recalled: ‘What I remember are events and encounters and
routines, markers that emerged here and there from the ocean of time and
imprinted themselves on my memory. The smell of spent hand-flare shells,
and prayers at dawn, and the killing of the turtles, and the biology of the algae,
for example’.5
It is precisely bodily sensations – Deleuze’s so called motor-sensory schema –
that make up the convergent series of the realism of this part of the novel. We
can note in particular the visual impressions of the endless ocean, the light and
dark, the glaring sun and the cold wet rain; the specific mechanics of survival,
fishing, killing turtles and gathering precious water; and finally the pseudo-
scientific precision of an educated young man, reasoning and rational, observ-
ing the nature that surrounds him inside and outside the boat. While specific
details of history and geography are left out, something we will return to later,
the narration remains consistent with the realism we have previously identified
in magical realism. There may be no houses or towns, but the boat is quickly
divided into very specific territories – the tiger’s and the boy’s. There may be no
historical events to mark the progression of time, but Pi acts in a meticulously
rational way, segmenting his day according to the tasks that need to be per-
formed: we are given a list of activities including ‘inspection of raft and life-
boat’, ‘tending of solar stills’, ‘examining of scabs and sores’, ‘dinner for self
and Richard Parker’ and so on (LP 190). The lifeboat with its territories,
and the ordered activities of Pi are, indeed, Pi’s protection against the chaos
that assails him from both within and without the life-boat. The magic of
the animals and the sea, in contrast, constantly challenge these motor-sensory
schemata and push him to the limits of human life.
True to most definitions of magical realism, the magic in Life of Pi is described
precisely by the same realist narration as Pi’s rational activities. The tiger
starts off as part of a veritable menagerie on the lifeboat. Immediately after the
shipwreck the boat offers salvation to not only Pi and the tiger, but also an
orangutan, a zebra and a hyena. Pi’s narration of the animals is always steeped
in zoological details, and the not unexpected outcome of the strange animal
gathering on the boat is described in the same tone. The hyena gets to the
dying zebra and kills the orangutan in battle when hunger overcomes it – ‘An
adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is
the plain empirical truth.’ (LP 130) – before succumbing to the tiger. The
tiger thus literally absorbs all the other animals, and becomes the one enduring
magical sign. This magical sign persists in the face of an unswerving realist
narration, vividly evoking the fluid power of the tiger:
He completed the turn of his head with a slow turn of his body, moving his
forepaws sideways along the side bench. He dropped to the floor of the boat
with ponderous ease. I could see the top of his head, his back and his long,
curled tail. His ears lay flat against his skull. In three paces he was at the
middle of the boat. Without effort the front half of his body rose in the air and
his forepaws came to rest on the rolled-up edge of the tarpaulin. (LP 152)
Martel here provides us with a typical magical realist matter-of-fact narration

that leaves no room for doubt about the real presence of the tiger on the life-
boat. The tiger is narrated as if it fitted within the convergent system of realism.
Indeed, in some senses the tiger manages to fit into this order, as he does, in
fact, obey the ‘laws of nature’. Yet the tiger also always seems to exceed any
attempt at description. He is, in his fluidity and brightness, always something
more than just the referent of a realist narration, and therefore, at the same
time, something less than a referent. As we saw, such magical signs exhibit a
tendency towards the symbolic, as they appear significant even as the reality of
their supposed referent is slipping away. Indeed, it is tempting to read the tiger
of Life of Pi symbolically or allegorically. Critics and reviewers have suggested
that central part of the novel is an allegory that continues the frame narrative’s
meditation on faith, yet have at the same time been forced to admit that there
is little that bears this reading out.6 Not only are Pi’s own musings on religion
almost entirely abandoned, the tiger also refuses to be reduced to a simple
symbol. Pi admires his natural beauty, but the tiger is not Nature. Pi is tested by
his presence, but he is not Adversity or Temptation or Doubt. He is just a tiger
stuck on a lifeboat. This is why the central part of Life of Pi has to be regarded
as magical realism: even though the text is dominated by a realist narration; the
magic of the tiger is irreducible, unavoidable. We already know that the magic
and realism in magical realism coexist, not through any conciliation but in a
state of constant tension. This tension is precisely the tension between what
Deleuze terms an organic narration and the crystalline signs of magic.
A part of the realist narration of the novel, the magic of the animals has an
unexpected effect on the language of the novel. Greer starts her review of it by
quoting a sentence that to her ‘jumps out’ of the novel: ‘I turned around,
stepped over the zebra and threw myself overboard’ (LP 100).7 Indeed, this is
a sentence that encapsulates the function of the magical signs in the mainly
realist text of Life of Pi. The zebra, as a sign, strains against the realism of the
sentence. On the one hand, it seems to fit the realist narration, while on the
other, it is entirely divergent from it, contradicting realism’s ordered world.
It seems to imply a certain significance, this zebra in a lifeboat, yet meaning
escapes it: it is an object = x. Thus in this sentence, language can be seen to
begin to be put to a ‘minor’ use, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka. Indeed, the
sentence has a similar valence to Kafka’s ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning
from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic
insect’,8 or the famous magical realist sentence-long short story of the Latin
American Boom by Augusto Monterroso, ‘The Dinosaur’: ‘When he woke up,
the dinosaur was still there’.9 Considering what we argued in the beginning of
this chapter, we now see that the moment the magic appears as a crystalline
sign, ‘the actual is cut off from its motor linkages, or the real from its legal con-
nections’; that is, we move away from a human order, and the virtual magic
appears as distinct, ‘valid for itself’ (C2 123). It is at this moment that language
seems to take a leap – not just a leap off the page, but in the Deleuzian sense of
taking flight: ‘Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water,
but Bengal tiger a serious problem’ (LP 238).
However, it is not only the magic of the animals that appears as a crystalline
sign in contrast to the organic narration of the realism in the novel. Francie Lin
suggests that ‘it is testament to Martel’s talent that his narrative never drags
despite the fact that the movement of time in Life of Pi is almost undetectable.
All incidents take place in a kind of vacuum’.10 Certainly, the narrative is lacking
in the usual realist markers of history and geography, time and location. It is as
if the magic of the tiger within the lifeboat has a correlative outside the lifeboat:
the absolute absence of signs that is the sea. In contrast to the convergent series
of the lifeboat realm, the small but segmented world of Pi, the sea presents a
total absence of order. It is a Deleuzian smooth space, a space that is entirely
non-human, devoid of all that the motor-sensory schema needs: ‘I considered
jumping overboard and swimming away, but my body refused to move. I was
hundreds of miles from landfall, if not a thousand miles [. . .]. What would
I eat? What would I drink? How would I keep the sharks away? How would
I keep warm? How would I know which way to go?’ (LP 147). The sea, like the
jungle that surrounded Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is without
markers, without territories or places, only a ‘smooth skin reflecting the light
with a million mirrors’ (LP 159).
Florence Stratton suggests that the tiger is the ‘spark’ of the story and that
its ‘primary signification is the incantatory or transcendent power of art: the
imaginative truths or realities that great art encompasses. That art has redemp-
tive or transformative power is also suggested’.11 Though she is actually scepti-
cal about the power of Life of Pi as a work of art, Stratton is on the right track
here, while nevertheless making the error of trying to give the tiger a symbolic
significance. In fact, the tiger, as a magical sign, does not signify the power of
art but embodies it. The power of art, to Deleuze, is not a transcendent but an
entirely immanent one. Art does indeed have ‘redemptive and transformative’
powers, and these are enacted by the magical sign. The tiger embodies the
spark of the story, insofar as it embodies the virtual that gives sense to all
language. Interestingly, and we will come back to this, Stratton concludes that
the central section of Life of Pi is not satisfactory, as it is ‘hollow at the core’ –
without literal referent.12 Indeed it is, with its null signifying value, and this is
precisely because it embodies the power of art, rather than referring to it.
What effect does the power of art of the magical sign have in Life of Pi? One
answer lies in the final section of the novel, in which an alternative story of
Pi’s shipwreck is offered. Crucially, this version comes after the magical middle
part of the novel, and thus after we have already gone through a kind of appren-
ticeship of signs in which we have encountered the magical signs of art. Thus
when we are faced with the second story, we see it in an entirely different
way than we would have done, had it been presented to us at the beginning.
In the second story, in place of the menagerie of animals, Pi finds himself on
the lifeboat with his mother, a wounded Taiwanese sailor and a murderous
French cook. The cook kills both the Taiwanese sailor and Pi’s mother before
in turn being killed by Pi, who is then forced to eat his flesh for survival.
Although some reviewers have labelled this the ‘true’ story, most seem to imply
that it is a story Pi makes up in his frustration with the incredulity of the inspec-
tors from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who refuse to believe his initial
account. The crux of the novel is that Pi manages to get these representatives
of reason to admit that his first story is the ‘better one’, upon which admission
Pi states ‘And so it goes with God’ (LP 317). Critics and reviewers rightly agree
that this is an entirely unsatisfactory line. While Life of Pi at its outset promises
to be ‘a story that will make you believe in God’ (LP xii), most readers note that
apart from the rather weak episode of Pi’s three faiths, the novel has little to say
about faith or the existence of God. However, a great many critics and reviewers
admit that while the novel does not make a good case for belief in God, it does
suggest a faith in fiction or the power of writing.13 In contrast to the weaknesses
found in the frame narratives of the novel, critics have praised the inherent
ambiguity of the central story. Francis King asks: ‘Is this a narrative [. . .] of what
really happened or of what happened in the mind of a boy maddened by fever,
terror and grief?’ However, he concludes that ‘it is a strength, not a weakness,
of this extraordinary novel that when boy and tiger at last reach the seaboard of
Mexico, that question still remains unanswered’.14 In fact, the question remains
unanswered even though we are given the alternative of a more believable story,
and it does so because of the very power of writing or of art. What the power
of writing does is not, as many readers have suggested, make them choose, with
the Japanese officials, Pi’s initial story as ‘the better story’. That choice is all
their own. Rather, the power of the signs of art is precisely what leaves the
question unanswered.
This undecidability is exactly at the heart of the magical crystalline signs of
the tiger, the sea and sky. The impossibility of survival at sea for 277 days and the
extreme impossibility of survival in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger are, in fact, the
non-human becomings of the text. Pi notices ‘that I ate like an animal, that
noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard
Parker ate’ (LP 225). Pi becomes-tiger in the central narrative to such an extent
that it is implied (and noted by several reviewers) that in his second story, if the
Frenchman is the hyena, the Taiwanese sailor the zebra, and Pi’s mother
the orangutan, Pi must be the tiger himself. Pi’s zones of indiscernibility
with the tiger, his becoming-tiger, thus introduce zones of indiscernibility
between his two stories. The becoming-non-human of the magical sign is there-
fore part of its power as a sign of art. It is also what inevitably makes the magical
sign divergent from the essentially human order of the realism in the text.
June Dwyer compares the relationship between human and animal in tradi-
tional shipwreck narratives, such as Robinson Crusoe, and Martel’s novel. She
notes that in the shipwreck narrative there is a ‘privileging [of] the know-how
and the power of human over non-human animals’ reflecting the utilitarian
view of animals during the Enlightenment period.15 Man is seen as master of
beasts: an essentially superior, because rational, being. Recalling the link

between reason and realism discussed in the last chapter, we can connect this
view of the superiority of rational man to the realism of Life of Pi, borrowed
from such shipwreck narratives. Dwyer notes that in Robinson Crusoe, animals
are seen not as survivors but as part of the useful items Crusoe salvages. In
Life of Pi, by contrast, the animal has a central role. Pi, of course, does try
to tame Richard Parker, which can be seen, as James Mensch suggests, as a
‘humanization’ of the tiger.16 It is certainly an attempt to impose a human order
on the animal. We noted before how the very undertaking of this taming and
its description is central to the realism of the main episode of Life of Pi. That is,
again realism is linked to the imposition of order, explicitly now in the attempt
of the human to impose order on the animal.
While Crusoe keeps the animals at a distance, Pi’s affinity with the tiger grows:
‘but it is not that Richard Parker is becoming more domesticated [. . .] the
reverse is true: Pi is becoming more like a wild animal’.17 Not only does Pi
eat like an animal, his daily rhythms become more animal, revolving around
sleeping, hunting, eating and grooming. In the very struggle for survival, or
perhaps in the proximity to non-survival, Pi and the tiger become the same:
‘We were two emaciated animals, parched and starving’ (LP 239). Pi’s becom-
ing-tiger is thus a movement away from the human subject effectuated by the
presence of the magical sign of the tiger. However, it is also enabled, or rather,
enforced, by the other non-human presence in the novel – the sea. Both Dwyer
and Mensch read the shipwreck situation as a deliberate device for taking
the human out of its environment, society, with Mensch drawing a parallel to
the zoo animals. Just as the animals on the lifeboat revert to their wild ways
and eat each other outside of their cages, Pi in the absence of the structure of
society turns to what he himself sees as savagery – killing and eating meat. Even
though Pi manages to keep a hold on some order in the life-boat, these experi-
ences of killing often shade into the magical, as in the passage, frequently
quoted by reviewers, where he catches a dorado:
I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head
with the hammerhead [. . .]. The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it
died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green,
red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it
struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death. (LP 185)
Mensch reads both the animal and the divine in Life of Pi as the other of the
human. To Mensch the human is defined by its alterity, but also by the inevita-
ble inclusion of this alterity: humanity is defined by the boundaries it draws and
the ways it is forced to trespass them.18 This may be so, in which case trespassing
is what is happening in the central story of Life of Pi. As we have seen, Pi is
becoming-animal, and his encounter with the smooth sea has been read, by
Mensch as well as others, as an encounter with the numinous. Pi does see the
immensity of the sea and sky as divine. He calls the thunderbolt a ‘miracle’ and
‘an outbreak of divinity’, praising Allah. In moments of desolation he tries to

seek comfort in the divinity of that which is around him: ‘I would point to the
lifeboat and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S ARK!” I would spread my hands wide
and say aloud, “THESE ARE GOD’S WIDE ACRES!” I would point at the sky
and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S EAR” ’ (LP 209).
This is, however, not a case of a meeting with the divine, but of Pi interpreting
these events and things as divine. Mensch has a point, insofar as these things, as
we have seen, are distinctly non-human, but while they are part of Pi’s non-
human becoming, there is never a sign of a God as such. Pi is ultimately stuck
for words in the face of the lightning: ‘ “This is . . . this is . . .” I could not find
what it was, this thing so vast and fantastic’ (LP 233). He also comes to the
conclusion that ‘God’s ark was a jail. God’s wide acres were slowly killing me.
God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening’ (LP 209). God is conspicuously absent in
the main part of the novel, in contrast to his apparent presence in the frame
narrative. Pi does, however, continue to pray and perform religious rituals in
his bid to keep an ordered existence on the lifeboat. These rituals are, in fact,
revealed for what they really are by the presence of the magical signs and Pi’s
becoming non-human: merely ways of ordering existence. It is therefore also in
this sense that the magical signs of art of Life of Pi make us see the signs of real-
ism differently: the religious specifics, the ‘presence of God’ of the frame nar-
rative are revealed as part of the ordered regime of realism and of the State.
Rather than offering Pi an experience of the divine, his experimentation with
different faiths offers him the conception of God as an other to the human,
setting up a binary hierarchy of identity. In contrast to Pi’s becoming impercep-
tible with the non-human at sea, in the frame narrative the non-human, God, is
offered as strict alterity to Pi’s human identity, and as Mensch points out, so are
the zoo-animals. Here the hierarchical division of animal-man-God is strictly
affirmed. However, interestingly, Dwyer interprets Pi’s post-shipwreck studies of
theology and zoology, mirroring his childhood interests, as a wish to under-
stand the human and the non-human, respectively. Indeed, the religious theme
of the frame narrative of Life of Pi has more to do with the human than the
divine. Not only is religion shown to be culturally determined, it is also shown
as precisely an attempt to specify, to order, the idea of the divine in human
culture. Rather than persuade us that all religions love the same God, an argu-
ment between three religious leaders demonstrates how religion is involved in
ordering – and thus dividing or segmenting – society: the pandit sees both
Christianity and Islam as foreign, the former as pandering to colonials and the
latter as violent and uncivilized. The imam sees Christians as pigs and cannibals
and Hindus as slave-drivers of the caste system. The priest, finally, considers
Hindus idolaters and Muslims polygamists (LP 67–68). All these negative accu-
sations have very little to do with theology and everything to do with different
cultural practices.
We can see that it is the realism of the novel that expresses its cultural con-
tent, and which allows Pi to explore his identity – even when plural or mixed.
Realism is the regime of signs that is able to represent the specific order, the
position, and the identity that any human culture implies, that is, the order
necessary for the human motor-sensory schema to function practically in the
actual ‘everyday’ world. Magic, of course, belongs to an entirely different regime
of signs. What becomes apparent in Life of Pi is that becoming-non-human, the
negation of the motor-sensory schema, is crucial to the magical sign and its
divergence from the ‘protective rules’ of the real. The clear separation between
the central narrative that contains the magic of the novel, and the frame narra-
tive that contains the order of human culture, make this fact more apparent.
In the core story, the magic literally and poignantly forces Pi towards the limits
of his humanity. It is precisely in their utter otherness to the human that the
magical signs of the novel work as signs of art, standing on their own, apart
from the actual world. However, the signs of art also reveal the structure of the
actual world, for after we have become acquainted with the magic of the central
narrative we see how the order of the real, the actual, permeates all aspects of
human experience, even the experience of the divine. In addition, however, we
also see that it is possible to think outside this order, through the non-human
becomings embodied in art.
If becoming non-human is central to the magic of Life of Pi, it also suggests
that imperceptibility is at the heart of becoming, as, at the end of the novel, the
magic of the central narrative opens up zones of imperceptibility between Pi’s
alternative stories of his adventures at sea. We saw in the beginning of this
chapter how the crystalline sign, because it is free from the human motor-
sensory schema, allows the virtual to be ‘valid for itself’ to the extent that it
becomes imperceptible from the actual. Becoming non-human in magical real-
ism thus implies a becoming-imperceptible not only between the human and
non-human, but between the real and the magic, the true and the false.
André Brink’s Devil’s Valley (1998): What is Real

and What is Magic?
South African writer André Brink is perhaps best known for his dissidence
during the apartheid regime, made poignant because of his Afrikaner heritage.
His best known novels, such as Looking on Darkness (1974), Rumours of Rain
(1978) and A Dry White Season (1979) were all expressions of Brink’s belief that
the writer has the power and indeed the responsibility to make a difference in
an oppressive and unequal society. In Brink’s own words, during the apartheid
regime ‘whole territories of historical consciousness [were] silenced by the
power establishment and invaded by the dominant discourse’,19 and it was
the restoration of these territories that constituted the most pressing task for
the dissident writer, on whom, by political necessity, the role of reporter and
historian was imposed. However, with the end of apartheid in 1994 South
African writers were compelled to reconsider their position, as well as their
way of writing. During the apartheid years realism was the preferred mode of
writing for the dissident writer, Brink notes, since realism made sufferings
apparent to those not directly affected and ‘stimulated a sense of solidarity’.
However, with socio-political change in South Africa came a new freedom for
writers: new possibilities for ‘imaginative engagement’.20 Thus in the late ‘90s
Brink turned to the fantastic in his novels, notably in Imaginings of Sand (1996)
and Devil’s Valley. Indeed, he sees literature taking on new regenerative powers
after 1994, in order
not simply to escape from the inhibitions of apartheid but to construct and
deconstruct new possibilities; to activate the imagination in its exploration of
those silences previously inaccessible; to play with the future on that needle-
point where it meets past and present; and to be willing to risk everything in
the leaping flame of the word as it turns into world.21
These words have a Deleuzian ring to them, suggesting that literature is not
simply a way to report the injustices of the world, but a way of thinking, and thus
creating, a new world.
This does not mean, however, that Brink decided to leave behind all the
themes of his anti-apartheid literature. In fact, Devil’s Valley is very much con-
cerned with the issues Brink lists as ‘silent territories’ under apartheid: the
settlement of South Africa before the whites, the enslavement of the peoples
of the interior, the use of the Bible as a justification for oppression, the extent
of miscegenation in Afrikaner society, the involvement of coloured in the
Great Trek, the marginalization of women, the exploitation of the environ-
ment, and Afrikaner dissidence;22 that is, the issues that lie at the core of
Afrikaner national identity. Devil’s Valley, like some of the novels considered in
the last chapter, is about history and national identity, and in particular deals
with the attempts of a settler colony to create an identity in a strange new land.
Of course, South Africa is a special case in many ways, since, as Elleke Boehmer
points out, the apartheid regime outlawed the cultural mixing and cross-
fertilization informing so much postcolonial literature. Boehmer wonders if
perhaps the new literature of ‘a society which has laboured under a unique situ-
ation of internal colonization in a postcolonial world will [. . .] bypass the teem-
ing dreamscapes that characterize the postcolonial writings of an Amitav Ghosh
or a Ben Okri and create something quite its own’.23 Actually, as an example of
the regeneration of literature in post-apartheid South Africa, Devil’s Valley does
display some strong similarities with the novels of these two postcolonial authors
and with other magical realist texts. We will turn to these two authors in the
next chapter, but here we will look at how Brink’s use of magical realism allows
him to ‘imagine the real’.24 This act of the imagination will prove crucial to read-
ings of magical realism in a postcolonial political context. What is interesting
here is that at a time when the ‘truth’ of the past was pursued in the name of
reconciliation in South Africa, Brink uses a genre where the specifics of a place
and time represented by realism are pitted against an ahistorical magic. As we
saw in Life of Pi, the magical sign, as a non-human becoming, is a movement

towards the imperceptibility of the real and magic as well as of ‘true’ and
‘invented’ pasts.
Devil’s Valley, as Mélanie Joseph-Vilain says, can ‘be read as a playful transposi-
tion of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the South African context’.25 Devil’s Valley
shares the themes of migration, settlement and isolation, family and incest,
natural disaster and war with García Márquez’s novel. What is important here,
however, is the mention of context, for Brink’s novel is distinctly rooted in
South African history and geography, just as García Márquez’s novel is in
Colombian. The central family in Brink’s novel are the Lermiets, who broke
away from the Great Trek 150 years ago and settled a remote and isolated valley
in the Swartberg range of the Karoo region, where they have remained with
minimal contact with the outside world. In contrast to García Márquez’s novel,
Devil’s Valley is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an ageing, disil-
lusioned crime reporter named Flip Lochner, who sets out to find out the truth
about the settlement and its history. Through Lochner’s narration, as Lorna
Sage notes in her review of the novel, Devil’s Valley ‘stages a ritual resurrection
and reburial of the Afrikaner past’.26 On the one hand, the community embod-
ies the archetypal Afrikaner myth of origins: an independent-minded and resil-
ient people that despite adversity and hostility settle part of the virgin land of
Africa and make it their own, building a righteous community heeding the
word of the Bible. On the other hand, Lochner’s experience of the community,
even before he arrives in the valley, indicates the instability of this myth.
A drunken encounter with a young member of the Lermiet family who has
unusually ventured into the outside world leaves Lochner with ‘the fucking
shards and tatters and loose ends of stories. A smous [pedlar] returning with
exotic wares from the farthest corners of the world. A girl with four tits. A child
with goat’s feet. A large naked woman on a bed crawling with cats. And some-
thing about a magician who could track you down to the very end of the earth’.27
Thus from the very beginning the novel pits an ordered, in Deleuze’s terms
organic, narrative of settlement and community against an array of disordered
stories, or, the crystalline signs of magic.
Devil’s Valley could be seen simply to perform the customary transaction of
‘historiographic metafiction’: by exposing the processes of history-making it
reveals that all history is based on stories, which are all equally fictional. Flip
Lochner wants to write the ‘true’ history of the Devil’s Valley settlement, to
capture and define it, but as he questions the inhabitants of the valley he is
given a multitude of contradictory tales, and realizes that there are no written
records to verify any of them. Indeed, as Ute Kauer notes, the novel follows
Flip’s growing understanding that there simply is no recoverable ‘true’ history,
and that even if he collects all the stories of the valley, they will not cohere into
an ordered whole.28 Kauer suggests that Flip ultimately learns to see this not as
a loss but as a utopian possibility, a way to recover the lost voices of history.
Joseph-Vilain, however, views these alternative stories as destructive; they
question not only history, but also notions of family and nation – ‘imagined
communities’ that rely on stable myths for cohesion and sanction, or in our
terms, the State. She notes how ‘the Lermiets are Lermiets only if they lend
credence to the family’s myths: dissenters leave or die’.29 Indeed, once the
silenced voices of the community, in particular the women, speak up, the family
and the whole community starts to disintegrate.
It is true that the many alternative and contradictory stories undo the idea of
a single, truthful version of history, as well as expose such a history’s centrality
to the concepts of family and community. However, the magical events of the
novel are different to any version of history, and take us in a different direction
to that indicated by the idea of ‘historiographic metafiction’. Brink, in Mapmak-
ers, states that ‘whereas society tends to enslave language the writer strives to
liberate it’,30 and in the inventive freedom he found after the apartheid years,
he was able to fully explore this thesis. Each of the multiple stories of the Devil’s
valley is an attempt to order and define experience. However, as they multiply,
the success of this attempt becomes less rather than more possible, as they are
contradictory and confusing. In contrast, the magical events escape order and
definition completely. As such they belong to a different regime of meaning,
one where origins and truthfulness are not important, where the divergent and
different can coalesce into a whole without unity.
Whatever stories the inhabitants of the Devil’s Valley tell, they all conform to
a particular order – the linear, convergent order of society, that which is
expressed in the realism of the novel. As an eyewitness account, Lochner’s
narration provides us with the requisite details for the ‘reality effect’, giving us
some background history on the Great Trek, describing how he came to find
himself in the remote valley, and furnishing us with vivid visual descriptions of
the place. Like Macondo, Devil’s Valley is a strictly segmented place: ‘Probably
thirty or forty houses altogether, arranged in two uneven rows, all of them
whitewashed and built to the same basic plan [. . .]. Every backyard had its shed
and its haystack and a longdrop, while most sported an old-fashioned stone
well’ (DV 35). At the centre of the settlement lie the church and the cemetery,
while its boundaries are the bluegum forest and the cliffs surrounding it. The
convergent series of the genealogy of the inhabitants – ‘Lukas Seer begat Lukas
Nimrod, and Lukas Nimrod begat Lukas Up-Above, and Lukas Up-Above
begat Strong Lukas, and Strong Lukas begat Lukas Bigballs, and Lukas Bigballs
begat Lukas Devil, and Lukas Devil begat Lukas Death, and Lukas Death begat
Little-Lukas’ (DV 105) – is not only a force for community cohesion through
its air of Biblical inevitability, but also ensures that each member has his own
rightful place. Occupations are passed from father to son or mother to daugh-
ter, and nicknames seal the fate of the inhabitants: there is Brother Holy the
preacher, Smith-the-Smith, Jurg Water the diviner, Poppie Fullmoon the mid-
wife, Gert Brush the painter and so on.
The novel’s realist order could be read, Joseph-Vilain suggests, as an allegory
of apartheid – a society strictly stratified and determined by racial lineage.31
This society is challenged by the alternative stories that Lochner unearths

from the inhabitants. The stories shatter the myth of racial purity, as well as the
myth of the Devil’s Valley as an unsettled promised land waiting for the chosen
people, and the myth of the people’s strength, courage and righteousness, that
is, the myths that also underpinned apartheid. Lukas the Seer, the founder
of the colony, is said to have been led by God to the valley, defeated the Devil
himself, and established a pure line of descendants. However, the patchwork of
stories that Lochner hears indicate that in fact, when Lukas arrived, the valley
was settled by a native people who he used and subsequently abused, that he
was forced to stay due to losing a leg, that his first wife was responsible for most
of the hard work in the early years and that he took a second black wife. These
stories surface as the direct contradictions of the villagers’ grand myth, and it is
no wonder therefore that the community begins to fall apart.
However, as we follow Lochner’s attempts to trace these stories to their
origin, we find not an alternative past, but a living magic. Faced with an imme-
diate, present magic, the contradictory past suddenly appears less crucial to the
community. The dead, including Lukas the Seer himself, wander the settlement
and interact with the living population. To Kauer these ‘ghosts’ are simply the
reincarnations of the silenced and forgotten alternative stories: ‘what the ghosts
and mythological figures in Brink’s novels demand is to be recognized, to be
part of cultural memory’.32 Joseph-Vilain, however, discovers that the novel does
more than lay bare the processes of historiography, noting that in his search for
truth, Flip ‘witnesses [the] reinvention of the real’.33 In fact, because the ghosts
are magic, they are divergent from the alternative stories or ‘cultural memory’
of the community. Rather than representations of the past, these magical signs
are the creation of something new in the present. As such, just as the magic of
Life of Pi, they certainly do reveal all stories, present or past, to be ‘inventions
of the real’. However, they are less crucial as an exposition of the fiction at
the heart of all historiography, than as a revelation of the conditions of the pres-
ent. Flip himself exclaims, ‘Every word spoken in this place is a bloody new
invention’ (DV 45). In the face of magic, it is no longer just impossible to tell
true and imaginary pasts apart; it is impossible to know what is real and what is
magic in the present.
The dead of the Devil’s valley are indistinguishable from the living from the
very opening of the novel when Lochner meets old Lukas the Seer, who is
still tending goats on the mountainside even though, as Lochner later finds
out, he has been dead for many years. However, it is not only the dead that are
indiscernible from the living in Devil’s Valley; Joseph-Vilain notes that in the
village ‘the confusion between real and imaginary is total’.34 As Lochner enters
the valley he sees a naked woman with four breasts bathing in a rock-pool, a
vision that he reports as vividly real:
A long black mane that ripples in shiny wet waves all the way to the bulge of
her buttocks. In the interests of truth I must specify that her body is a bit on
the thin side to my taste. If this had been my fantasy I’d have filled her out a
bit [. . .]. But this is the point: it’s not a dream, she is real. (DV 26)
The next moment the woman, as well as the rock-pool, are gone, yet Lochner
insists, as a realist eye-witness narrator: ‘She was there. I can recall every damn
detail’ (DV 27). It later turns out that Emma, a young woman keen to escape
the colony who Lochner befriends and falls for, had dreamt of bathing in the
rock-pool that same afternoon. Joseph-Vilain sees this as a blurring of the bor-
ders between reality and dream, which to her ‘reflects the unstable nature of
history in Devil’s Valley’.35 In fact, it is the present of the narrative that is unstable.
Joseph-Vilain also refers to Flip’s nightly sexual encounters with mysterious,
animal-like women, which would appear to be dreams, if it were not for the
tangible objects they leave behind; to the porcupine-hunt that he participates
in which is then denied by the other men of the village; and the encounter
with the adolescent temptress Henta Peach in the bluegum woods which
Henta seems to have forgotten the next day. Continually in the novel, both
Lochner and the reader are unable to tell what is real and what is not, in the
here and now.
This blurring of the boundaries of the real and the imagined is the moment
of the emergence of magic as a Deleuzian crystalline sign – a sign which means
that ‘we no longer know what is imaginary or real’ (C2 7). The implications
of the crystalline sign go beyond the simple relativization of history, according
to Deleuze, because such indiscernibility does not simply imply the subjectivity
of truth. Rather, the crystalline sign ‘poses the simultaneity of incompossible
presents’ (C2 127). The magical elements of Brink’s novel are not simply
part of the alternative stories or subjective ‘truths’ of the inhabitants, in fact,
the two are radically different. The inhabitant’s stories pose variants of the past
and appear contradictory, while the magical events are sites where such contra-
dictions are no longer an issue. The magic does not resolve these contradic-
tions, but rather allows us precisely to gain the ‘superior viewpoint’ of art, which
is also a ‘thousand various noncommunicating viewpoints’ (PS 166).
The established myth of the community recounts how Strong-Lukas single-
handedly repelled government agents sent to the valley to tax the community.
Lochner then hears an alternative story from Dalena, the wife of Lukas Death,
that Strong-Lukas’s daughter, Mooi-Janna, sacrificed herself by seducing the
government agents, and thus allowed her father and his men to overcome them
by surprise. Her father, to save his own reputation and the family’s honour, then
killed her. Kauer suggest that this is the recovery of the silent women’s voice:
Dalena telling Mooi-Janna’s lost story.36 This may well be so, but the magic in
the episode is a different matter altogether. The magic crystalline sign lies not
in the alternative story as such, but in the strange fact of the girl’s four breasts.
These breasts are what makes her irresistible to the government soldiers, and
allows her to take her tragic action. They are also an image that haunt Lochner
throughout his stay in the valley, after he sees the woman at the rock-pool. The
woman both is Emma dreaming herself at the pool, and isn’t Emma, who does
not, we learn at the end of the novel, have four breasts. The woman at the pool,
therefore, at the same time, both is and isn’t Mooi-Janna’s ghost. We can now
recast the multiplication of possible meanings that we previously noted as an
effect of the magic of magical realism, as the opening up of zones of impercep-
tibility between these alternative meanings.
It is, paradoxically, the very difference of the magical sign from the order of
realism that makes it imperceptible from the real. The four breasts initially
appear as a meaningful sign to Lochner, a vision of the mystery he wants to
solve. They may also be interpreted as the sign of the hidden miscegenation
and incest of the community, or the secret sign of the female side of the story.
What these magic breasts really do – rather than mean – is, like the trickle of
blood in One Hundred Years of Solitude, to traverse the series of the novel as an
object = x. It is this movement, diverging from the convergent series of realism
yet traversing these series at the same time, that makes the magical sign of the
four breasts appear both real and unreal at the same time. Crucially, magical
signs are not merely stories we don’t know if we believe, but like the ghosts, very
much there in the present. The voices in Ben Owl’s head that everyone can
hear; the fact that there are no birds in Devil’s Valley since Lukas Up-Above
tethered them all to a basket and flew away; Hans Magic’s spells that shrivel a
man’s foot and give another a perpetual itch; the enormous whale’s skeleton in
the bush – these are some of the other magical signs of the novel. It is impossi-
ble to say if they are true or imaginary, yet they are unquestionably present.
In fact, we can now also see how imperceptibility as a feature of the magical
sign is radically different to the idea of magic as cultural pluralism, recalling
Life of Pi. The alternative stories in The Devil’s Valley, Kauer suggests, allow the
construction of ‘hybrid identities’ in the sense of culturally diverse identities.
The suppressed stories of Lukas the Seer’s wives, the strong Mina who saved his
life, and black Bilha; the story of Mooi-Janna; the story of Katarina Sweetmeat
who took a black servant as a lover; and of Emma’s mother who was stoned for
carrying an outsider’s child – these stories do open up the pure genealogy and
patriarchal myth of the community to differences of race and gender. However,
this kind of difference is, as we saw early on in this book, still predicated on
categories of identity, a difference-between. What the magical events of Devil’s
Valley uniquely do, as objects = x, is to introduce difference-in-itself into the
realist system of difference-between, creating what Deleuze calls resonance or
‘statistical unity’. At the same time, then, as the real and magic are divergent,
the crystalline signs of the magical events make the distinction between real
and magic disappear. That is, these signs collapse the difference between the
very categories that are the foundation of difference predicated on identity.
There is by definition no difference-between in zones of indiscernibility. As in
Life of Pi, the magic of Devil’s Valley stands in sharp contrast to its considerations
of culture and identity, because the indiscernibility of the magical sign is linked
to its becoming non-human. As mentioned, Lochner on several occasions has
vivid ‘dreams’ of women coming into his room at night and sexually attacking
him, and then slipping away before he can establish their identity. Yet in the
mornings he always finds some concrete object left behind by these women.
These events do not just erase the difference between dream and reality. The
women’s arrivals are heralded by owls and baboons, and they are themselves
animal-like in more ways than one: one has webbed feet, another a hare-lip,
and a third is covered entirely by fur, and they all make love with an animal
ferocity. Even the love-making acts themselves are moments when the catego-
ries of distinct bodies, of self and world, seem to dissolve: ‘And she was bloody
well everywhere, against me, on me, below me, beside me, all over me’ (DV 83).
Lochner’s nights are zones of indiscernibility between reality, dream, woman,
man and animal. Yet these ‘elements’ (for we can no longer properly call them
categories), remain distinct, different in themselves.
The crystalline sign is important to Deleuze as a sign of art because in its
simultaneous distinctness and indiscernibility it reveals the creative force of
Being: ‘We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronolog-
ical time [. . .]. This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world’
(C2 79). The crystalline sign thus makes the ‘powerful Life’ of the virtual chaos
thinkable in the actual. André Brink himself states that ‘The writer is not
concerned only with “reproducing” the real. What he does is to perceive, below
the lines of the map he draws, the contours of another world, somehow a more
“essential” world’.37 As Deleuze posits in Proust, once these privileged signs
of art have been understood, a superior viewpoint becomes accessible to the
whole work of art. We saw in Life of Pi that the magical signs of the central nar-
rative of the novel made the truth or falsehood of Pi’s alternative stories impos-
sible to ascertain. Indeed, because of the viewpoint revealed by the magical
signs the alternative stories of Devil’s Valley also cease to be merely a collection
of contradictory facts, true or false. The stories become valid simultaneously
even though they are ‘incompossible’. The novel thus attains a kind of ‘unity’
in which ‘there is no totality except a statistical one which lacks any profound
meaning’ (PS 125–126). This unity has no patterns, there is no new ‘hybrid’
culture, implying reconciliation, here, rather, the opposing stories all become
valid on their own: ‘All I have, I the historian, I the crime reporter, in search of
facts, facts, facts, is an impossible tangle of contradictory stories. And yet she
said, It doesn’t mean that nothing happened’ (DV 352–353).
What the indiscernibility of the magic in Devil’s Valley shows us, in contrast to
the contradictory but realist stories of the past, is that the key to magical realism
lies precisely in the fact that things did happen, even though they are contradic-
tory. Magical events, by being included in the realist narrative, are both real
(there really is a tiger on the life boat in Life of Pi, and Lochner really did see
the woman with four breasts at the rock pool in Devil’s Valley) and divergent
from the real (the unbelievable tiger, the magical woman) at the same time.
While realism only allows the inclusion of different representations of the
past as contradictory, the magic allows for the inclusion of the divergent
present – ‘present’ both in the sense of presence, and in the sense of the
present time. The unique characteristic of magical realism is thus a tension not
only between the real and the magic, but the paradoxical tension between
the distinct divergence of the magic and its simultaneous indiscernibility from
the real.
The magic of the nightly visitations or of the dead in the valley cannot
be reduced to dream or memory. Old Lukas the Seer is the nexus of the contra-
dictory stories of the community, but he cannot be viewed simply as memory, or
as an alternative story among other stories. He is not a mental image, but, in
Bergsonian terms, a ‘pure recollection’. He is, indeed, as ghosts tend to be,
non-chronological and non-organic. He is a piece not of the past but of the
virtual pure past – a magic ‘moment’ when time, including all alternative
stories of the past, exists in simultaneity. At the beginning of Devil’s Valley Flip
Lochner is descending down the steep mountain-sides to the valley to begin his
investigation. The very first words of the novel are uttered by the ghost of Old
Lukas the Seer: ‘I been sitting here, waiting for you’ (DV 3). The novel closes
with the very same words, as Lochner, on his way out from the Devil’s Valley,
encounters Lukas once again: ‘I been sitting here, waiting for you’ (DV 354).
The Lermiet is both living and dead, as well as both present and past. Suddenly,
he makes the whole narrative of the novel, apparently so linear, timeless. This is
the same magical timelessness that we first encountered in One Hundred Years of
Solitude, where the old gypsy Melquíades, repeatedly returned from the dead
and a timeless ghost himself, performed a similar transaction with his mise-
en-abyme prophecy of Macondo’s rise and fall. We can now identify this as the
timeless or pure time of the virtual, or duration. Duration is crucial to magical
realism, since it is duration that drives indiscernibility, allowing for the simulta-
neity of the real and the magic, the true past and the imagined present – and,
as we shall see, the future.
Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989):

Transcending the Flesh through Time
Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry has not been approached as magical real-
ism by most of its critics, yet it is mentioned in many overviews of magical
realism. Seen by many, like Suzana González, as a ‘feminist fantasy’,38 the novel
has, unsurprisingly but rather monotonously, been mainly read in terms of
gender and sexuality.39 However, many of the readings do have much in com-
mon with approaches to other magical realist works, considering precisely
the novel’s treatment of history, identity, and Winterson’s use of the fantastic.
A reviewer of Sexing the Cherry concluded that Winterson ‘possesses the ability to
combine the biting satire of Swift with the ethereal magic of García Márquez,
the ability to reinvent old myths even as she creates new ones of her own’.40
At first glance Sexing the Cherry appears to consist of clearly demarcated

narrative strands, one historical and the other magical. However, Winterson’s
novel defies such simple categorisations, not only in these narrative strands but
throughout. The first two narrative voices belong to Dog Woman and her
foundling son, Jordan. Dog Woman recounts the story of finding Jordan and
other adventures that take place in London between the years 1630 and 1666.
Her narrative is firmly anchored in the historical events of the day: the last years
of King Charles I’s reign, the Civil War, the Puritan Commonwealth, including
the King’s trial and execution in 1649, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660,
the plague in 1665 and finally the Great Fire of London in 1666. In contrast, the
narrative of Jordan, who joins historical figure John Tradescant the Younger on
voyages of exploration, recounts not the real geographical places he visits, but
magical journeys across space and time: ‘These are journeys I wish to record.
Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in
some other place or time’.41
Making her living by keeping fighting dogs, Dog Woman lives on the margins
of society, next to the dirty river Thames. She is poor, filthy and fat, clothed in
rags and sleeps in a ramshackle hut, but she is also independent, shrewd and
strong. In contrast, her son Jordan is slender and delicate, dreaming of voyages
to faraway lands. It has been noted how the character of Dog Woman anchors
the historical narration in the material and visceral, while Jordan’s stories are
ephemeral flights of fancy. In addition, the female Dog Woman displays what
were supposed to be the traditionally masculine characteristics of strength,
practicality and logic, while male Jordan is femininely sensitive, intuitive and
imaginative.42 This inversion of gender roles is the basis of many discussions
of the interrogation of gender in the novel, which we will return to. However,
as Susan Onega points out, the division between the historical and fantastical
narratives is not without contradictions. Dog Woman may live in a very real
historical world, but she is, in fact, a magical character – her proportions and
strength are supernatural. She is heavier than an elephant, can hold Jordan in
the palm of her hand and a dozen oranges in her mouth. She catches bullets
in her cleavage and can kill a grown man with one hand. While Dog Woman’s
historical narrative is interspersed with stories of these fantastic feats, Jordan’s
fantastical journeys are told in a very matter-of-fact way by a young man who
appears ‘perfectly normal’.43 The novel’s magical realism is thus situated in
both these narrative strands – both are anchored in realism but include magical
elements. The realism of Dog Woman’s narration is ordered by the historical
and geographical detail that she gives. The setting is unmistakably seventeenth-
century London, with the stinking Thames at its heart, and the political ten-
sions between monarchy and parliament as its backdrop. The realism of Jordan’s
narratives lies in his empirical approach to the fantastic journeys. Like any
seventeenth-century explorer he keeps a detailed record of both the voyages
he takes with Tradescant and his fantastic journeys, describing his experiences
in an impassive tone: ‘I’ve kept the log book for the ship. Meticulously. And I’ve
kept a book of my own, and for every journey we have made together, I’ve
written down my own journey and drawn my own map. I can’t show this to the
others, but I believe it to be a faithful account of what happened’ (SC 102).
In addition to Dog Woman and Jordan’s narrative strands, two more appear
towards the end of the novel. These belong to twentieth-century characters
that seem to be the contemporary alter-egos of Dog Woman and Jordan – an
unnamed female chemist protesting against pollution on the banks of the
Thames and Nicholas Jordan, a man who joins the Navy. Both of these narra-
tives are solely realist until they begin to intersect with the two earlier narrative
strands. The interweaving of these narratives gives Sexing the Cherry the timeless
magic that Melquíades’s prophecy or Lukas the Seer’s continual present add to
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Devil’s Valley. In fact, this intersection of narra-
tives across the centuries is, as we shall see, central to the novel’s treatment of
time, an aspect of the Sexing the Cherry that has often been overlooked.
As mentioned, most critics have focused on issues of sexuality and gender
in the novel, and have therefore often read the magic as functioning simply in
these terms. However, some of the problems thrown up by Winterson’s use of
the real and the magic will appear familiar to anyone considering magical real-
ism. Tiziana Giordano expresses the common view that Winterson ‘transgresses
the border between reality and fantasy and creates hybrid fictions and bodies
which contrast the binary opposition of male and female and provide a space in
which it is possible to reinvent the very notion of subjectivity’.44 Again we come
across the idea of ‘hybridity’ as a mixing of categories, although of gender
rather than culture. The idea is the same, however, namely that the magic of
the text somehow allows categories to coexist in a new and liberating way. Dog
Woman is commonly seen as the key site of the subversion of gender stereo-
types, and of the disclosure of ‘natural’ gender characteristics as artificial
and contingent – she is none of the things that a woman is ‘meant’ to be. Her
magical bulk and strength not only exaggerate her lack of traditional feminin-
ity but also make her an image of female power. She has been compared to
Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, as they both exist in a ‘liminal space between real-
ity and illusion, truth and simulation that allow [them] to transgress the catego-
ries of western culture’.45 However, it is also notable that Winterson’s novel has
been accused of lacking engagement with politics. Lynne Pearce notes the ten-
sion in the novel ‘between perceptions of romantic love as a non-gendered,
a-historic, a-cultural “universal”, and as an “ideology” which the specificities of
gender and sexual orientation constantly challenge and undermine’.46 Lynn
Pykett also finds that Winterson, by creating an ‘alternative reality’ in Sexing the
Cherry, ‘backs off from an engagement with political and material constraints’.47
This is, of course, a complaint common to many readings of magical realism.
Roessner and Pykett also refer to Winterson’s own theories of art, in which
she draws on Romanticism and, in particular, Modernism.48 Roessner finds that
Sexing the Cherry in its celebration of the irrational and imaginary ‘reinforces an
essentially Romantic drive to locate a ground of being outside time, space, and
material existence’,49 while Pykett notes that Winterson attempts, like the
Modernists, to harness, through linguistic precision and vitality, ‘the power of
words to conjure worlds into existence’.50 Both statements notably resonate
with a Deleuzian reading of magical realism.
Indeed, a Deleuzian framework highlights how Winterson’s magical realist
text is about much more than reconsiderations of gender. The magic in Sexing
the Cherry cannot be reduced to a device for undermining binary categories;
rather it appears as something that escapes these categories, something which
appears as supplemental to the realist realm where these binaries are expressed.
Dog Woman and her magical attributes do not conform easily to readings
of her as subverting patriarchy. She may be an unnaturally strong woman,
thus de-naturing the feminine, but she is also a supporter of the monarchy, a
supremely patriarchal institution, and she is not averse to slipping into expected
gender roles, playing coy and demure when it suits her purposes. Her role as
doting mother is not particularly controversial, she is very traditional in her
view of gender roles in others, and she longs for and even attempts heterosex-
ual love. Nor does sensitive and feminine Jordan always undo male stereotypes.
He sets out on his voyages precisely because he wants to conform:
I want to be brave and admired and have a beautiful wife and a fine house.
I want to be a hero and wave goodbye to my wife and children at the docks
[. . .]. I want to be like other men, one of the boys, a back-slapper and a man
who knows a joke or two. (SC 101)
The image that informs the novel’s title, referring to Jordan ascertaining the
sex of a grafted cherry tree branch, is also problematic if approached in binary
gender terms. Dog Woman, allegedly a feminist subversive, is appalled at
Jordan’s efforts:
‘Of what sex is that monster you are making?’

I tried to explain to her that the tree would still be female although it had
not been born from seed, but she said such things had no gender and were a
confusion to themselves.
‘Let the world mate of its own accord,’ she said, ‘or not at all.’
But the cherry grew, and we have sexed it and it is female. (SC 79)
Responses to the grafting theme has been varied, ranging from Shena MacKay’s
who in her review of the novel admits she simply fails to understand the signifi-
cance of the image,51 to Laura Doan’s who reads it as a sign of a third sex, free
of binarisms.52 There are also those, like Cath Stowers, who note that the cherry
problematically remains female. She argues that Sexing the Cherry seems to
represent ‘a bisexuality which is based on a free play on identities and hetero-
geneous desires associated with femininity, for even though Jordan’s cherry
tree “had not been born from seed” it would still be female’.53 Others, however,
note the significance of the image of grafting outside the issues of gender and
sexuality. Maria Lozano reads the novel as questioning the idea of origins, and
sees grafting as the main image of this theme. Lozano suggests that Winterson’s
novel replaces the notion of origins with that of metamorphosis.54 Such a view
seems closer to Winterson’s own outlook on literature and art, to which, as
Pykett notes, the idea of transformation is central.55
Indeed, we can read Dog Woman and her magical body and powers more
profitably through the notion of transformation, or in Deleuzian terms, becom-
ing. The parallel to Angela Carter’s Fevvers continues to be useful here. If
Fevvers is becoming-bird, then Dog Woman is becoming-dog. As we know,
becoming has nothing to do with imitation, Fevvers does not actually become a
bird, or Dog Woman a dog, but importantly, like Pi in the Life of Pi, they enter
zones of indiscernibility with something other than the human. Paulina Palmer,
who reads Dog Woman in terms of the grotesque, notes how the grotesque
body overlaps with the world, how its borders become blended with the animal
and the inanimate.56 However, Dog Woman is not just grotesque, she is magical.
Deleuze emphatically states that becomings are not metaphors but metamor-
phoses. Dog-Woman is not just heavy ‘like’ an elephant, she actually launches
an elephant into the air with her weight.
Roessner, despite his reservations about the novel’s politics, very succinctly
points out that reading Sexing the Cherry only in gender terms ignores the ‘per-
sistent drive’ in it to ‘transcend the flesh’.57 Indeed, Jordan’s magical journeys
have been either neglected or fitted into gendered readings of the novel, when
in fact, their main dynamic is the juxtaposition of corporeal weight and incor-
poreal lightness, not sexuality or gender. It is true that Jordan visits mainly
female communities, that he cross-dresses and that the story-within-a-story of
the novel, the tale of the twelve princesses, revolves around the failure of mar-
riage for women. However, just as Dog Woman moves away from the ‘normal’
motor-sensory schema of the flesh by becoming-dog, so Jordan’s travels can be
thought of, in Deleuzian terms, as flights from the ‘heavy’ real or actual body
through the ‘lightness’ of virtual magic.
In fact, in Sexing the Cherry Winterson continually pits weight against lightness
and the historical real against the magic. While Dog Woman is explicitly heavy
and bound to the material, Jordan’s voyages always involve taking flight. On
his first journey he visits a house without any floors, where the furniture is
suspended from the ceiling and the inhabitants travel from room to room by
ropes. Here he has his first glimpse of a magically light figure who becomes his
obsession to find again: ‘She was climbing down from her window on a thin
rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent’
(SC 21). On his search Jordan meets the twelve flying princesses, whose stories
all revolve around escaping the ‘heavy’ order imposed on them by society
through marriage. Marriage is, quite literally, what takes their ability to fly away,
while their escapes involve renewed flight. It becomes clear that heaviness, not
the least in Dog Woman’s enormous body, stands for the order and rule of the
historical, material world, whereas lightness embodies the freedom of the
flighty, immaterial imagination. As Cath Stowers notes, in the places that
Jordan visits on his travels, houses and towns are refigured as floating and fluid
places, rather than solid structures.58 The solid spaces of realism, the segmented
structures of the domestic space and the village or city, are literally dissolved by
the magic of lightness and flight.
In contrast, Dog Woman, however subversive her non-feminine grotesque-
ness may be, is still tied to the ordered thinking of the time she inhabits, failing
to understand the freedom of true love, limited by her heaviness as well as her
rigid views on gender, indeed, by her being in and constricted by a specific
moment in linear time. In fact, the contrast between the heaviness of the his-
torical world of Dog Woman and the lightness of Jordan’s magical journeys can
be seen as analogous to the distinction between Bergson’s space and duration.
Space, as the most expanded form of time, exists only in a series of consecutive,
but separate, present moments. In duration, however, as the most contracted
form of space, everything exists simultaneously. While Dog Woman is stuck
in historical time, Jordan’s travels across time and space are made possible pre-
cisely by their existence outside of linear chronology.
In fact, the magically light woman whom Jordan comes to pursue is a charac-
ter that links the idea of flight and incorporeal lightness with that of pure time
or duration, as well as situating these explicitly in the realm of art. One story is
missing from the princesses’ personal stories of marriage and escape. It is that
of the twelfth princess, Fortunata, who turns out to be the woman that Jordan
is searching for. She is the lightest of the princesses, a dancer who defies not
only gravity but also physicality itself. She evades marriage by flying away, and
lives apart from her sisters. After a long search, Jordan finds her running a
dancing school in ‘a remote place’ where she teaches her pupils to overcome
their bodies because ‘she believes that we were fallen creatures who once knew
how to fly’ (SC 72). As Roessner says, in her dance, ‘the bodily organs undergo
a mystical transformation that takes the dancers beyond language, concept, and
time’.59 She makes her dancers spin ‘until all features are blurred, until the
human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar’ and
when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music
escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone
like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems
to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into
infinity. (SC 72)
Here Winterson seems to suggest that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, it is the in
the power of art to ‘restore the infinite’ (WIP 197). This restoration of the
infinite starts with a negation of the motor-sensory schema, but the bodies of
the dancers become non-human not only by becoming dance and music, they
also pass from the movement of actual time to the infinity of virtual duration.
Their dance is a becoming non-human in time as well as space.
As we would expect, the magic of Jordan’s narrative also introduces the
element of imperceptibility to Sexing the Cherry. We do not know what is past,
present or future: ‘The scene I have just described to you may lie in the future
or in the past. Either I have found Fortunata or I will find her. I cannot be sure.
Either I am remembering her or I am still imagining her’ (SC 93). Central to
Sexing the Cherry, then, is the non-human becoming we encountered in Life of Pi,
as well as the indiscernibility that we found in Devil’s Valley, but importantly,
here they become apparent as transformations in and of time. Indeed, Jordan
explicitly meditates on time:
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that

our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward
lives are governed by something much less regular – an imaginative impulse
cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the
boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure
time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not
contain. (SC 89–90)
Jordan’s journeys, which extend as much in time as in space, indeed pass along
this ‘coil of pure time’. This is nothing other than duration, which makes the
magic and the real indiscernible even though they are different, precisely
because it is ‘the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain’
(SC 89–90), or in Deleuze’s words, ‘the transversal of all possible spaces, includ-
ing the space of time’ (PS 130).
In Deleuze’s terms, magical signs have the effect of giving us a ‘superior view-
point’ that influences our view of the whole work of art. This effect is noticeable
in Sexing the Cherry, when, in Bente Gade’s words, ‘at the end of the novel these
seventeenth-century narrators are doubled by – or extended into – twentieth-
century counterparts’.60 Indeed, the two contemporary narrators are more like
extensions of the first two narrators than their alter-egos or doubles. Nicholas
Jordan and the unnamed chemist do not simply parallel Jordan and Dog
Woman, they are future instances of these characters as they become indiscern-
ible from them, across time. Nicholas Jordan is not merely a ‘modern’ Jordan,
with his adoration of heroes, his obsession with a pineapple and a wish to
navigate the seas, he, momentarily, is Jordan. A passage begins squarely in the
twentieth century, subtly metamorphoses, and ends in the seventeenth:
Six months later I was on board an admiralty tug in the Thames Estuary
outside Deptford. We were after a mine someone had spotted, or said they
had [. . .]. I was standing on deck with a friend of mine [. . .]. I heard a foot
scrape on the deck beside me. Then a man’s voice said, ‘They are burying the
King at Windsor today.’ [. . .]. nobody wears clothes like that any more [. . .].
I heard a bird cry sharp and fierce. Tradescant sighed. My name is Jordan.
(SC 120–121)
In the same way the chemist not only has dreams of wreaking havoc in a
giantess’s body; as she protests against pollution, and sits ‘by a rotting river with
only the fire for company’ (SC 129), she is both the contemporary chemist and
Dog Woman at the same time.
This simultaneity of characters and events across time in Sexing the Cherry has
been to some extent noted by critics, although obviously not in these terms.
Palmer reads it, rather unimaginatively, in terms of historiographic metafiction:
The ambiguous relationship which some of the characters bear to reality –

are they “real” or imaginary, we are prompted to ask? – highlights one of
the novel’s key themes. As Winterson playfully reminds us, by drawing atten-
tion to the fictionality of the text and the acts of representation which its
construction involves, the question is ultimately meaningless since all the
characters portrayed in it are fictions.61
Indeed, as we have seen, the question ‘what is real or imaginary?’ is no longer

meaningful in magical realism, and to Palmer this is a non-political affirmation
of a variety of sexual identity positions, opposed to the radical feminism in the
stories of the twelve princesses. Middleton Meyer, on the other hand, finds
political agency precisely in this moment when ‘neither set of narratives can be
established as real vis-a-vis the other’.62 At the end of the novel the chemist and
Nicholas Jordan set out to burn down a factory that is polluting the Thames,
while simultaneously, three hundred years earlier, Dog Woman, disgusted by
the filth and immorality of the city, is instrumental in the beginnings of the
Great Fire of London. This, to Middleton Meyer, is a political act: ‘Whether
fantastic or real, characters here are empowered to enact social change, reveal-
ing the force contained in a multiple existence’.63 Rather, we can say, it is a force
contained within virtual duration that allows the characters to be linked across
time and space.
If in the last chapter we saw that the magic of magical realism is ahistorical,
it now becomes clear that it is precisely in this ahistoricity, the magic’s very
atemporality, that the revolutionary potential of Sexing the Cherry is situated. The
novel’s ‘flights of fancy’ lead away from the realism of Civil War London, but
they also lead toward a timeless future uniting all four narrators. Recall that in
the crystalline sign, ‘The present is the actual image [or sign], and its contem-
poraneous past is the virtual image’ (C2 76–77). Bente Gade, like Middleton
Meyer, finds political action in this episode, precisely in the extension of Dog
Woman into contemporary times and issues. For as Gade points out, monsters,
such as Dog Woman, resist identities as they ‘cross the boundaries of the unified
subject’, but the chemist lives out her identity as a monster through burning
the factory, so that identity is reformulated from ‘a way of being to a way of
doing’.64 If the identity of Dog Woman is, as we have seen from readings of
her above, too ambiguous to be political, Dog Woman, as a contemporaneous
past – as the virtual to the chemist’s actual – is a kind of catalyst for revolution-
ary action. Duration is thus at the core of the unique power of art: the ability of
connecting the actual present image to its virtual double in the pure past in
order to herald the future. In fact, Jordan’s narrative links his view of time par-
ticularly to art, stating that the artist is able to experience time as ‘a larger, all
encompassing [sic] dimension and so be in touch with much more than the
present’ (SC 91).
To Deleuze, this is what all good art does: it shows us something that the
world as it is, in its actuality of the here and now, cannot show us. If art, to
Deleuze, is a ‘superior viewpoint’, to Winterson ‘the fiction, the poem, is not a
version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing things’.65 For Deleuze
this viewpoint is intimately linked to ontology. While we are only usually aware
of the present of the actual, the sign of art is revelatory in the way it enacts the
essential double nature of Being: actual and virtual, space and duration. Art
‘signifies at once the birth of the world and the original character of the world’
(PS 110). Deleuze and Guattari explicitly see movement in art away from the
human through becoming and indiscernibility as an ontologically important
operation: it ‘is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s non-
human becoming [. . .]. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if
things, beasts, and persons (Ahab and Moby Dick, Penthesilea and the bitch)
endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentia-
tion’ (WIP 173), that is, a point which reveals the ontological conditions of their
differentiation. Indeed, in the three texts considered in this chapter, becoming
non-human, indiscernibility and duration lead us to a point before differentia-
tion, the point of new creation, of Being ‘in action’, as it were.
In Chapter 2 it became clear that, even though the magic is distinct from the
historical, political and human realm of realism, it nonetheless has an effect. In
this chapter we traced how such an effect can be seen as ontological revelation,
but we also found in Sexing the Cherry something that was suggested already in
Beloved, namely that the magic acts as a kind of catalyst. It seems that the magic
can be read as a supplement to the realism of the genre, articulating something
that the realism cannot. The magic acts not only as an ontological revelation,
but as a part of the text that has direct bearing on the contexts dealt with in the
realism of the magical realist text. Indeed, the features that make the magic
revelatory can also be read as revolutionary.
Chapter 5
Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics

of Magical Realism
Introduction: Magical Realism and the Postcolonial
In the previous two chapters we have seen how it is possible to describe the
magic in magical realism as a particular embodiment of Deleuze’s virtual,
revealing the singular process of creation that underpins both art and being.
It has become clear that this inevitably precludes the magic from being read as
political in the traditional sense of politics. Instead, the magic appears as an
example of Deleuze’s counter-actualization, where the actual of the real and
the virtual of magic become indiscernible. In this final chapter we shall con-
sider how such a movement can enable us to reconsider the magic, and thus
magical realism, as significant in a political context too, precisely because it
allows the magical realist text to articulate possibilities beyond the traditional
boundaries of the political.
As we have seen, it is most often with reference to postcolonial literature that
magical realism has been read in political terms. Peter Hallward’s approach to
postcolonial theory, in conjunction with his reading of Deleuze, is useful for
considering the theories of the postcolonial that have influenced readings
of magical realism relative both to each other and to Deleuzian philosophy.
Hallward succinctly identifies and pries apart a core problem of postcoloniality,
identifying a double bind which we saw mirrored in magical realism, viz. the
need to ‘move beyond an insufficiently specific notion of hybridity or pure
difference on the one hand, and an excessively specified notion of community
or essence on the other’ (AP xix). The problem for postcolonial theory is widely
acknowledged and discussed,1 but, as Hallward notes, both ‘diagnosis’ and
‘remedies’ remain vague. In contrast to such vagueness Hallward clearly delin-
eates the split between anti-colonial writing and postcolonial theory. He notes
that the clearly political stance of anti-colonialism, as he finds it in writers such
as Césaire and Fanon, is based on the assumption of a ‘world of constituent
antagonisms and sharply demarcated interests; it is militant and partisan by
definition. Its fundamental terms – engagement, position, mobilization – are
necessarily specific or relational rather than singular in orientation’ (AP xiv).
Hallward notes that contemporary Marxist approaches to postcoloniality have
built on these anti-colonial writers, foregrounding radical politics, retaining

this specific orientation.
In contrast, Hallward characterizes postcolonial theory, as we have seen, as
‘a refusal of any identifiable or precisely located centre, in favour of its own
self-regulating transcendence of location’ (AP xv). He reads the key terms of
postcolonial theory such as the hybrid, the in-between and the subaltern as
‘attempts to evoke that which no concept can “capture” ’ (AP xi). As such, they
articulate a singular configuration, which operates without external criteria on
a univocal plane of consistency. That is, these concepts attempt to describe
a cultural production which replaces ‘the interpretation or representation of
reality with an immanent participation in its production or creation’. It imme-
diately follows that such a production leaves ‘nothing outside itself, to which it
could be specific’ (AP xii). Thus it inevitably makes the ‘engagement, position,
mobilization’ of the anti-colonial stance impossible.
The postcolonial approach to magical realism has been pervasive, and indeed,
at times, persuasive. However, it can be traced to a surprisingly small number of
statements that have been called upon time and again as arguments for such
readings of the genre. In Imaginary Homelands Salman Rushdie famously states:
‘El realismo magical [sic], magic realism [. . .] is a development out of Surrealism
that expresses a genuinely “Third World” consciousness. It deals with what
Naipaul has called “half-made” societies, in which the impossibly old struggles
against the appallingly new’.2 Rushdie’s definition refers to the genre’s Latin
American roots, but also echoes Fredric Jameson’s words on magical realism
and Third World fiction – words which are probably quoted more often than
anything else in postcolonial approaches to the genre. As we briefly discussed
in the Introduction, Jameson states that ‘magical realism depends on a content
which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with nascent
capitalist or technological features’ (OMRF 311). Jameson’s reading of the
genre, then, is aligned with an anti-colonial Marxist approach. Taken together,
Rushdie’s and Jameson’s statements seem to imply that the magic encodes an
‘impossibly old’ pre-capitalist culture, while the realism represents ‘appallingly
new’ capitalist features. Jameson also harks back to magical realism’s Latin
American roots, stating that Carpentier is able to insist that magical realism is
merely Latin American realism exactly because the precondition for magical
realism is ‘the articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the
present’ found in Latin America (OMRF 311). What is central to Jameson’s
view of magical realism is that it is inherently historical, reflecting a particular
social situation.
It must be noted that Jameson’s influential article tells us virtually nothing
about magical realism in literature, but describes a magical realist form in film,
which by his own admission has little to do with the literary genre exemplified
in García Márquez’s work. However, Jameson’s article on magical realism in
film has been consistently conflated by critics of magical realism with his essay
‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ which, like the
Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 105
film article, stresses the historicity of its subject in contrast to the lack of such a
historical dimension in the postmodern.3 The conflation of the two articles is
not surprising, since Jameson in this article considers ‘Third-World literature’
much in the same Marxist terms as magical realism in the article above, namely
as born out of the ‘penetration of various stages of capital’ in pre-capitalist
economies, embodying a ‘life and death struggle with first-world cultural
imperialism’ (TWL 68). In fact, it is in the overlap between the two articles that
we find the roots of the idea that magical realism is somehow the paradigmatic
genre of the Third World. Jameson also goes on to argue that ‘Third-World
texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested in a properly libidi-
nal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the form of a national
allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third-world culture and society’ (TWL 69). This is an overly
general assertion to make, and one which can clearly be met with numerous
objections,4 but which, crucially, is also an assertion which seems to have had
a great deal of influence on readings of magical realism in the postcolonial
context. Again, Jameson does not actually consider literary magical realism in
his ‘Third World’ article. However, he does oppose the allegorical-political
mode of Third World literature not only to postmodernism but also to Western
realism. Furthermore, Jameson finds mythical and ritual elements in this
allegorical mode, and describes it as inherently collectively political. These are
characteristics that also distinguish Spindler’s anthropological magical realism,
which centres on a reversal of the hierarchy between a Western and non-
Western world-view, in an attempt to construct a new independent national
identity (MRT 80–82). Indeed, the familiar politicized ‘anthropological’
approach to magical realism can ultimately be traced to suggestions, notably
Jameson’s and Rushdie’s, that magical realism uniquely represents, and is
defined by, the cultural encounters at the center of postcoloniality.
At first glance, such a view of magical realism seems to be echoed by one
of the ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha, in his short but
influential introduction to Nation and Narration: ‘ “Magical Realism” after the
Latin American Boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent post-
colonial world’.5 In fact, on the back of this piece by Bhabha, the model derived
from Jameson’s articles has been shoe-horned into those approaches to magical
realism that use postcolonial theory, even though Jameson’s and Bhabha’s
theoretical positions are, as we shall see, not compatible. Bhabha, like Jameson,
is considering the function of literature vis-à-vis the emerging postcolonial
nation, but while Jameson proposes an allegorical model, Bhabha suggests that
the literary here operates through Derrida’s ‘irreducible excess of the syntactic
over the semantic’,6 and thus ‘what emerges as the effect of such “incomplete
signification” is a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces
through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated’.7
In his The Location of Culture Bhabha elaborates this idea of ‘in-between spaces’
into a theory of enunciation as the condition not only for the nation, but for
all culture. The ‘in-between space’ opens up due to the ‘time-lag’ inherent in
the signifying process, the gap between ‘sign and its initiation of a discourse or
narrative’ (LC 263), a concept based on Derridean différance. It is in this ‘[extra]
temporality of enunciation’ that culture is articulated (LC 54). What Bhabha
does is to situate this process in a space prior to the text, and, importantly, prior
to any specific choices about the text. Hallward alerts us to the singularity of
such a position, and indeed, to its Deleuzian echoes (AP 24). The ‘in-between
space’ of the ‘time-lag’ is one of ‘difference within’ (LC 19), a difference with-
out binary terms or hierarchy. It is a properly timeless space of undecidability,
‘the uncanny moment’ of the present ‘all at once’ where all possibilities, all
choices exist at the same time (LC 228). As Hallward puts it, this is the ‘enuncia-
tory moment’ productive of language itself, the creative agency that gives rise
to both culture and language (AP 25). Compare this to the Deleuzian virtual,
the undetermined difference-in-itself that is the creative force of all of being.
What is particularly important here is the fact that Bhabha situates this
uncanny moment specifically in cultural hybridity. Although it becomes a pro-
perly post-colonial movement, it is initially located by Bhabha in the colonial,
precisely in the encounter between cultures when cultural difference is, as it
were, inevitably articulated. It is striking how Bhabha describes this articulation
in terms reminiscent of Deleuze. What is at first present in the colonial encoun-
ter – the ‘boum, oboum’ of Forster’s Malabar Caves – and properly employed
in the postcolonial narrative – the disembodied gaze of the slave-woman in a
poem by Meiling Jin – are ‘hybrid signifiers’ which, while they emerge with a
certain fixity in the present, cannot be fixed (LC 176–177). They are meaning-
less in themselves, undecidable, untranslatable: a ‘structure of difference that
produces the hybridity of race and sexuality [or any index of identity] in the
postcolonial discourse’ (LC 76). Bhabha’s hybrid signifier can therefore be
described as a Deleuzian object = x, which although it may take on an identity
in a certain situation, in itself has no meaning. It is the condition of meaning as
such. To Bhabha, the experience of what he calls cultural difference lies pre-
cisely in the moment of the hybrid signifier: ‘Cultural difference [. . .] is not the
acquisition or accumulation of additional cultural knowledge; it is the momen-
tous, if momentary, extinction of the recognizable object of culture in the
disturbed artifice of its signification, at the edge of experience’ (LC 179–180).
Such a view of the hybrid signifier as the extinction of culture resonates with
Deleuze’s description of the signs of art: ‘Beyond designated objects, beyond
intelligible and formulated truths, but also beyond subjective chains of associa-
tion and resurrections by resemblance or contiguity, are the essences which are
alogical or supralogical’ (PS 37).
However, while Deleuze’s and Bhabha’s concepts are structurally similar, we
have to note Bhabha’s insistence on the location of this moment specifically in
cultural difference or hybridity. It is this location, it seems, that allows Bhabha
to make rather striking proclamations on behalf of the hybrid. Not only does
hybridity ‘open up possibilities for other narrative spaces’ (LC 255), but it is
also a ‘liberatory discursive practice’ where ‘cultural identification [is] articu-

lated at the liminal edge of identity’ and ‘subjectivities [. . .] are empowered in
the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition’ (LC 256). Indeed, to Bhabha,
the liberatory possibilities of the colonial or postcolonial text lie precisely in
their ‘enunciatory moments’, which they reveal most forcefully as sites of cul-
tural encounter. As we can see from the quotes above, it is a kind of liberation
dependent on the very uncertainty and undecidability of this moment. Bhabha
insists that ‘this liminal moment of identification – eluding resemblance –
produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that negotiates its own
authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable,
insurgent relinking’ (LC 265). To Bhabha, then, the encounter of cultures,
whether in the colonial or postcolonial context, is inevitably textual, just as the
nation is constructed through narrative, and it is precisely because of their
textuality that these encounters necessarily include the possibility of liberation.
In the face of Bhabha’s claims, Hallward tersely notes: ‘It would seem that lasting
(if not catastrophic) oppression is thus effectively precluded as an enunciatory
impossibility – a point Bhabha might have trouble explaining to, say, the Caribs,
the Sioux, or the Palestinians’ (AP 26).
We can see from this brief outline of Bhabha’s position, and by comparing it
to Deleuze’s, that it is, in Hallward’s terms, of a singular orientation – and thus
one which is difficult, if not impossible, to square with the specific, the histori-
cal and political. The problem, however, lies not in the singular orientation of
Bhabha’s thought per se, but rather in the fact, which Hallward’s statement alerts
us to, that Bhabha, typically of postcolonial theorists, attempts to reinsert
subjective agency within this model which is, by definition, as a singular mode
of individuation, subject-free: ‘As a result of its own splitting in the time-lag of
signification, the moment of the subject’s individuation emerges as an effect
of the intersubjective – as the return of the subject as agent’ (LC 265). If Bhabha
proposes that hybridity is a way to liberation, any close reading of Bhabha
should reveal that this kind of liberation has little to do with what Jameson calls
a ‘life and death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism’ (TWL 68).
The central problem encountered by postcolonial readings of magical real-
ism, the double bind of the singular and the specific, is caused by a confusion
of incompatible approaches to the genre as Third World literature. Bhabha’s
statement that magical realism is the ‘literary language of the emergent post-
colonial world’, coupled with his outline of the enunciatory moment of such a
literature, clearly invites a reading of magical realism in terms of hybridity (in
Bhabha’s sense of the word). Bhabha’s statement, on the one hand, agrees
with the conclusion drawn from Jameson’s articles above: magical realism is to
be read as Third World literature if the Third World is seen as that part of the
world which has ‘suffered the experience of colonialism’ (TWL 67). On the
other hand, Bhabha’s view of such literature as characterized by ‘the momen-
tous [. . .] extinction of the recognizable object of culture’ (LC 180) is hardly
compatible with Jameson’s view of a Third World literature which ‘depends on
a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with

nascent capitalist or technological features’ (OMRF 311). Thus we can trace the
conflicting movements in readings of magical realism to the fact that both
Bhabha and Jameson have placed magical realism in the postcolonial context,
but from opposing theoretical positions. It appears that there was, with
Jameson, an early push towards Marxism, the impulse of which has never quite
left approaches to the genre. This impulse has remained in the form of an insis-
tence on defining magical realism as an encounter of the pre-capitalist and the
capitalist, articulated as the pre-colonial and the colonial, and thus represent-
ing liberatory (often nationalist) politics, even though theoretical approaches
to the genre have shifted towards postcolonial theories. There is a clear wish to
read magical realism both as a specific articulation of the history and politics of
the postcolonial situation, and as an example of the hybrid and the in-between
in Bhabha’s sense. This is the theoretical double bind of magical realism similar
to that which Hallward finds in postcolonial theory.
The confusion is also augmented because the term ‘hybridity’ has been
applied somewhat indiscriminately in readings of magical realism, to describe
both the dual nature of the form itself – magic with realism – and Bhabha’s
theoretical term. The two definitions of hybridity are, however, not entirely
compatible. Take, for example, readings of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We
saw that the novel was about a search for identity, personal and national, but
we also found that the magical elements of the novel were not able to sustain
such an identity. Quite the opposite; the magic in Midnight’s Children leads to
the ultimate breakdown of identity, Saleem’s explosion into sixty million pieces.
Now we can see that Midnight’s Children does, on the one hand, fit Jameson’s
model: it represents the clash of India as a modern capitalist nation with its
numerous regional pre-capitalist cultures, and it can certainly be read as
a national allegory. On the other hand, it is an example of the hybrid – in
Bhabha’s sense – as its moments of magic can be viewed as ‘hybrid signifiers’.
The magic moments in Midnight’s Children fit our description of the hybrid
signifier as an object = x: meaningless in themselves, they reveal the virtual con-
ditions of sense and identity – the ‘in-between’ or enunciatory moment. How-
ever, by doing this they preclude any identity as such.
Yet the ‘hybridity’ in Midnight’s Children that is most often indicated by critics
is not the magic moment at all, but the coexistence of real and magic, the inter-
mingling of world-views, or the syncretization of cultures, which is not the same
as Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. For although Bhabha’s hybridity is predicated
on the encounter between cultures, it has very little to do with multiple cultural
identities as such. Bhabha draws a distinction between cultural diversity and
cultural difference:
Cultural diversity is an epistemological object – culture as an object of empiri-

cal knowledge – whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation
of culture as “knowledgeable” [. . .]. If cultural diversity is a category of
comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural difference is a process

of signification. (LC 49–50)
Surely Damian Grant, who locates in Rushdie ‘the endorsement of hybridity

(the mixture of Western and Eastern forms, of written and oral modes; the
mixture of “fantasy and naturalism”; the mixture of genres and styles, of media
and languages)’,8 or Liselotte Glage, who finds in Rushdie’s magical realism
‘mo(ve)ments of cross-over between different political, social, and cultural
locations’9 are thinking of cultural diversity.
Furthermore, considering magical realism as hybrid in this syncretizing sense
naturally leads critics back to the Jamesonian view of magical realism. Wendy
Faris, who ascribed a decolonizing agency to magical realism, notes ‘the multi-
vocal nature of the narrative and the cultural hybridity that characterize
magical realism’ and concludes that through this hybridity ‘magical realism
partially reverses the process of cultural colonization’.10 Also recall Jean-Pierre
Durix’s argument that reflecting the ‘multiple and contradictory’ reality of cul-
tural encounters, magical realism is ‘one of the best-known forms of [. . .]
generic hybridity’ which serves ‘to incorporate the old values and beliefs into
the modern man’s perception’ (MGP 187, 81). That is, Bhabha’s concept of
hybridity and Jameson’s idea of the encounter between modes of production
are both erroneously elided with the idea of cultural hybridity as diversity, in
order to square Bhabha’s and Jameson’s approaches to magical realism. In fact
these concepts come from opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum.
Hallward’s juxtaposition of the Marxist approach to the postcolonial and
postcolonial theory is particularly illuminating when considering approaches
to magical realism as postcolonial literature, since these approaches have appar-
ently confused the two. On the one hand, those two articles of Jameson’s have
been widely applied to magical realism; but Jameson never offers a definition
of the magic – he simply does not consider the magical realist text and its ele-
ments. The Jamesonian Marxist approach will identify the material conditions
of the text, and indeed elucidate the politics of the realist part of magical real-
ism, but, as will be discussed, it will not tell us how the magic works in the
text. On the other hand, as Hallward argues, postcolonial theory appears mis-
guided in its wish to articulate both the indeterminate conditions of cultural
enunciation and political and historical specifics. Bhabha’s hybrid signifier can
be used to describe the magical element very effectively, as we will see, but it
cannot, however, at the same time be seen as related to a ‘a subversive strategy
of subaltern agency’ (LC 265).
While Bhabha’s concept of the hybrid signifier is useful in order to place the
magical element within a postcolonial context, Deleuze allows us to think
the magic as revolutionary without having to re-incorporate it into a specific
Marxist materialist politics. In fact, a Deleuzian reading of magical realism
describes those elements of the text that cannot be defined in Marxist
terms. We can take Jameson’s Marxist materialist or historicist approach in his
The Political Unconscious as, broadly, the model for such readings. While
Jameson admits that history is only accessible to us through texts, he insists that
it exists as a non-textual reality. This reality relates to any text as its subtext, and
the aim of literary criticism, to Jameson, is the ‘rewriting of the literary text in
such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or the restructura-
tion of a prior historical or ideological subtext’.11
In the Jamesonian Marxist model, the base of any society, its modes of
production, are expressed in various levels of superstructure: the political, the
economic, the juridical, the cultural and so on (PU 21). This relationship
between modes of production and superstructural levels is crucial to literary
analysis: if it is the ‘same essence at work’ in culture as in organizing relations of
production (PU 24), it follows that the text can be read as another expression
of this ‘essence’. Interpretation will reveal the ideology of a text, for all litera-
ture, ‘however weakly’, expresses the modes of production of the society in
which it is produced, and thus reflects the particular ideological perspective
implied in any mode of production. Thus the magical realist text in its contra-
dictory inclusion of the real and the magical reveals the clash between pre-
capitalist and capitalist modes of production, articulating what Jameson reminds
us is Marx’s most important lesson – that of class bias and the conflict it leads
to (PU 272). Indeed, in the Political Unconscious Jameson again seems to situate
the magical on the side of the oppressed, considering how an ‘oppositional’
voice pitted against the discourse of ruling classes is constructed ‘most notably,
from the fragments of essentially peasant cultures: folk songs, fairy tales, popu-
lar festivals, occult or oppositional systems of belief such as magic and witch-
craft’ (PU 71).
However, Jameson states that the relationship of a historical situation to the
text is not straightforwardly causal, but rather ‘one of a limiting situation; the
historical moment is here understood to block off or shut down a certain num-
ber of formal possibilities available before, and to open up determinate new
ones, which may or may not be realized in artistic practice’ (PU 134–135). To
Jameson, neither the presence of two contradictory modes of production nor
that of magical elements necessarily has a revolutionary or subversive function.
In Chapter Two of The Political Unconscious, ‘Magical Narratives: On the Dialecti-
cal Use of Genre Criticism’ (PU 89–136), Jameson considers the possibility
of defining the genre of romance in a ‘historically reflexive way’ (PU 93). The
romance is similar to Jameson’s magical realism, as it is borne out of the meet-
ing of pre-industrial and industrial society, as well as indulging in elements of
fancy which Jameson links precisely to pre-industrial society. His aim is to show
how the correlation between these modes of production and the textual form
‘restore[s] our sense of the concrete situation in which such forms can be
seized as original and meaningful protopolitical acts’ (PU 135). However, to his
disappointment Jameson finds that romances are instead more likely to offer
‘a nostalgic (or less often, a Utopian) harmony’ (PU 135). Rather than articulat-
ing a political struggle, the romantic narrative ‘cannot dramatize the triumph
of either force over the other one, or enact any genuine ritual purification, but
must produce a compromise in which everything finds its proper place again’
(PU 136).
Thus neither the presence of contradictory modes of production nor that of
fantastic or magical elements guarantees a revolutionary text. The affirmation
of such nonhegemonic cultural voices [as magic or myth] remains ineffective if
it is limited to the merely ‘sociological’ perspective of the pluralistic rediscovery
of other isolated groups: only an ultimate rewriting of these utterances in terms
of their essentially polemic and subversive strategies restores them to their
proper place in the dialogical system of the social classes. (PU 71)
This means that a reading of magical realism as a paradigmatically political
Third World genre on the back of Jameson’s two articles cited earlier appears
even more misguided. As previously stated, the article on magical realism makes
no mention of the magical elements usually associated with literary magical
realism. The connection between the two articles lies in the articulation of both
magical realism in film, as defined by Jameson, and Third World literature as
dependent on the presence of two contradictory modes of production. It should
be clear at this point in our analysis that the magic in literary magical realism as
we have found and defined it, is qualitatively different to the socio-historical
elements that Jameson finds in Third World literature: no ‘meaningful pro-
topolitical act’ can be situated in the magic of magical realism.
Jameson’s wish to see the romance form as something that leads us back to
the ‘concrete situation’ reminds us of the postcolonial imperative to articulate
the specific historical and political situation of a text. Yet Jameson argues that
romance does not necessarily lead us in this direction. It rather resolves the
class conflict so essential to Marxist materialist readings through dream and
fantasy. There thus seems to be a residue or ‘outside’ to Jameson’s material
analysis of the text, textual elements that simply do not articulate the contradic-
tions of class and society. To Jameson, these elements, and thus literary modes
predicated on these elements, cannot be anything but naïve failures, denying
the reality of political struggle. It is here that the limit of Jameson’s materialist
method lies: it cannot articulate what the magic of magic realism does, as
opposed to what it cannot do. It is clear that the magic is ahistorical, but this
does not mean that it is ineffectual.
A Deleuzian Theory of Magical Realism:

The People Are Missing
A Jamesonian approach to magical realism is certainly valid up to a point; we
have already noted that Midnight’s Children can be read from such a perspective.
We can now compare this historicist method Deleuze’s philosophical stance,
where Being as creative agency is the absent cause of all of reality. If Jameson’s
society and its superstructures is predicated on modes of production, to Deleuze,
it is the orientation of Being which determines both modes of production and

such superstructural levels. Jameson reads the text as inevitably ideologically
charged since it reflects the modes of production of a society. Deleuze reads the
text as potentially ideologically charged; insofar as a text is oriented in a way
analogous to the organization of a certain mode of production or a certain
superstructural level, they can be seen as mutually explanatory. Crucially,
however, the text for Deleuze does not have to reflect this dimension. Since
Deleuzian ontology takes us back to conditions of Being prior to superstruc-
tures or modes of production, it allows us to articulate the world in terms not
inevitably bound to society, at the same time as it also provides a philosophical
framework in which society can be analyzed.
Recall, how, following the Deleuzian distinction between two modes of
Being, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two modes of assemblages. An
assemblage is a unit in the analysis of the world that allows them to describe
relations between terms (material as well as immaterial) without subjective
agency, without hierarchy and without a transcendent organizing principle.
Rather, assemblages are determined by their relative territorialization or
deterritorialization, or, in some of the many other terms used by Deleuze and
Guattari, whether they are striated or smooth, rigid or supple, sedentary or
nomadic and so on. In terms of Deleuze’s ontology, that which is actual tends to
be territorialized, while the virtual is that which is absolutely deterritorialized.
As we have seen, society, life in the actual world, is necessarily territorialized as
it is inherently organized. That is, the political field is one that is in essence
predicated on territory.
The same poles of orientation, towards the actual or the virtual, the territori-
alized or deterritorialized, that inform societies, also determine works of art.
Literature is not an image of the world to Deleuze and Guattari, but another
assemblage in the world:
There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)

and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the
author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain
multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel
nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. (TP 23)
The text may well establish a particular resonance with a certain kind of society,
because it embodies the same kind of ontological orientation as that society –
recall how the organization of the realism in magical realism follows that of the
State: rigidly segmented – but this is not the limit of what the text can do. The
text can also embody something completely separate and different from any
society, something unique to art itself, since the principles of its creation, which
we considered in the previous chapter, are to be found prior to any society. It is
this uniqueness of art that a Jamesonian analysis cannot grant literature, since
to Jameson, ‘all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we
have called a political unconscious [. . .] all literature must be read as a symbolic

meditation on the destiny of community’ (PU 56). It is precisely by going
outside the social realm for the conditions of art that Deleuze enables us to
understand what art can do apart from and beyond the territorial, political
realm – but, importantly, not in detriment to this realm, but as an equally vital
part of Being.
In the last chapter we discovered how the sign of art, to Deleuze, is something
that is ‘the ultimate goal of life, which life cannot realize by itself’ (PS 155).
It allows for a ‘superior view-point’ where the ontological principle of Being
is revealed in all its chaotic reality as it ‘constitutes and reconstitutes the begin-
ning of the world’ (PS 110). However, while these ontological effects are key to
Deleuze and his view of art as revelatory of the virtual, they tell us little about
the practical effect art can have in the here and now. After all, the work of art is
actual and we encounter it in the actual. Yet there were hints at such practical
effects at the end of Sexing the Cherry, as well as Beloved, where the virtual as the
contemporaneous past of the actual opened up possibilities of action in the
present and future. In order to further consider how art can be both separate
from the world in essence, and at the same time be effective in this world, we
have to go back to Deleuze’s work on art, in particular What is Philosophy? and
Cinema 2.
It is obvious that Deleuze’s approach to art radically differs from Jameson’s
historicist view, and this is precisely the key to why a Deleuzian approach can
articulate what the magical elements in magical realism can do, where a histori-
cist reading cannot. In fact, it is because the signs of art, such as the magical
elements, are not historical that Deleuze finds that they have unique revolu-
tionary potential: ‘ “Becoming” does not belong to History’ (WIP 96). Instead,
history is ‘only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the
experimentation of something that escapes history’ (WIP 111). This experi-
mentation is the creative act of art as revolution, for ‘revolution is absolute
deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new
people’ (WIP 101). The political field as predicated on territory belongs to the
actual conditions of history. In contrast, the revolutionary, for Deleuze, is that
which moves away from such territory. Magic, as we have seen, is precisely a
movement of deterritorialization, divergent from the territoriality of realism,
and thus divergent from politics and history, and it is precisely as such that it is
revolutionary in Deleuze’s sense.
If the revolutionary, to Deleuze, is that which is deterritorialized to ‘the point
where this calls for a new earth, a new people’, the sign of art is revolutionary
exactly because it is a new creation in the act of being created. In fact, the
specific ontological characteristics of the signs of art that we discovered in
the previous chapter are necessary for their revolutionary potential. The point
of the call for a new people can only be reached if a sign of art, through its
deterritorialization, enacts the ‘birth of the world’ (PS 110). Any actual people,
any people that already exists, and which is merely represented by realism
reflecting the conditions of that existing society, is, of course, necessarily already
territorialized. Only a virtual people without any relation to present or histori-
cal society can be absolutely deterritorialized and thus properly revolutionary.
Consider Deleuze’s notion of the minor. A minority is not defined by the num-
ber of its members or elements, but by the connections between these constitu-
ents, connections which belong neither to the elements nor to the group as
such. While the major is that which is territorialized or coded, a minority
‘has no model, it’s a becoming, a process [. . .]. When a minority creates models
for itself it’s because it wants to become a majority’.12 Only a people that does
not yet exist, but which is in the very process of becoming-people, is properly a
minority. Equally, minor literature does not designate specific ethnic or national
literatures, but the ‘revolutionary conditions for every literature’; any author,
even one belonging to a majority, can find ‘his own point of underdevelop-
ment, his own patois, his own third world’ (KM 18).
Clearly, Deleuze’s use of the term ‘third world’ here is as idiosyncratic as
his use of the term ‘revolutionary’. Indeed, we have to consider this a virtual
‘third world’ just as his revolution is virtual – and thus explicitly not an image
or representation of the actual Third World, nor of any actual revolution.
However, within a Deleuzian framework this certainly does not mean that
the two cannot be usefully considered in relation to each other. In Cinema 2
Deleuze defines a Third World cinema in political terms which we can compare
to Jameson’s analysis of Third World literature. Deleuze states that a Third
World political cinema exists exactly on the basis that ‘the people no longer
exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing’ (C2 208). To Deleuze, it is in the
Third World, ‘where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state
of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis’, that the need for the
articulation of a new people becomes clear, precisely because the people are
missing:
This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation

of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded,
in the third world and for minorities. Art, and especially cinematographic
art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is pre-
supposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The
moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been
people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in
shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which
a necessarily political art must contribute. (C2 209)
To Deleuze it is thus not a case of finding the contradictions caused by

the encounter between individuals, classes or modes of production: ‘If the
people are missing, if there is no longer consciousness, evolution or revolution,
it is the scheme of reversal which itself becomes impossible. There will no
longer be conquest of power by a proletariat, or by a united or unified people’
(C2 211). The Deleuzian revolution is not about reversing the master–slave,
colonizer–colonized relationship, but about inventing a new people beyond

any such opposition.
Deleuze and Jameson may appear to intersect at the point where they
both proclaim that Third World art is necessarily collective. However, while to
Jameson this collective utterance is a function of individual lives expressing
national destinies through allegory, to Deleuze, the minority voice is collective
precisely because it does not represent any actual, existing people:
because the people are missing, the author is in a situation of producing

utterances which are already collective, which are like the seeds of the people
to come, and whose political impact is immediate and inescapable. The
author can be marginalized or separate from his more or less illiterate com-
munity as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a position
to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true collective
agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst. (C2 213)
Ronald Bogue, in his essay ‘Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come’,
elucidates this role of the artist as catalyst that Deleuze develops in Cinema 2,
by considering Deleuze’s analysis of the work of Quebecois film-maker Pierre
Perrault and his methods. Perrault makes documentaries, ‘not by producing an
“objective” recording of an external reality, but by entering into a collaborative
process of invention with their subjects’.13 In Pour la suite du monde (1963)
Perrault invites a group of Quebecois islanders, marginalized by both Anglo-
Canadian society and official French culture, to revive a traditional hunting
practice. As they go about this task, Perrault films the group not only speaking
of memories and folk lore of the hunt, but also beginning to form a new
community. Perrault’s camera captures them in the process of what Perrault
calls ‘legending in flagrante delicto’, that is, in the very process of inventing a
new communal myth. Bogue quotes Perrault on this subject: ‘I do not want to
help give birth yet again to myths, but to allow people to give birth to them-
selves, to avoid myths, to escape customs, to elude Writings’.14
While Jameson sees a return to myths and rituals of the past as an expression
of the ‘voice of the oppressed’ constituting an allegory of the nation in Third
World literature, to Deleuze, ‘Third World’ cinema is instead all about ‘legend-
ing’ or inventing myth; ‘an act of story-telling which would not be a return to
myth but a production of collective utterances capable of raising misery to a
strange positivity, the invention of a people’ (C2 214). The author, acting as an
agent for these new myths, ‘must not, then, make himself into the ethnologist
for his people, nor himself invent a fiction which would be one more private
story: for every personal fiction, like every impersonal myth, is on the side of the
“masters” ’ (C2 213). To Deleuze, the collective nature of ‘Third World’ art does
certainly not lie in its allegorizing individual stories, or any kind of representa-
tion of a state of things, but in its power as the creation of the new.
As we have seen, realism is not a matter of verisimilitude as such, but of
the text belonging to a particular regime of signs or reflecting a particular
ontological orientation. Realist fiction keeps up the appearance of referential-

ity through the regime of signs of subjectification. Such fiction is thus, says
Deleuze, a ‘model of pre-established truth, which necessarily expresses domi-
nant ideas or the point of view of the colonizer [. . .] [it] is inseparable from a
“reverence” which presents it as true, in religion, in society, in cinema, in the
systems of images’ (C2 145). The crucial opposition is not between ‘fiction’, or
‘text’, and ‘reality’, but rather between the realist regime of signs and the
regime of signs revealed by the signs of art. That is, between a territorial regime
and one which embodies the deterritorialization of Being in the act of new
creation. Thus ‘what is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth
which is always that of the masters or the colonizer; it is the story-telling func-
tion of the poor, insofar as it gives the false the power which makes it into a
memory, a legend, a monster’ (C2 145). This statement may seem to echo the
mantra of the magical realist critic that sees freedom in returning to traditional
story-telling and legend. This is not what Deleuze means, however. To Deleuze,
story-telling is precisely not the return to ‘anthropological’ myth in search for
meaning, or the recollection of personal or collective memories of a people,
it is the creation of the ‘monsters’ of simulacra: myths and legends without
origins, that is, myths and legends whose people do not yet exist. It is precisely
only when art goes beyond the real, starts ‘making up legends’ that it contrib-
utes to the invention of a new people (C2 145).
Bogue rightly asks how this ‘story-telling’ or ‘legending’ relates to narrative,
and concludes that it does so by opposition. Bogue finds that Deleuze privileges
elements antithetical to narrative in his works on literature and art. For
example, in Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari find the ‘minority’ of Kafka’s novels in
their structure consisting of pieces of discontinuous narrative. In Cinema 2
Deleuze describes ‘Third World’ cinema as operating through crises or a ‘put-
ting into trance’ of its narrative or ‘speech-acts’. Just as the minority of Kafka’s
language means being ‘a sort of stranger within [one’s] own language’ (KM 26),
in ‘Third World’ cinema ‘the speech-act must create itself as a foreign language
in a dominant language’ (C2 215). Also in Proust and Signs, Bogue points out,
the search or apprenticeship progresses not through narrative but through
signs, and ‘eventuates in a philosophical understanding of essences that
transcends the sequence of events leading to that understanding’.15 That is,
this making up of new myths does not consist in a narrative movement at
all, but is rather situated in the elements that rupture narrative, such elements
as the crystalline signs, in terms of which we considered magic in the last chapter
– the signs characterized by non-human becomings and indiscernibility in
opposition to an ‘organic’, human or motor-sensory narration.
It is therefore the very fact that art leaves behind a narrative that represents
the individual, the human, the historical, that gives art its greatest revolutionary
potential for Deleuze. It is a revolution that cannot be found in any existing
society. To Deleuze and Guattari,
art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and
a people that are lacking as correlate of creation [. . .]. The artist or the phi-
losopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it
with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings,
and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books
of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable
sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in
common – their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame,
and to the present. (WIP 108,110)
The effect of art in the here and now is thus a resistance, a forewarning or an
imperative. Clearly, this approach sheds a new light on postcolonial magical
realism. We cannot see magic in an ‘anthropological’ light any longer, so much
we already know. Defining magic as a pure simulacrum makes the debate about
origins and authenticity redundant. We have to remember that becomings ‘are
born in history’ but are not of history.
It is in this sense that we can recuperate, through Deleuze, Bhabha’s concept
of the hybrid signifier. If the hybrid signifier is a sign of art, meaningless and
undecidable, the very ‘extinction of the recognizable object of culture’, then
that is precisely why it has a Deleuzian revolutionary potential. We saw that the
problem was that Bhabha, like many postcolonial theorists, attempted to bring
this enunciatory moment back to the existing state of affairs: while the hybrid
signifier entailed the ‘act of erasing the politics of binary opposition’ (LC 256),
such ‘iterative “unpicking” ’ was immediately followed by ‘incommensurable,
insurgent relinking’ (LC 265). Deleuze, however, allows us to take the hybrid
signifier to its logical conclusion: rather than insisting on a return of ‘the
subject as agent’, Deleuze finds the revolutionary potential of the sign of art
precisely in the fact that the subject, the people, is missing. Deleuze thus enables
us to both go beyond the limits of a Marxist approach, which cannot adequately
articulate what it is that magic can do, as well as take the core ideas of post-
colonial theory further, rather than attempting to reconcile it with a specific
political programme.
Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said (1978): The Stuff before
the Stuff that is History or Culture or Society or Art
Robert Kroetsch is perhaps best known as, in Linda Hutcheon’s words,
‘Mr Canadian Postmodernism’.16 The novel What the Crow Said, Kroetsch’s ‘flirt
with magical realism’,17 has often been overlooked in favour of his other works
such as The Studhorse Man (1969) and Badlands (1975). However, it has featured
in many considerations of magical realism, since much attention has been
given to the genre in Canada. It is impossible to read about Anglophone
magical realism without being struck by its flourishing in Canadian literature,

the two examples mentioned most often being What the Crow Said and Jack
Hodgin’s The Invention of the World (1977). Kroetsch’s novel is interesting partly
because of the position it occupies in critical texts on Anglophone magical
realism, but also because Canadian magical realism has been explicitly placed
in a postcolonial context. In fact, Canadian critical approaches to magical
realism as a postcolonial genre have been very influential on readings of
magical realism in general. The most notable example is Stephen Slemon’s
essay ‘Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse’, discussed in the Introduction.
He reads What The Crow Said, among other novels, in an attempt to place
magical realism ‘within the context of English-Canadian literary culture in its
specific engagement with postcoloniality’ (MRDP 409).
To Slemon, What the Crow Said displays all the elements he believes are
characteristic of a postcolonial magical realist text: the novel’s narrative opposi-
tion of magic and realism reflects the ‘real conditions of speech and cognition
within social relations of a postcolonial culture’ (MRDP 411), that is, the oppo-
sition between colonizer and colonized cultures. In addition, according to
Slemon, its ‘foreshortened’ time and local place of the novel, like the one
hundred years and Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude, are representative
of the postcolonial situation on a larger scale. Finally, it foregrounds the frag-
mentation and disjunction of the experience created by the colonial encounter
by not allowing either magic or realism to become dominant. ‘The text thus
demands a kind of reading process in which the imagination becomes stimu-
lated into summoning into being new and liberating “codes of recognition” ’
(MRDP 421). In Slemon’s approach we can recognize both the influence of
Jameson, and the idea of hybridity as cultural coexistence.
However, the position of Canada in the postcolonial context perhaps
necessitates a few notes. Stanley E. McMullin articulates the status of Canadian
culture and literature in terms of heartland and hinterland. The Canadian
West, with the exception of Vancouver, is the hinterland to the metropolitan
East, but this heartland of Canada is also a hinterland: on the one hand, histori-
cally, relative to the British and French colonial powers, and, on the other,
increasingly in the present, to the United States.18 A writer like Kroetsch, who
writes about the Canadian prairie, is therefore doubly from the hinterland. The
Canadian writer, especially one from the west, has to face some of the same
issues of belonging and identity as other postcolonial writers. Of course, since
Canada is largely a settler nation, as well as a major economic power, these
issues are also very different. As Linda Hutcheon points out, the Canadian
situation is certainly marginalized and ‘ex-centric’ but ‘as more a privileged
than a denigrated position’.19 However, the Canadians’ status as privileged
white settlers does not preclude difficulties in coming to terms with a colonial
legacy. In addition to the sense of marginalization from a ‘home’ nation, settler
Canadians face a certain disconnection from their own country. On the one
hand, the place of the native inhabitants and their culture in Canadian national
identity has to be negotiated after the fact of their decimation and marginaliza-
tion by the settler population. On the other hand, while the native peoples
had a connection to the land, settler Canadians still wrestle with their relation-
ship with the vast empty spaces and raw nature of the Canadian hinterland.
As a significant magical realist text with precisely such a Canadian legacy, What
the Crow Said is particularly interesting in our context. As Marie Vautier says in
her New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction, it is
‘located in that “space between” so prized by postcolonialists’.20 Such a space
appears precisely as the ‘in-between space’ of Bhabha’s hybrid signifier.
The colonial legacy is ever-present in Canadian negotiations of place and
identity and Kroetsch is a writer who feels the dilemmas of identity keenly,
exclaiming, ‘To be a Canadian: a fate so barren and so complicated I can hardly
endure’.21 Lecker notes that Canadian writers, like other Anglophone post-
colonial writers, have to commence ‘a new literature in a mandarin language’,
and he quotes Kroetsch stating that the Canadian writer has to ‘uninvent’
American and English homonyms that ‘prevent him from hearing his own
language’.22 The Canadian writer approaching Canadian identity, whether
as a settler community or in relation to native peoples and land, has first, as
Hutcheon points out, to ‘deconstruct British [or French] social and literary
myths in order to redefine their colonial history’.23 Indeed, Kroetsch’s work has
often been seen in terms of the deconstruction of old myths in search of better
expressions of Canadian place and identity, and many readers note that What
the Crow Said opens with a version of the Greek myth of Zeus and Danae. Vera
Lang is impregnated, not by a god turned golden shower, but by a swarm of
bees in a prairie meadow. Gunilla Florby notes that the novel is full of such
irreverent rewritings of myths, both western and indigenous. In What the Crow
Said we encounter versions of the flood as well as of the Ark, and the Tower of
Babel. The central female character, Tiddy Lang, is pursued by suitors like
Penelope. Matings between animals and humans have many parallels in Native
Indian myths, as has the talking crow that visits the characters of the novel.24
Some have seen this deconstruction of myth through magical realism from
the usual postcolonial perspective: ‘Since most history written by the heartland
about the West appears fictional to readers in the hinterland, it appears that
the western novelist has become the hinterland historian, and magic realism is
one of the techniques of recording that history’.25 However, it has also been
noted that Kroetsch’s rewriting of myths through magical realism has been
strangely apolitical, unspecific, ambiguous and even meaningless, echoing criti-
cal comments about magical realism as a postcolonial genre. Kathleen Wall
says, ‘What the crow actually said was not particularly important or insightful:
what about what Kroetsch said?’26 Other critics have also noted that what the
crow says is meaningless, and that, in fact, most of the events in the novel
are difficult to interpret in a coherent way. Wall finds that ultimately ‘it is
appropriately difficult, given Kroetsch’s preoccupation with the “temptation of
meaning” to decide which causes actually operate meaningfully in Kroetsch’s
border cosmos’.27 Geert Lernout sees What the Crow Said as repetitive and oper-
ating outside history28 and Simona Bertacco notes that the novel prioritizes the
irrelevant. Bertacco concludes that ‘the words used in this novel, starting with
the description of Vera being raped by a swarm of bees, underline two things at
the same time: their being physical presences, and their inability to make any
sense whatsoever’.29 Yet again, we see how the magical realist text strains against
any politically or culturally loaded readings – the meaninglessness of the magic
refuses to conform to the ordered interpretations necessary for such readings.
Interestingly, Lecker finds that Kroetsch does not merely rewrite myths, but
that he goes further, looking for the place of the ‘un-created’ myth, the ‘silent’
realm before the origins of myth. This, however, also implies a going beyond
identity: ‘Silence may return us to the condition preceding creation, but in
doing so it also obliterates identity.’ To Lecker, ‘Kroetsch’s first concern is not
with the social, political, or economic phenomena which apparently define this
country, but with the relationship between language and being’.30 Lecker
explains this concern as emerging from Kroetsch’s attempt to articulate the
emptiness and silence that is, to Kroetsch, essentially Canadian. This emptiness
expresses both the vast hinterland of Canada, and the sense that as Kroetsch
says, colonial models of history and geography are ‘telling us [the Canadians]
that we didn’t exist’.31 Kroetsch’s statement recalls Deleuze’s idea that the miss-
ing people start creating themselves precisely when the masters proclaim there
is no one around. There may not be any shantytowns or ghettos in Kroetsch’s
hinterland, but there is a place that lacks its own myths. Kroetsch’s magical real-
ism is thus not merely about deconstructing or rewriting myths, but also about
bringing a people into existence, precisely through the act of ‘legending’ or
myth-making. It is about finding that place of Bhabha’s hybrid signifier, before
culture, where culture is created or enunciated. As he says in an unpublished
journal, Kroetsch is looking for ‘the stuff before the stuff that is history or cul-
ture or society or art’.32
However, like all magical realism, What the Crow Said is anchored in realism.
In the published notes to the novel, The Crow Journals, Kroetsch describes the
work as ‘my own (rural?) experience, basically, expanded towards the tall tale,
the mythological; but always the hard core of detail’.33 It is this ‘hard core of
detail’ that constitutes the realism of the novel, and places it in a specific time
and place. As Hutcheon notes, ‘Kroetsch’s work is rooted very firmly in the
geographical, historical, and cultural world of Alberta’.34 Just as Macondo was
clearly a coastal Colombian village during a century of transition from rural
economy to early industrialization, Big Indian is a village quite obviously in the
Canadian West, in the years after the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Just as in Macondo, the community seems to exist on the edge of modern soci-
ety, yet slowly modern inventions such as telephones and televisions creep into
their homes. The Municipality of Bigknife and village of Big Indian are located
not only on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan – no one is sure to
which province the place actually belongs – but also on the border between
agricultural and modern, between hinterland and heartland. It indeed appears

to be a place where there is an overlap between pre-capitalist and nascent capi-
talist features à la Jameson, where the prairie agricultural economy offers a
certain model of Canadian identity specifically connected to the land, in con-
trast to the dislocated modernity of the metropolitan heartlands in the east.
However, if we only consider the world of Kroetsch’s novel through Jameson’s
lens, we are likely to misunderstand its magic. Such an analysis would
immediately suggest that the magic is to be connected with the agricultural,
pre-capitalist way of life of the small community, when, in fact, it is anything but
that. Indeed, it is not an opposition between different modes of production
that lies at the heart of this novel, but an opposition between what is territorial-
ized and what is deterritorialized. As a novel about a settler colony that What the
Crow Said can be paralleled to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which revolves
around a Spanish settler colony in Latin America (indeed, native communities
are as conspicuously absent from García Márquez’s novel as they are from
Kroetsch’s). The segmented territoriality of Macondo appears in contrast to the
deterritorialized, smooth space of the jungle, while the agrarian, pre-capitalist
phase of Macondo is as territorial as the later capitalist reorganizations of the
village. What stands out, of course, is the magic, not as representative of a
pre-capitalist society, but as divergent from the territorial order of any kind of
society, and thus also altogether divergent from a Marxist analytic framework.
Indeed, the realist narration of What the Crow Said gives us a wealth of
detail about life on a prairie farm and the goings-on in the village. It is world
organized by the convergent series of family ties and social functions much
like Macondo, the territorial centre of which is the Lang farmhouse. Tiddy’s
matronly character presides over the domestic order much like Úrsula over the
Buendía household, and it is through her we get the wealth of detail about farm
life: ‘She sent her daughters out to pick beans, to shell peas, to thin the carrots
and the beets, to dig under the potato stalks with their bare hands in the cool
earth, for small new potatoes to be washed and then fried whole in butter’.35
Everything on the farm has its order and place, the land is segmented by crops
which are in turn used and stored according to traditional rules. However, from
the very beginning of the novel the detailed realism of life in a small prairie
town, where everyone has their place, is contrasted with a divergent magic. As
Vera Lang is copulating with the bees, she lets out a cry that startles the regi-
mented order of the town:
Big Indian, at that hour was quiet. The train came into town from the west
three days a week, returned on alternate days. But the clanging of cream cans
being unloaded had not yet begun. The drayman had rattled his team and
wagon through the gravel streets and stopped beside the platform. The egg
crates were stacked and ready for loading. The farmers were sitting quiet in
the spring sun, in front of the hardware store, in front of the pool hall. Doors
were propped open along Main Street, the businessmen inside waiting for
shipments of parts of machinery, waiting for the farmers to stir alive before
going home to supper and chores [. . .]. They had expected a steam loco-
motive’s whistle, all those loafing and waiting men; they heard a sound that
was almost human. (WCS 5)
Vera’s cry is almost human, but not quite, as, overwhelmed by a swarm of bees,
she finds herself in the throes of a magical becoming-animal: ‘The hum of
wings melded earth and sky into the thickness of her skin. She had no mind
left for thinking, no fear, no dream, no memory. The bees closed her mouth,
her ears’ (WCS 4). Like Pi and the tiger in Life of Pi, through the magical crystal-
line sign, Vera and the bees, as well as Vera and the earth and sky, become
indiscernible. Vera can be said to become-bee, and become-earth and -sky
through the bees.
We can now read such a magical crystalline sign as a hybrid signifier. The
incomprehensible inhuman cry, like the ‘boum, ouboum’ of the Malabar Caves
in Forster, emerges in the confrontation between colonizer and colonized land,
the settler Canadian and the hinterland landscape, the woman and the bees,
earth and sky. It is precisely the ‘incomplete signification’ of such a sign that
opens up the ‘in-between’ space of the hybrid signifier. As we have already
noted, such a magical moment makes no sense, has no particular meaning. It is
an object = x in divergence to the set ways of the village. Indeed, as Bhabha says,
it is in the very meaninglessness of the hybrid signifier that meaning and thus
culture is articulated: it is the ‘stuff’ before history and culture, in Kroetsch’s
words. That is, the magic in What the Crow Said appears not in contrast to a
modern or capitalist culture, but in contrast to culture itself. Importantly, how-
ever, it does not appear simply as an opposition to or negation of culture, but as
the condition of culture. Thus, while the magic of What the Crow Said resists a
political or historicist reading, it can be seen as a supplement to the historical,
social and even political conditions of the text, precisely as the ahistorical
condition of culture.
The magic of Vera’s encounter with the bees is not only a rewriting of
myth, but a return to a place where myths can be invented. The result of Vera’s
magical coupling is a son that is part animal, who returns from the wild a young
man, after his mother has had to abandon him to coyotes as a baby. However,
this is another becoming-animal that does not follow the lines of any existing
myths; the boy is not the monster we expect, but the ‘monster’ of a Deleuzian
simulacrum. He is not half-bee nor even half-wolf and half-man, but a rather
neat boy who speaks only in pig-latin and can foresee the weather. On the one
hand, Kroetsch is inverting the mythical figure of Cassandra here, just as, in
one sense, he was rewriting the myth of Zeus and Danae in Vera’s rape by the
bees. Vera’s boy is a soothsayer whom people actually believe when they manage
to understand his strange utterances, but who does not tell the truth at all:
‘ “The ercilessmay unsay shall urnbay us,” he yipped and barked. “Be repared-
pay” ’ (WCS 128). Soon afterwards a deluge starts. On the other hand, then, we
can read Vera’s boy and his nonsensical prophesies as another hybrid signifier,
the ‘in-between’ space that emerges as an effect of the confrontation between
the settlers and a climate they cannot understand. It is as such that Vera’s boy is
a part of the regime of the ‘false’ or a new myth: he is a story without origins.
The magic is not the revision of the mythical, but the act of ‘legending in
flagrante delicto’ as seen in Perrault’s film (coincidentally also about a Canadian
hinterland community). What is at stake here is not a re-articulation of ‘cultural
knowledge’ through myth, but, to use Bhabha’s terminology, the ‘extinction of
the recognizable object of culture’ (LC 180). Indeed, it is precisely this extinc-
tion, that is, the very meaninglessness of the hybrid sign or the ahistoricity of
the magical event, that allows it to become new myth.
Just as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, then, the lack of meaning in the magi-
cal signs is marked, and crucial, in What the Crow Said. Not only are the magical
signs difficult to interpret; they seem without cause and effect. Liebhaber has
the magical ability of remembering the future, but he is entirely unable to do
anything about it, whether it is the death of Martin Lang or a flood that he
foresees. Martin Lang’s ghost appears and disappears without much impact.
A man makes a Lang daughter pregnant with genitals he lost in the war. Bees
hail down frozen in ice after Liebhaber fires them from a cannon into the
sky. Another man is taken up in the air by an eagle, survives the fall, but dies
by drowning in the latrine he lands in. As in Macondo, there are numerous
magical events that seem to be signs and omens that should have some signifi-
cance, but which actually only appear strange and divergent from the reality
around them. Most notable is perhaps the talking crow. Despite the title, the
presence of the crow does not play a central role in the novel. The crow appears,
hangs around Tiddy’s mute son JG and one day starts speaking. It almost exclu-
sively deals out insults to the world, especially to the Big Indian men. Instead
of being meaningful, what the crow said is as empty as the cawing that the
men take up: ‘ “Bugger off,” the black crow said. “Caw caw caw,” Leo Weller said’
(WCS 76). Here we find another magical becoming-animal, where, while the
crow appears to become human, the men become crows. As we saw in the
previous chapter, becoming is precisely the zone of indiscernibility of the crys-
talline sign or sign of art, where ‘beasts and persons [. . .] endlessly reach that
point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation’ (WIP 173). Like
Bhabha’s hybrid signifier, becoming is an example of the very ‘structure of dif-
ference’ or ‘the in-between space’ where meanings are negotiated or created,
prior to the individuation and differentiation of society or even species.
Kroetsch is, indeed, explicitly concerned with the conditions of meaning in
What the Crow Said, and it becomes clear that the magic of his text is, in fact,
necessary for him to fully work through these concerns. Liebhaber, a writer and
printer, is throughout the novel struggling with words and their meanings: ‘He
thought of the letter O, from his collection of wood type. He tried to let it
become a mere circle. A cat’s eye. The perfect circle of a soap bubble. He would
free the O from the O, let back into the world the zero of ought’ (WCS 64).
However, Liebhaber, just like the realist narration describing his actions, fails
to free himself from meaning: ‘He set the word OUT, building from the T he
had tried to mock out of meaning, He left the T on the table. He placed the U
on a windowsill. He carried the O into his living room. But he knew the word
OUT was still OUT’ (WCS 47). The realist narration here literally remains in an
ordered domestic space, at the same time as language itself remains lodged in
the regime of signs that makes ‘out’ out.
In contrast, the magic of the novel succeeds where realism and Liebhaber
fail, taking us beyond meaning to the virtual conditions of meaning. The men’s
cawing, as a sign, or hybrid signifier, of their becoming-non-human, takes place
during a 151-day Schmier card game. The card game starts in Tiddy’s parlour
but moves on to the basement of a church and then a player’s poor shack of
a home. The card players, having no time for anything else, ever more dirty,
hungry and bedraggled, become progressively less human. The fantastically
long game is a magical event, divergent from the ordered rural life of Big
Indian, divergent, in fact, from any society predicated on a mode of production
as it is, of course, non-productive: entirely fruitless and meaningless. Kroetsch,
in The Crow Journals, notes the episode as ‘The meaning that doesn’t quite
mean’, the card players recognizing that ‘all the numbers and pictures on
the cards mean nothing’, and that they are engaged in an endless game without
significance.36 The magical episode of the game thus manages to do what
Liebhaber could not: reveal the disconnection between signs and meanings,
and liberate utterances from any significance, as in the men’s ‘caw caw’.
The lack of meaning of the magic as a hybrid signifier indicates its lack of
productivity and territoriality, marking its removal from society, politics, history.
John Skandl builds a lighthouse out of ice during the winter that lasts for over
a year, but of course ultimately the beacon melts to nothing. The long winter is
a magical occurrence that like the others above, has no particular meaning, but
that does have a particular function: that of divergence from the ordered world
of the real, with its four predictable seasons, in the same way as Vera’s magical
coupling diverged from the ordered time and place of the town. Yet, as we
know, the lack of meaning in the magic object = x is also an excess of meaning.
All of these events can be given a range of meanings, in particular around sym-
bolic values such as male and female, human and natural, settler and Native.37
Yet none of these are final or stable in any way. Indeed, all such meanings are,
as Bhabha says, present ‘all at once’ in the magical signs. Is the crow a symbol
of Native Indian culture, conspicuously absent from Big Indian itself, the idiot
savant voice of the retarded JG, or a representation of the vanity and uselessness
of the men playing cards?
The meaninglessness of these events ensures that as Bhabha says of his
hybrid signifier, they do not constitute a return to anthropology or ethnic
studies, or an ‘accumulation of cultural knowledge’. However, the fact that
their lack of meaning is predicated on the moment of the present ‘all at once’,
that is, in Deleuzian terms, the indiscernibility of meanings, is crucial. It is this
indiscernibility that as we saw in the last chapter, reveals the sign of art as an act
of new creation to Deleuze. It is therefore this indiscernibility that is key to the
magic as a hybrid signifier appearing as the condition of culture. As Lecker says,
Kroetsch searches to find the chaos before any sources, tries to make the world
pre-fixtual, attempts to write the ‘the un-named, the de-created, the un-invented,
the de-mythologized’.38 Like Deleuze and Guattari’s art that embodies the
virtual chaos, the magic in What the Crow Said thus works as a hybrid signifier,
enacting the ‘total ambiguity’ that Kroetsch suggests lies behind language, soci-
ety and culture.39 It is in this place of ambiguity that new myths – Vera and the
bees, her soothsayer son, the men’s becoming-crow, the Schmier game and so
on – are created.
Nevertheless, the fact that the ‘what the crow said’ of the title turns out to be
nothing is indicative of the relationship of the magical events to the realism in
the What the Crow Said. Like the crow, the novel’s hybrid signifiers are strangely
detached from the everyday life of the community. These new myths seem to
have little impact on Big Indian life in the end. Unlike One Hundred Years of
Solitude, or Midnight’s Children, What the Crow Said does not end in apocalypse.
There is a flood, but it does not spell wholesale destruction. In the penultimate
scene of the novel, in a moment of magical coincidence, Vera on a floating
house together with her admirer Martin Straw are saved, disappearing down
the swollen river through a gap in the CN bridge, while Vera’s boy in a boat and
Jerry Lapanne, one of Tiddy’s daughter’s admirers, in an aeroplane, simultane-
ously crash into the bridge. This semi-magical climax is a moment when as
Jackman says, ‘the world of Crow exists suspended in a moment when transfor-
mation is possible’.40 However, the moment is also as meaningless and ineffec-
tual as all the magical events in the novel: nothing actually changes in Big
Indian.
In the final part of the novel Liebhaber and Tiddy become lovers, in a scene
of bliss and hope reminiscent of the endings of Nights at the Circus and Beloved.
As in these novels, this scene of love is entirely realist, leading Slemon to argue
that ‘the fantastic element in the novel never quite manages to dominate an
undercurrent of realism’ (MRPD 410). Somewhat incongruously, Slemon also
finds that in the union of Tiddy and Liebhaber, the binary oppositions of the
text, represented by the male and female, are resolved. To Slemon, this ‘infi-
nitely suspended moment that fuses the real with the numinous in the actuat-
ing imagination’ is what ‘in postcolonial terms [. . .] represents an imaginative
projection into the future, where the fractures of colonialism heal’ through a
‘positive imaginative reconstruction of reality’ (MRPD 415).41 In fact, the final
scene is a definite return to the territorial order of realism, after the climactic
magical moment. There may be a ‘healing’ of fractures, but it is not effectuated
by any magic, but by return to daily life on the farm, in the same way that, in
Beloved, Sethe’s personal healing could only start through a renewed engage-
ment with human relationships. That is, as we have previously suggested, the
reconstruction of identity can only take place within the order of society.
Tiddy’s daughters are doing what they always have done: Rose is burying a
chick, Theodora is playing ball, Rita is writing letters, Gladys is in the barn
and so on. They are all engaged in the repetitive activities that have identified
them throughout the novel, in their domestic, territorial setting. It is against
the backdrop of this domestic idyll that Tiddy and Liebhaber finally find each
other.
It seems that in What the Crow Said, though Kroetsch begins to imagine new
myths, it is not these myths but the territoriality of everyday life that provides a
resolution. In the novel magic works as a hybrid signifier, which, in what Bhabha
would call the colonial encounter, opens up a space where myths can be
invented. While this encounter is made possible by a historical situation, the
resulting hybrid signifier escapes history, entering the realm of the conditions
of society and culture. As in Beloved, the magic of What the Crow Said can perhaps
be seen as a catalyst to the healing restoration of relationships. However, if in
Beloved such a restoration was a matter of life and death for Sethe, in Big Indian
the magic seems to have little effect. Perhaps, in the privileged Canadian settler
community there is simply no need fully to explore the possibilities of imagin-
ing a ‘new people’. As we have seen, Deleuze tells us that ‘The artist or the
philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people [. . .]. A people can only be
created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with
art or philosophy’ (WIP 110). In Beloved, then, the magic of Beloved herself
acted as a catalyst to a healing restoration of community and identity, but the
strength of that community and identity actually came from the shared suffer-
ings of the people. If in What the Crow Said the return to a domestic territorial
order is merely a return to the conditions at the outset of the novel, implying
no progress and change, in Beloved, we have to remember, the ‘return’ to the
territorial order of the domestic was, in fact, a progression from the despotic
order of slavery. Perhaps certain real conditions, the ‘sufferings’ of real people,
are necessary in order for the magic to work properly as a catalyst for change.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986): The Reality

of Migrants and Nomadic Magic
Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason has inevitably been compared to Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, as part of a ‘recent genealogy of Indian writing in English
commonly if loosely drawn together around a notion of magical realism’,42 at
the same time as its difference from the Rushdiesque model of magical realism
has been noted. Ghosh’s magical realism is more sparse than both Rushdie’s
and García Márquez’s. In contrast to Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of
Solitude, there is no steady stream of magical events, only a few magical moments,
together with an intricate rambling narrative, often seemingly lacking in direc-
tion and logic, yet undoubtedly realist. It is actually this chaotic narrative that
has led The Circle of Reason to be seen as more historically and socially anchored
than Rushdie’s exuberant magic that threatens to ‘slip into ahistorical

playfulness’,43 or as less lyrical and more responsive to the ‘specificity and
multifacetedness of experience’ than both Rushdie and García Márquez.44
It appears that a richness in realist narrative together with a sparseness in magic
is perceived as more historically specific, as might indeed be expected from our
analysis of magical realism so far. John Hawley notes that Ghosh’s realist prose
betrays his anthropological background – it presents us with a careful observa-
tion of characters, settings and history, with all its attendant realist detail.45
However, as we shall see, Ghosh’s novel is not that different, after all, to its
magical realist predecessors. While supernatural magical events are few in the
novel, there are several elements in the narrative that, while not supernatural,
perform a magical function as objects = x. Several elements of the realist narra-
tive, such as sewing machines and carbolic acid, appear as repeated motifs
which, while they seem to have significance or symbolic value, much like the
magic omens in What the Crow Said or One Hundred Years of Solitude, are actually
unsettlingly void of logic or meaning.
In addition, Ghosh treats his postcolonial material differently to Rushdie.
While Rushdie is thought of as celebrating the cultural diversity of diaspora
and migrant communities, Ghosh provides a critical account of such a positive
view of migration. As Kavita Dayia notes, Ghosh criticizes both postcolonial
nationalism and globalization. He focuses on those ‘in-between travellers’ that
are not benefited by either: those who do not fit into any emergent national
identity, and for whom global migrancy does not mean privileged cultural
insights, but disempowerment, violence and poverty.46 Ghosh’s novel is interest-
ing as it is concerned with the physical deterritorialization of people, its actual
removal from the territory of the nation state.
Ghosh has expressed the view that the postcolonial or Third World does not
have the nation as its ‘central imaginative unit’ – in contrast to both Jameson
and Bhabha. Rather he argues that while the First World novel centres on the
nation, the Third World novel centres on the family in all its forms.47 In The
Circle of Reason the apparently haphazard movement of the protagonist, Alu,
between various surrogate families, functions as a unifying thread in the chaotic
narrative. Nevertheless, although Ghosh does not believe that the nation is key
to Third World literature, The Circle of Reason can still be seen as an allegory in
Jameson’s sense, but of the migrant’s situation rather than that of an emergent
nation, one in which the migrant drifts at the mercy of the currents of politics
and economics, unable to control his or her own destiny. In fact, the novel
can be seen as a representation of the dislocation of peoples as an effect of
the struggle between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production. Such a
reading would have to place the migrant as abject, removed from the possibility
of controlling any modes of production, thus removed from any agency
within this struggle. This analysis, however, would miss some of the key points
of Ghosh’s novel, for Alu, as we shall see, appears different to the majority of
migrants in the novel.
Robert Dixon notes that Ghosh ‘understands that the routes of international
trade are over-determined by economic forces; that they tell a history of
imperial exploitation’.48 Ghosh’s narrative, indeed, in a realist manner, portrays
the vicissitudes of the lives of the refugees and migrants resulting from such
exploitation. However, Ghosh complicates the opposition between capitalist
and pre-capitalist society, between imperialist exploitation and the exploited,
and the main tool he uses to do so is the magic or quasi-magic in the novel.
Much has been made of the contrast between reason and non-reason in the
novel, but the conclusion has always been that it is impossible to say what the
message of the novel is on this subject. Both Western reason and old Hindu
beliefs are shown as arbitrary, both modern science and traditional life lead to
disasters and disappointments. Indeed, Dixon goes on to note that Ghosh
deconstructs the simple modernity–tradition, occidental–oriental binaries.49
What Ghosh shows us is that for the people leading the chaotic life of the
migrant or refugee, the order of a society, whether traditional or modern,
appears crucial. Indeed, in a Marxist materialist analysis the participation in
either pre-capitalist or capitalist modes of production would be necessary to
gain some kind of political agency. However, in Ghosh’s novel any organization
of the migrants, whether based on a capitalist or pre-capitalist model, any
attempt at imposing a territorial order on the chaotic world of their commu-
nity, is doomed to failure. A simple Jamesonian reading of magical realism as a
struggle between modes of production is clearly limited here, as this struggle is
portrayed as not only destructive, but futile. Yet this failure to order society does
not necessarily mean the loss of all hope, as Ghosh attempts, through the magic
in his novel, to capture the possibility of a movement beyond territorial order.
The magical elements in The Circle of Reason, as we would by now expect, can-
not be seen as a representation of a particular mode of production, society or
cultural world-view. Instead they appear as that which escapes such organiza-
tion; escapes, that is, rather than those, who like the migrants, are excluded from
the organization of society. As in What the Crow Said the magic is that which is by
definition non-productive in a territorial sense, and therefore is also what a
historicist analysis cannot but fail to define, but the magic is not therefore
aligned with the abject powerlessness of the migrants in The Circle of Reason. In
contrast to both society and those who are excluded from it, the magic appears
as that which has neither territory nor a relationship to it. It is precisely as such
that it has revolutionary potential.
The magic of the novel centres on the protagonist, Alu, who seems to embody
deterritorialization. The novel begins with the orphan Alu coming to stay
with his uncle Balaram in the village of Lalpukur in India. Notably, Alu lacks a
firm identity: with a prodigious talent for learning, he seems to take on the
languages and skills of whatever community he finds himself in. Alu’s incredi-
ble ability to learn languages and his unbelievable speed at the loom are some
of the first magical features in the novel. Alu learns not only Bengali, English
and Hindi, but the difficult dialect of the Bangladeshi refugees in Lalpukur.
Originally from remote Noakhali in the far east of Bengal, these refugees
emigrated to India after partition, and Ghosh tells us that ‘most of them had
left everything but their dialect behind’.50 The refugees’ dialect is ‘a mark of
common belonging and [. . .] a secret weapon to confuse strangers with’
(CR 27). That is, a last mark of identity, a vestige of territory clung on to by
those who have been dispossessed of any territory. In contrast, the fact that ten-
year-old Alu miraculously learns a dialect, which even his uncle after sixteen
years in the village can barely understand, is a movement of deterritorialization.
Alu does not gain any sense of belonging through his prodigious learning.
He remains an outsider who, despite his knowledge of many languages, barely
speaks or interacts with village life. Thus Ghosh contrasts the realism of the
refugees’ situation with Alu’s magic, their painful loss of territory with his ease
at learning their language. In the same way Alu’s incredible talent for weaving
is pitted against a three-page politico-economic history of cotton and weaving
(CR 55–58). Interestingly, Ghosh, through the character of Alu’s uncle Balaram,
connects both the learning of languages and weaving to reason, a faculty
Balaram obsessively privileges. Balaram tries to find a place for his strange
nephew in his world-view based on science and reason, but Alu, despite his
ability to learn, seems always to escape his plans. Alu’s abilities have nothing to
do with reason, logic or science. Instead, Alu appears as an empty sign through-
out the novel, an object = x that can take on any value, just as he can learn any
language or profession.
Alu is not so much a migrant as a nomad in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.
Whereas a migrant moves from point A to point B, that is, has a point of
departure as well as arrival (even if it may never be reached), the nomad moves
on a continuous trajectory where points A and B are merely temporary stops.
The migrant always retains a connection to territory, even if only as a memory
or aim, whereas the nomad’s journey is a complete deterritorialization
(TP 380–381). Indeed, in the novel, the physical deterritorialization of refugees
and migrants, their loss of territory, is emphatically not equated with the deter-
ritorialization of its magical elements and their lack of territory. The refugees
in Lalpkur retain their dialect as the territorial marker of their point of origin,
which for many is perhaps also a desired point of return. Alu, however, in his
trajectory through The Circle of Reason, has neither firm origin nor goal. The
families he temporarily becomes part of and the places he finds himself in are
merely stopovers on a continual journey. In the same way, the skills he learns
are merely pauses or stops in a continual movement through his own lack of
identity.
As we would expect, Alu’s deterritorialization always appears as divergent and
different from the political specifics of the novel. While Ghosh tells us that
Alu’s loom ‘poured out rainbows of cloth with magical ease’ (CR 75), he also
recounts two territorial battles going on around his protagonist. One battle is
comical, between two equally extreme adherents of ‘reason’: Balaram believes
the village can be saved by the disinfectant powers of carbolic acid, while his
former friend, now nemesis, Bhudeb Roy, insists that straight roads are the
answer to all their problems. However, alongside their absurd ideas of ‘militant
reason’ there is a much more violent struggle, for which the weaver’s son Rakhal
is making bombs. ‘Wars keep people busy,’ says Ghosh, ‘as a rule the spectators
are the busiest of all. Some keep busy helping armies with their business of
murder and massacre, loot and rapine. Others are left with blood trickling
their way and no choice but to join the flow or mop it up’ (CR 59). Most of
Lalpukur consists of those who ‘mop it up’, taking in a new wave of refugees
from Bangladesh. However, Rakhal is one of those who joins in, not because of
any allegiance, but because he can make money by making bombs. It is the
coming together of these two battles, of reason and of war, that leads to the loss
of Alu’s family in Lalpukur. When the police get involved in the village rivalry,
a warning flare ignites the explosives that Rakhal has stored in Balaram’s house.
The resulting explosion wipes out all things that tie Alu to Lalpukur: his home,
his family, his loom and his sweetheart. Alu, in himself lacking both identity
and place, easily becomes labelled as a terrorist, and has to flee the police.
While his family and friends lose their lives to the territorial struggles they are
either spectators to or participants in, Alu literally remains on the outside – by
a quasi-magical coincidence he finds himself outside the house, itself predi-
cated on territory, when it goes up in flames.
Ghosh, here, on the one hand, uses the comical value of the rivalry between
Balaram and Bhudeb Roy and its parallels to the ongoing war to indicate that
wars are fought over apparently ‘reasonable’ but actually arbitrary causes, and
on the other, contrasts the territorial ‘life and death struggle’ in Jameson’s
words, with the deterritorialized nomadic magic of Alu. The first movement
belongs to the realist narration of the novel: the parallel between Balaram and
Bhudeb Roy’s rivalry and the war can be drawn because they are both territorial
struggles, essentially over how something should be ordered. While the war is
directly about the division of land in one way or another, the fight in the village
is about whether things should be divided into clean and dirty or straight and
crooked. Both fights belong to the same regime of signs that governs realism:
the territorial regime of signs of the State. However, in contrast to this realism,
the magical deterritorialization of Alu allows the text to do something entirely
different than articulating either the territoriality of social struggles, or, indeed,
the human misery that is the fall-out of these struggles. Again, Bhabha’s distinc-
tion between cultural diversity and hybridity is useful here. Ghosh’s parallel
between Balaram’s and Bhudeb Roy’s interpretations of Western science and
the war is a matter of cultural diversity: ‘the acquisition or accumulation of
additional cultural knowledge’ is paralleled with the acquisition or accumula-
tion of territory. The magic of Ghosh’s magical realism, however, like Kroetsch’s,
allows him to go beyond instances of culture to the conditions of culture. In
Bhabha’s terms, Alu, as a hybrid signifier appearing in the encounter between
Western reason and Indian village life, becomes the very ‘structure of difference’
that underlies any production of cultural identity in Ghosh’s postcolonial text.
As we shall see, it is precisely as such that he can become the site for making
myths for a ‘missing people’, but with a very different effect to the disengaged
myths in What the Crow Said.
What saves Alu from immolation is one of the quasi-magical objects of the
novel – the sewing machine – which his aunt asks him to dispose of, thus
making him leave the house before the explosion. To Alu’s childless aunt the
sewing machine is a child substitute, and to Alu it becomes a strange talisman
for survival: his aunt’s plea that he buy her a better sewing machine stays with
him, magically saving him from being killed yet again, and leading him on his
trajectory towards the West. The sewing machine is another object = x, child to
Tori-debu, talisman to Alu. Even its meaning as a sign for the industrialized
West is ultimately deterritorialized – ‘Don’t worry about the sewing machine;
they make them better at home now’ (CR 422), Alu is told by an Indian country-
man. What makes the sewing machine work as magic is the fact that it, like Alu
himself, is a hybrid signifier, opening up that gap of signification in the encoun-
ter between India and the West. In Deleuze’s terms, these hybrid signifiers,
present the actual encounter between India and the West, colonizer and colo-
nized as ‘the set of almost negative conditions’ that ‘make possible the experi-
mentation’ of the magic, which in itself escapes both India and the West.
In the second part of the novel the opposition between the territorial real
and deterritorialized magic continues, as Alu’s magical, nomadic adventures
are contrasted with other migrants’ continual search for territory and identity.
On the boat from Calcutta to Al-Ghazira, Alu is plagued by mysterious boils,
which appear inexplicably after the disaster in Lalpukur. Alu does not get rid of
the boils until he is saved again by sewing machines, but what the boils signify is
hard to say. It is suggested that the ghost of his uncle is haunting his body, but
this suggestion is not sustained. The boils appear to have some significance,
but Ghosh never allows them to assume it. In effect, they might be merely the
physical symptoms of Alu’s lack of identity and belonging. In contrast to this
magical aporia, one of the other passengers on the boat, Khartamma, in labour
but desperately trying to prevent her baby being born, is a clear representation
of the real dilemma of ‘in-between travellers’. She has been told that if her baby
is born an Al-Ghaziri citizen it will have a better life, and is adamant that she
needs to sign a form for this to happen: ‘She says that she knows that the child
won’t be given a house or a car or anything at all if she doesn’t sign the forms.
It’ll be sent back to India, she says, and she would rather kill it than allow that
to happen’ (CR 177). It is clear that territory is crucial to the refugee or migrant,
that it indicates the difference between a life worth living and one that is not.
This consideration of territory and the loss of it is borne out in the second part
of the novel by its realist setting and characters. Al-Ghazira is a fictional Arab
peninsula oil state, but its history of struggle for territory between the ruling
Malik, the British and the oil corporations clearly refers to a real historical
and geographical situation. Al-Ghazira is a place that is strictly segmented: the
territories of the Arab population, the corporate-owned Oiltown and the ghetto
of migrant workers are clearly divided. The last, called Ras al-Maqtu’, the
Severed Head, provides Alu with a new community of migrants. He is taken in
by Zindi, an entrepreneur, landlady and brothel madam, the various itinerant
workers and prostitutes inhabiting her house becoming his new substitute
‘family’. These are realist characters, telling us about Al-Ghazira’s past and
enacting its present situation: the low-paid jobs, the prejudice and the poverty
in the shade of riches that constitute a migrant worker’s life.
Alu is nearly killed by one of the symbols of these riches: a new skyscraper
shopping centre collapses while he is inside working on its construction. Again,
in contrast to the migrants who are metaphorically crushed by the Al-Ghaziri
inequality between rich and poor, Alu literally escapes the destructive exclusion
from territorial belonging that the skyscraper stands for. He is magically saved
by two cast-iron sewing machines preventing the rubble crushing him, and
incredibly survives for several days without food or water until he is saved. In
addition, his boils disappear, and he is inspired to preach to the inhabitants of
the Ras about cleanliness. Having been rescued, he addresses the gathered
crowd in tongues: ‘Arabic with Hindi, Hindi swallowing Bengali, English doing
a dance; tongues unravelled and woven together – nonsense, you say, tongues
unravelled are nothing but nonsense – but there again you have a mystery, for
everyone understood him perfectly’ (CR 279). This is another hybrid signifier,
magical and nonsensical. Bhabha says that the hybrid signifier is a space of
undecidability, where all possible meanings exist at the same time, and which
opens up possibilities for ‘other narrative spaces’ (LC 255). However, such nar-
rative spaces do not mean the ‘return of the subject as agent’ as Bhabha
suggests, but the possibility of thinking Deleuze’s new people.
Alu himself is unsure of the meaning of what he is saying – that money equals
dirt and needs to be cleansed – but he enables others to imagine a plan for the
Ras and interpret his words into action. Soon the carbolic acid is flowing in
the Ras, and all money is pooled. Alu, however, ‘could no longer understand
what he’d started’ (CR 315). Recall how at the end of Sexing the Cherry, Dog
Woman appeared as the virtual contemporaneous past of the chemist, and this
simultaneity in time worked as a catalyst for revolutionary action. In the same
way, the moment of simultaneous meanings in the hybrid signifier of Alu’s
speech acts as a catalyst for the people of the Ras. The motley migrant commu-
nity suddenly mobilize in a flagrant anti-capitalist movement, rejecting the
each-to-their-own mentality, turning away exploitative labour contractors and
setting up a system to share their assets. The unwanted people of the Ras are
precisely people who, in Deleuze’s phrase, live ‘in a state of perpetual minori-
ties, in a collective identity crisis’, and who ‘invent themselves, in shanty towns
and camps, or in ghettos’ (C2 209). What makes these people invent themselves
is precisely a crisis and trance similar to that which Deleuze finds in his ‘Third
World’ cinema?: Alu’s near-death experience and visionary insights. We saw
that Kroetsch’s magic was an act of making new myths, myths that do not have
an origin, that is, a people. Rather, these new myths are precisely what allow a
‘missing people’ to appear, indeed, to become apparent in its very absence.
For a moment, then, a missing people appears in Ghosh’s novel as the possi-
bility of thinking a future people. In Alu’s words: ‘We will drive money from the
Ras, and without it we shall be happier, richer, more prosperous than ever
before’ (CR 281). Stephanie Jones sees Alu’s revelation as a typical magical real-
ist cliché, a ‘moment of magical reason [that] quickly resolves into the reality of
administration and the potential for corruption’.51 Therefore she concludes
that Ghosh does not offer a workable alternative to modernity. Clearly, Alu’s
ecstasy does not offer a real, workable political agenda, but, in the revolutionary
deterritorialization of his magical survival and nonsensical trance-like speech,
he at least opens that space where a new people can be thought outside the
cultural and historical constraints of the specific context. If in a Marxist Jame-
sonian analysis the relationship of historical conditions to the text is ‘one of a
limiting situation’ (PU 134), then in a Deleuzian theory the magic is an element
of the text that escapes the limits of this situation.
The power of this invention of a new people is attested by the fact that it
poses an immediate threat to the territorial order of the Al-Ghaziri State. The
people, having pooled their money, decide to go on a mass shopping trip to the
rich parts of Al-Ghazira. They traverse the boundaries of the segmented state,
leaving their ‘proper’ place, entering the spaces they have previously been
excluded from. However, this excursion from the Ras is interpreted as a coup-
attempt by the authorities, who react with force, massacring the shoppers. The
State brutally reterritorializes those that have dared to cross the boundaries
of its order. Despite this disastrous outcome, in The Circle of Reason the very
thinking of a new people has a noticeable effect on the existing people, as
opposed to the new myths of What the Crow Said. The question is, of course, why
this should be so. Both the settlers of the Canadian hinterland and the people
of the Ras can be said to be ‘minorities’ with ‘identity crises’, but, clearly, their
situations are also vastly different. The magical elements in the two novels may
work in the same way, through deterritorialization, but, ultimately, the effect of
the magic on the real will depend on the particular situation of the existing
peoples, represented by the realism of the two novels, not the magic. ‘A people
can only be created in abominable sufferings’, says Deleuze, and it appears that
it is indeed the real sufferings of the migrants in The Circle of Reason that mean
that the invention of a new people is translated into action. In What the Crow
Said, the hinterland life may be territorial, but it is also reassuring and healing
in its domesticity and order. That is, the magic may appear as the new myths of
a missing people in any situation, but it is merely a conduit or ‘leaven’ for the
appearance of a new people, as Deleuze says. In Beloved the magic acted as a
catalyst to a reconstruction of Sethe’s identity, by the very fact that it was
antithetical to any identity. Similarly, in certain situations, such as the polluted
London in Sexing the Cherry or, even more poignantly, the abject Ras in The Circle
of Reason, the magic acts as a catalyst to political action, although, in itself, it

is nothing so territorial as political action. It is important to note that the
magical moment is not the actual burning of the chemical factory or London
in Winterson’s novel, nor the mass mobilization of the people in the Ras,
but the moments of crisis that gives these actions their impetus – instants of
Bhabha’s momentary extinction of culture.
After the massacre, Alu yet again finds himself a suspected terrorist and is
forced to flee, and again he is mysteriously afflicted: his thumbs have stopped
working. In the final part of The Circle of Reason Alu is on the run in North Africa
with Zindi, the prostitute Kulfi and Khartamma’s baby – another strange
familial unit – pursued by Jyoti Das, an Indian policeman who has been on
Alu’s heels since the events at Lalpukur. Pretending to be a married couple
travelling with their nanny in order to obtain medical care for the baby, the
group find themselves involved in the staging of a play, based on a legend
from the Mahabharata, by a couple of Indian doctors. Ghosh here renews his
exploration of the juxtaposition of reason and Hindu beliefs, modern thought
and old traditions. While both are modern scientists, Dr Verma believes that
staging the play will ‘give everyone a glimpse of our country and our culture’
whereas her colleague, the sceptical Dr Mishra, counters that a realistic view of
their culture would be to ‘show them how all those fancily dressed-up brides are
doused with kerosene and roasted alive when they can’t give their grooms
enough dowry’ (CR 379). However, Ghosh again goes further than just compar-
ing various views on the subject of culture by making an apparently real object
work in a magical way.
When Kulfi unexpectedly dies of heart failure, Dr Verma is keen to give her a
proper Hindu burial, and is again berated by Dr Mishra. He points out the lack
of reason in the ritual of cleansing a body in the dirty waters of the Ganges, as
well as in Verma’s substitution of carbolic acid for holy water. Ghosh emphasizes
the relativity of both religious beliefs and the ‘tyranny’ of scientific facts: ‘What
does it matter if it’s Ganga-jal or carbolic acid? It’s just a question of cleaning
the place, isn’t it? People thought something was clean once, now they think
something else is clean. What difference does it make to the dead?’ (CR 411).
Yet here Ghosh again moves away from merely considering what Bhabha would
call cultural diversity towards another hybrid signifier. Carbolic acid becomes
one of the quasi-magical elements of the novel, something that is able to take
on different symbolic values for Balaram, the people of the Ras and Dr Verma.
Ultimately, the presence of carbolic acid in Ghosh’s novel cannot be reduced to
any one message. Instead, it becomes a hybrid signifier, meaningless yet with a
multitude of meanings: to Balaram the acid is a way of imposing order, to the
inhabitants of the Ras a way of breaking down the monetary order that impris-
ons them. To Dr Verma it becomes a way of being an Indian abroad. In each
instance the carbolic acid is the magical element, the moment of deterritorial-
ization central to a new myth for a ‘missing’ people, a people that are explicitly
not the refugees of Lalpukur, the migrants of the Ras or the Indian diaspora.
That is, a people that is new, precisely because it escapes the conditions of any
existing people. These myths work as catalysts for action, although in Ghosh’s
novel more often than not this action ends in apocalypse – the explosion in
Lalpukur and the massacre in Al-Ghazira – echoing the destructive results of
magic in Midnight’s Children. However, the action that the new myth of carbolic
acid inspires at the end of the novel, Dr Verma’s funeral rites, lead to a hopeful
ending for the novel, despite these disasters.
As Kulfi’s presumed husband, Alu has to light the funeral pyre, something he
fears he cannot do because of his defective thumbs. Magically, however, his
thumbs have healed, as Dr Verma assures him: ‘Your thumbs are all right [. . .].
Really. You can do whatever you like as long as you want to’ (CR 417). It may
seem as if Alu has finally gained some individuality and agency, but Ghosh does
not allow his magical protagonist such a straightforward ending. Alu is still
going where he is directed: being given Kulfi’s ashes, he follows Verma’s advice:
‘She said it would give me a good reason to go home’ (CR 418). Where this
home is, however, is never made clear. The end of the novel is merely the start
of another journey, or rather, the resumption of the trajectory of a nomadic
movement that has temporarily paused.
On the one hand, Ghosh in his novel describes the bleak lot of the global
migrant, realistically depicting the poverty, violence and restricted choices of
people who fall between the independent postcolonial nations and the riches
of globalization. As Joshi Ulka points out, the novel consists of a number of
non-productive cycles of doomed loves and failed projects, from the death of
Alu’s sweetheart Maya, to the sudden death of Kulfi just as Jyoti Das has fallen
in love with her, from Balaram’s School of Reason to the commune in the Ras.52
On the other hand, Ghosh finishes his novel with the words ‘Hope is the begin-
ning’ (CR 423). As both Alu and his pursuer Jyoti Das set out on journeys once
again, they are turning away from the past, ‘the mocking grey smudge hanging
on the horizon, pointing to continents of defeat – defeat at home, defeat in the
world’ (CR 423); and, despite everything, believing in a future. As nomads,
rather than migrants, they are the perpetual minority, always a ‘missing people’,
who can always be thought outside the constraints of such a defeated world, not
realistically, perhaps, but magically. The novel ends, as Prasad suggests, not with
any explanations, but with a renewed search for meaning.53 While the novel
cannot be said to end on a particular political message, or even a particular
vision of the future, in contrast to Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of
Solitude, The Circle of Reason does not end in apocalypse and destruction, but
renewal and hope.
Ghosh himself does not want to be categorized as a political writer, and
although he deals with historico-political situations he is distinctly not a pole-
mical writer. However, as Brinda Bose notes, he does engage in an ‘intellectual
exploration’ of the contexts of modern history, foregrounding the ‘dilemmas
of diaspora that are engendered in the margins of history’.54 This is a possible
description of the politics that Deleuze finds in minor literature and we have
found in magical realism, while it references historical conditions, it also

goes further than these, ‘intellectually exploring’ the possibilities of the future.
Magical realism thus allows Ghosh both to articulate the specific situation
of global migrants, and to think a new people, a thought that is revolutionary
precisely because it is not territorial.
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991):

The Aesthetic of Possibilities
After Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is
perhaps the postcolonial novel that has most frequently been labelled and read
as a magical realist text. While Okri’s novel shares with Rushdie’s a focus on an
emerging nation, the use of magic, and indeed the use of a magical child as a
national allegory, it is a very different book, both stylistically and thematically.
There is a strong political and historical current in the novel, but the magic of
The Famished Road is so pervasive that it has inevitably been seen as problematic.
The narrator is Azaro, an abiku or spirit-child. In the lore of the Yorùbá people
of West Africa the abiku is a mischievous spirit child that dies and is reborn
repeatedly, bringing grief to its parents. Azaro, however, decides in one of his
cycles of rebirth to hang on to life. Nevertheless, his link to the spirit-world,
which wants to lure him back, is never broken, and allows, or perhaps forces,
Azaro to perceive a magical spiritual realm that coexists with the human world
around him. The novel has little in the way of a conventional plot, but traces
Azaro’s episodic adventures in the Lagos ghetto where he lives. The majority of
these adventures are in some way magical, and the book may give the impres-
sion of being set in a quasi-magical world. In fact, however, as Derek Wright
puts it, the setting of the Lagos ghetto provides the ‘harrowing social realism
used to present the grinding poverty, squalor, disease, and brutality in which
the hapless slum dwellers pass their days’.55 Azaro furnishes us with detailed
descriptions of daily life in the ghetto, centred on his small family and the
room they inhabit in a squalid compound. The magic in The Famished Road may
be much more prevalent and intense than in One Hundred Years of Solitude or
Midnight’s Children, but the realist elements of family life, domestic settings, and
the ‘village’ of the ghetto are unambiguously present, as are the historical and
geographic markers that place the novel in Nigeria just before Independence.
It is easy to see how the realism of The Famished Road is structured in a seg-
mented way, similar to the novels we have considered previously: through the
ordered series of family, the domestic world and the ghetto. However, perhaps
more poignantly than in any of these other works, it becomes clear in Okri’s
novel that such segmentation is what constitutes the political field. Recall that
the State is characterized by a rigid segmentarity. Thus the movement towards
independence as a nation-state is inevitably a movement of territorialization.
In Okri’s novel the territoriality of politics is particularly apparent in the efforts
by the two political parties to gain power – literally territory – in the ghetto.
Ghosh implies that both pre-capitalist and capitalist world-views impose arbi-
trary rules on a chaotic world. Okri shows that the Party of the Rich and the
Party of the Poor work in the same way: through intimidation and bribes they
segment the population of the ghetto according to political allegiance.
The realism of The Famished Road also allows us to read it in Jamesonian terms.
The novel represents the constant struggle for survival by Mum and Dad, a
hawker and a day labourer. The everyday repetition of Mum and Dad going out
to toil, bringing back barely enough money, of making do with too little food
in a rat-infested room, indicates the way they are caught, in Jameson’s terms, in
the conflict between the remnants of a pre-capitalist way of life and the increas-
ing hold of capitalism. In Deleuzian terms, Azaro’s family is caught in a rigidly
territorial State by the struggle for that territory by various interests: what
Deleuze and Guattari would call a ‘molar’ politics. The realism of the novel
depicts not only the fight for domination between the two opposing parties
and their various followers and cronies, but also between the landlord and his
tenants, and the rise in social status and change in allegiances of Madame Koto,
the bar owner. It deals with the struggle for independence, as well as the clash
between the modern and the traditional in the opposition between the build-
ing of roads by white men and the ancestral forest on the edge of the ghetto.
Indeed, The Famished Road can be seen as a national allegory, dramatizing
the vicissitudes of a Nigeria about to be born on several levels, personal and
collective. The constant births and deaths of the abiku can be posited as a meta-
phor for this process.
So a Jamesonian Marxist reading of The Famished Road is valid to some extent,
but it does not fully incorporate the magic of the novel. Reading the abiku as an
allegory is far too simple an interpretation of Azaro’s magical adventures. The
magic of the novel is so overwhelming that it is difficult to read it merely as a
tool to enhance a political message in Jameson’s sense. Numerous critics have
noted the impossibility of squaring Azaro’s spiritual encounters with any one
reading, in particular with any political agenda. Much has been made of the
fact that Okri uses Yorùbá mythology heavily in the novel: figures such as the
abiku, as well as witches and wizards, demons and grotesquely-shaped spirits,
and images such as the road and the forest. These have often been read, in the
vein of Carpentier or Jameson, as an ‘African aesthetic’56 or expression of pre-
capitalist society. However, on closer inspection, Okri’s use of this material is
idiosyncratic to say the least. The magic in his novel is by no means restricted
merely to Yorùbá mythology. In fact Okri’s magic is not reducible to simple
symbolism or allegory, as Jo Dandy notes: ‘Much of the imagery used by Okri in
The Famished Road [. . .] defies easy interpretation by the reader; that is, it delib-
erately avoids closure and specific meaning’.57 It is worth considering a longer
passage as an example of the novel’s magic episodes. Here Azaro goes through
one of his near-death experiences:
But deep inside that darkness a counterwave, a rebellion of joy, stirred. It was
a peaceful wave, breaking on the shores of my spirit. I heard soft voices
singing and a very brilliant light came closer and closer to the centre of my
forehead. And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye
opened, and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the
world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant, but it
did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid. Then my fear
turned. The light went into the new eye and into my brain and roved around
my spirit and moved in my veins and circulated in my blood and lodged itself
in my heart. And my heart burned with a searing agony, as if it were being
burnt to ashes within me. As I began to scream the pain reached its climax
and a cool feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse
journey of the brilliant light, cooling its flaming passages, till it got back to
the centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever
imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer.58
Such esoteric language, with its mix of Yorùbá elements (abiku myth, spirits) as
well as other mystical images (third eye, divine light) abounds in the frequent
magical passages of The Famished Road. It not surprising then that Wright finds
that the result is ‘such a confusing superabundance of features that they are,
paradoxically, rendered featureless [. . .] links between the book’s disparate
images – rivers and highways, dreams and hunger, nation and road-building,
political stasis and abikus – become too tenuous to be meaningful in any inter-
pretative way’,59 and Maggi Phillips complains of a ‘confusing excess of data
which is at times counter-productive in effect’.60 Counter-productive, that is, to
a traditionally conceived political reading of the novel. Wright concludes that,
‘for Okri, redemptive energy is finally not a political but a purely visionary,
imaginative quality, and the reader can be forgiven for seeing Azaro as an image
of literary self-absorption, a figure for the romantic artist’s solipsistic immersion
in a world of his own making’.61
There is a clear difference in The Famished Road between ‘old’ myths and
magic. The fact that the abiku can be seen as a national allegory indicates that
the act of thinking the nation in traditional, mythical terms is also an act of
territorialization by the State, a way of creating a territorial national identity, as
it was in Midnight’s Children. Like in Rushdie’s novel, in The Famished Road
myths are not opposed to the nation-state, although magic is. Myths are a way
of reigning in the purely different and divergent element of magic by giving it
meaning. In fact, in one sense the elements of Yorùbá myth that Okri uses in
his novel are reterritorialized magic: the road, the forest, the spirit world, the
abiku – all have specific symbolic meaning in Yorùbá cosmology. This is what
makes possible a Marxist materialist political reading of the abiku myth: pre-
cisely because the abiku myth is territorial, can it stand as a national allegory,
exposing the stasis of the politics of the existing State. In contrast to these ‘old’
myths, the missing people heralded by the entirely new myths of magic exist
only in the future, and the future is always uncertain.
Some critics, however, attempt to redeem Okri’s aporetic magic either as a

postcolonial aesthetic or as a kind of spiritual hope. Edna Aizenberg sees the
magic as an ‘enactment of the deliriums of a colonized world [. . .] the fore-
grounding of such deliriums emphasizes the text’s constant engagement with
sociopolitical and economic issues’.62 Phillips feels that through the multiplicity
of images in his novels, ‘Okri advocates a deepened, more inclusive perceptual
sense as the means by which the underprivileged peoples of the world may
effect a regenerative future’.63 Neither of those alternatives is particularly
convincing, echoing Bhabha’s insistence that an uncanny hybrid moment can
somehow become a ‘subversive strategy of subaltern agency’. In the same way
that Bhabha’s thought, as singular in Hallward’s terms, precluded such a sub-
versive strategy, so Okri’s magic, as a virtual sign of art, precludes the sociopo-
litical engagement and inclusion that Aizenberg and Phillips want to attribute
to it. The delirium of the colonized world is indeed present in the novel, but is
described quite adequately by Azaro’s realist observations. Compare the above
passage with this one:
As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with
everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pump-
ing on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling that there was no
escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity
of wounds, the stark huts, the rustic zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets,
children in rags, the little girls naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-
cans, the little boys jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun
noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the
filthy gutters. (FR 189)
As an abiku, Azaro may be an allegory for a nation about to be born before its
time, but it is the realism of Azaro’s surroundings that allows us to perceive the
material conditions of its situation. It is difficult to see how the delirium of
Azaro’s spiritual episodes can be linked to such ‘sociopolitical or economic
issues’. In both Aizenberg’s and Phillips’s statements we can detect the theoreti-
cal double bind of magical realism: the idea that magic realism, as multivalent
and hybrid, can somehow not only enact but also provide a solution to the
postcolonial situation.
This double bind, as well as its origins, is clearly apparent in Brenda Cooper’s
book Magical Realism in West African Fiction, which delivers perhaps the most
extensive reading of The Famished Road as magical realism. As discussed in the
Introduction, Cooper’s work is indicative of the way magical realism has been
approached in a postcolonial context, in particular with reference to Jameson.
Interestingly, Cooper also uses Bhabha’s theory. In fact, she notes the contradic-
tion between the politics of national struggle and the concept of hybridity, and
makes it her explicit aim to unite the two, to reintegrate ‘liminality, diversity,
multivalency’ with the explanatory historical force of Marxism (WAF 1–2).

However, Okri’s The Famished Road thwarts Cooper’s ambitions insofar as she
finds a surfeit of ambiguity in the novel that seems irreducible to any social real-
ity. On the one hand, she sees Okri as dramatizing cultural encounters, both
the opposition of Western ideas to the pre-colonial past and the celebration
of the transformation and interaction of cultures (WAF 74). On the other hand,
she realizes that ‘Okri resolutely refuses to reinforce the most obvious polarities
such as that between technological progress in opposition to the past’ (WAF 80).
Thus Cooper asserts that although ‘The Famished Road’s critique of the deca-
dence of Nigerian society is trenchant and brave’ (WAF 99), the national alle-
gory of the abiku carries no political hope: ‘The purpose of Azaro’s heroic
escape [from the spirit world] is not to be found in the awakening of the poor.
They are depicted in the novel as misguided or downtrodden’ (WAF 93).
Certainly, if one wishes to read the magic of The Famished Road as constitutive
of a plain political message, one will be disappointed. In contrast to the territo-
rial field of politics, the magic appears as distinctly different because of its
inherent deterritorialization. In the magical episodes, Okri’s language is eso-
teric and impressionistic; close, in fact, to that ‘pure and intense sonorous
material’ (KM 6) of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: ‘In the bright
white smoke I saw spirits turning into air, spirits of plants and herbs and things
I didn’t yet know about; I saw their brightness of blues and yellows, shapes and
sad faces, legs brilliant with oil becoming soot, golden eyes melting into vibrant
space’ (FR 283).
Rather than presenting a particular magic event as an object = x, the novel at
times becomes a kind of narration = x. The spirit world in itself is a site without
territory, present everywhere. It is a realm of the proliferation of series of
images, where ‘all things are linked’ (FR 553) – very much a Deleuzian virtual
realm, or Bhabha’s moment of undecidability. As Deleuze says, ‘lines of flight
have no territory. Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation of
fluxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies
and reigns’ (DII 38). Thus Azaro’s adventures appear as lines of flight not
only from the grim reality of his life but also from the ruthless territorial politics
that shape this reality. Okri’s magic has been criticized precisely as excessive,
idiosyncratic and devoid of specific messages, but if we consider it in Deleuzian
terms, it is neither a solipsistic vision nor an ‘enactment of the deliriums of a
colonized world’, but experimental and revolutionary in Deleuze’s ahistorical
sense: what Okri is doing is contributing to the invention of a ‘missing people’.
Many have noted Azaro’s lack of agency in the spiritual adventures he narrates,
and it is clear that while the magic in The Famished Road is hybrid in Bhabha’s
sense: ‘an anxious contradictory place between the human and the not-human,
between sense and non-sense’ (LC 178), it certainly does not imply the return
of subjective agency that Bhabha associates with this hybrid moment. Rather,
as a magical abiku, Azaro can become Deleuze’s collective agent or leaven, an
element through which a new people can be thought, precisely because, like
Alu in The Circle of Reason, he never gains the coherent human identity of a
proper subject.
In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari state that his ‘literature is not
a voyage through the past but one through our future’ (KM 83). The road that
appears to Azaro time and again in the spiritual world is a kind of virtual double
of the real road, leading him to numerous, different, often contradictory visions
of a future, new people. It is a road that is continually destroyed and then
rebuilt, sometimes appearing as a kind of paradise, esoterically beautiful, some-
times as a force for the destruction of nature and life itself. Like many of Azaro’s
other uncountable visions, the road is where the magic becomes a crystalline
sign, where, as we saw in What the Crow Said, the writing of myths without origin
takes place. Azaro’s visions have a strong element of Yorùbá myth, but crucially,
Okri also deviates from these myths, inventing entirely new legends. It is a
matter, as Perrault said, not of returning people to their old myths, but allowing
them to create their myths, and thus themselves, anew. The magic – as opposed
to the realism – of magical realism is not a national allegory, then, not a political
fiction; for the opposition is not between the atrocities of the real and the
liberation of fiction, but between a writing that refers to the territoriality of the
real, and a writing that ‘makes up legends’ and thus allows us to think a new
people. One of Azaro’s vivid visions is of the market place populated by spirits.
Here he is able to hear the voices of the spirits speaking about him:
I felt myself being lifted up by the darkness, pushed on by invisible hands.

And the voices followed me, voices without bodies [. . .].
‘Strange things are happening.’
‘The world is turning upside down.’
‘And madness is coming.’
‘And hunger is coming, like a dog with twelve heads.’
‘And confusion is coming.’
‘And war.’
‘And blood will grow in the eyes of men.’
‘And a whole generation will squander the richness of this earth.’
‘Let us go.’
‘Look at him.’
‘Maybe what is to come is already driving him mad.’ (FR 196–197)
Indeed, Azaro’s visions of a new people, both in the sense of a spiritual people,
and a Deleuzian ‘missing people’, appears as a kind of hallucinatory madness –
that is, a crisis or a trance, like Alu’s speech in The Circle of Reason. In The Famished
Road it is this new people that is the true opposite of the exploitation of the
land: the actual building of a road and the destruction of the forest without
any consideration for the inhabitants of the area. Again, as in the Ras al-Maqtu’,
at the very moment their existence is ignored, the people begin to invent
themselves.
In Ghosh’s novel we also saw how the magical element is only a leaven or
catalyst for action, not the political action itself. Indeed, in The Famished Road
this becomes clear again, in two ways. First, we see how the presence of the
real, actual suffering of the people, as opposed to the lack of it in What the Crow
Said, that is, the need for action, has to be present for the magic to act as such
a catalyst. Second, the magical catalyst, because it is entirely deterritorialized,
does not in any way determine the action which it initiates. As we noticed
already in Sexing the Cherry, and as is the case with Azaro’s vision of the road, the
magic is the virtual double of an actual state of affairs, but as Deleuze emphati-
cally reminds us, ‘every object is double without it being the case that the two
halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual
image’ (DR 209). Thus the action that is initiated by the magical event is in no
way guaranteed to be liberatory or even beneficial.
To Deleuze and Guattari the deterritorialized line of flight is ‘a line of escape,
yes – but not a refuge’ (KM 41). It rather points to a ‘coming collectivity’, a new
assemblage ‘without our knowing yet what this assemblage will be: fascist?
revolutionary? socialist? capitalist?’ (KM 85). The ‘missing people’ are not yet
territorialized in any such social formation. It becomes clear in The Famished
Road that the line of flight of deterritorialization can take different directions,
and that the people to come can take different shapes. In addition to Azaro,
other characters in the novel are also involved in making up new myths. The
photographer appears as an artist-figure, who with his photographic art is
able to imagine a new people, and who is therefore seen as an enemy by the
political, territorializing forces of the novel, and often set upon by cronies: ‘His
camera flashed and thugs in dark glasses appeared from the flash and pro-
ceeded to beat him up. The camera fell from the photographer’s hands. I heard
people screaming inside the camera. The thugs jumped on the camera and
stamped on it, trying to crush and destroy it. And the people who were inside
the camera, who were waiting to become real, and who were trying to get out,
began wailing and wouldn’t stop’ (FR 204). Without the photographer, the
people continue to be ‘missing’, despite the riots in the ghetto and the vigilante
attacks on its inhabitants: ‘And because the photographer hadn’t been there
to record what had happened that night, nothing of the events appeared in the
newspapers. It was as if the events were never real’ (FR 214). The photogra-
pher’s power, however, lies not in making what has happened real by recording
it, but in inventing the real. ‘I have a lot of powers’, he tells Azaro, like flying
to the moon. ‘ “What else can you do?” “I can change people’s faces.” “How?”
“With my camera.” “Into what?” “I can make them ugly or beautiful” ’ (FR 271).
The photographer’s art, his magic, is one that brings a new people into exis-
tence, but as with all invention, the people can be imagined as either ugly and
beautiful, good or bad.
Madame Koto is another central character in the novel, steeped in magic, but
one who seems to herald what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘diabolical powers
that are knocking at the door’ (KM 41): the possibility that the new people are
defined by corruption and greed. Throughout the novel, Azaro observes
Madame Koto’s rise to power from humble bar owner to party crony. As this rise
takes place, his visions in and around her bar are of increasingly demonic
spirits:
I realised for the first time that many of the customers were not human
beings. Their deformations were too staggering and they seemed unaffected
by their blindness and their eyelessness, their hunched backs and their
toothless mouths. Their expressions and movements were at odds with their
bodies. They seemed a confused assortment of different human parts. It
occurred to me that they were spirits who had borrowed bits of human beings
to partake of human reality. (FR 161)
These grotesque spirits could be read as an allegory of the corruption of

Nigerian society. However, as with all magic, the visions Azaro has at Koto’s bar
do not add up to anything so simple. Instead, Madame Koto, and the spiritual
pregnancy that Azaro perceives in her, are instances of Okri imagining a new
people. As Madame Koto’s powers reach their high point at the end of the
novel, and ‘her colossal form took wings at night and flew over the city’, Azaro
realises that ‘[Madame Koto’s] dreams gave the children nightmares [. . .]
drawing power from our sleeping bodies [. . .]. That was when I understood
that conflicting forces were fighting for the future of our country in the air, at
night, in our dreams, riding invisible white horses and whipping us, sapping
our will while we slept’ (FR 568).
In contrast to these demonic powers, Dad offers an alternative way of
imagining a new people. As Mariaconcetta Costantini points out, Dad goes
from corporeality, drunkenness, dirt and stink, to abstinence, visions and story-
telling.64 Dad takes up boxing, gains fame, and goes through fights with ever
more fearful opponents. His fights are his forays into the realm of magic, as his
opponents turn out to be from the spirit world. Although Dad never enters the
completely deterritorialized world of spirits as Azaro does, his bouts seem to
give him a strange inspiration:
He talked of grand schemes. He talked of buying enough corrugated zinc to

roof the whole ghetto. He talked of buying enough cement to build houses
for all the large families who lived in one room. He spoke of tarring all the
roads and clearing away all the rubbish that had accumulated in the con-
sciousness of our people. (FR 467)
Dad’s plans are never fully realized, and he is increasingly seen as a madman,
trying to mobilize a band of beggars to clean up the ghetto, believing that he
can change the world, and ranting against the people’s ‘weakness of will’ when
they ignore or destroy his plans. Thus many readers, like Felicia Oka Moh, have
seen Okri’s novel as carrying a message about the futility of political struggle.65
However, while Dad’s visionary madness is not political in the Marxist material-
ist sense, it is a moment of crisis that is revolutionary in the Deleuzian sense,
which pushes everything ‘into a state of aberration’ (C2 211).
In fact, a number of the novel’s critics come to conclusions interpretable in
Deleuzian terms. Costantini reads Azaro as a figure akin to the lonely visionary
artist, the poet who discovers a ‘hidden beauty’ through art, ‘stripping the
veil of appearances’.66 David Lim also proclaims Okri ‘political’ in a strangely
singular way: ‘Okri [. . .] goes a step beyond the kind of intervention that oper-
ates within the framework of existing socio-political relations. His brand of
creative politics is the “art of the impossible”, a politics that seeks to change the
very parameters of the “possible” in the existing constellation’.67 Indeed, Okri’s
own words bear out this position. His particular hope for Africa lies in art:
‘Africa has an incredible capacity to not die and not be destroyed [. . .] resil-
ience of the spirit, great dreaming capacities, the imaginative frames that are
visible in the art, and art that has not remotely been understood’. He goes on
to say that in our age we ‘have to posit a different conception of history, because
the facts of history alone are not enough to give an account of our conscious-
ness and what we need to do with our age’. Such a conception must lead to
‘infinity, to endless possibilities’. To Okri this is ‘the aesthetic of possibilities, of
labyrinths, of riddles [. . .] of paradoxes. I think we miss this element when we
try to fix it too much within national or tribal boundaries’.68 We see that Okri’s
project can be paralleled with Deleuze’s, where art is a way to revelation and
redemption, but in a manner that leaves historical specifics behind.
The magic in The Famished Road is certainly not a case of cultural diversity,
hybridity or ‘cultural interdiscursivity’, 69 as some critics have read it. Neither,
however, should it be identified with politics of postcoloniality or the nation as
proposed by Elleke Boehmer: ‘The pathology of contemporary national society,
it seems, is not to be comprehended except partially, under the flickering light
of magical vision and through the medium of gnomic narrative’.70 Okri does
not simply present an indigenous African ‘rationality’ as a solution to the post-
colonial condition, and the pathology of national society is more than ade-
quately described through the realism of The Famished Road. The magic in the
novel, however, does offer a glimpse of the ‘infinity, endless possibilities’, both
good and bad, of a new people.
Certainly from a Marxist materialist or historicist point of view, the magic of
magical realist works may appear as ineffectual and a failure – a Jamesonian
romance. However, Deleuze enables us to read the magic as revolutionary
outside the framework of Marxist materialism and the usual sense of ‘politics’.
Deleuze states that philosophy and art can ‘forewarn of the advent of a people.
They have resistance in common – their resistance to death, to servitude, to
the intolerable, to shame, and to the present’ (WIP 110). Quite apart from the
realism of the novels, the magical elements of these three author’s works –
Kroetsch’s articulation of ‘the stuff before the stuff that is history or culture or
society or art’, Ghosh’s ‘intellectual exploration’ and Okri’s visionary ‘aesthetic
of possibilities’ – are all acts of such resistance, precisely because they are the
acts of thinking a new people. Ultimately, it is only because they exist, as Deleuze
would say, as creations of the new and not representations of the past or present
situation, that they can betoken such a revolutionary resistance.
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Perhaps because of the double nature of the term itself, magical realism has
most commonly been thought of as a genre that brings together two differing
paradigms, the real and the magic. The default approach has been to focus on
the coexistence of these on seemingly equal terms. Indeed, the power of magi-
cal realism has often been presumed to lie in the way it erases the differences
between these incompatible elements. Gilles Deleuze’s ontological model in
which Being is univocal and yet nonetheless has two sides, the actual and the
virtual, provides a framework for reconsidering this double nature of magical
realism. Rather than seeing magical realism as equalizing the real and the
magic, this model shows us how the genre inserts a radically divergent element
into a mode of writing that depends on similarity and coherence. The potential
of the genre lies precisely in the fact that real and the magic always remain dif-
ferent, even when they appear indistinct, and can therefore act as complimentary
facets of the text.
Readings of magical realism that stress the coexistence of real and magic
as equal have often either failed to consider the full potential of one or the
other, or ended up caught in uncomfortable contradictions. Such readings
have been based on the assumption that the erasure of the differences between
the real and the magic also implies the subversion of the world-view projected
by realism, thereby defining magical realism as a particularly suitable mode of
writing for the postcolonial world. An influential definition of the genre by
Amaryll Chanady makes clear that this assumption rests on a paradox. Chanady,
like many other critics, defines magical realism by its ‘resolution of antinomy’
between the real and the magic. However, she also notes that for magical real-
ism to work the real and the magic have to be distinguished as different and
that it is, in fact, the dominant realist narration of magical realism which sets up
a rational, empirical world-view that determines both what is seen as real and
what is seen as magic.
If that is so, magical realism is paradoxically dependent on realism for both
the creation and the resolution of the antinomy between the real and the magic.
This paradox is clearly the root of many of the problems faced by critics who
consider the equivalence of the real and the magic to be at the heart of magical
realism, in particular those that see a political implication in such equivalence.
Conclusion 147
In the majority of postcolonial readings, the real and the magic are seen as
expressions of the different and conflicting world-views of capitalist and pre-
capitalist societies, and their equivalent coexistence as a representation of
the cultural mix of the postcolonial world and even the undoing of colonial
hierarchies. Yet it is undoubtedly the realism of the text that differentiates the
real from the magic. Not surprisingly then, many postcolonial readings of magi-
cal realism see it as a problematic, if not failed, mode of writing, escapist and
ineffectual at best, and neo-colonial and exoticizing at worst.
In fact, there cannot be any equivalence between the real and the magic in
a text that depends on the two being distinguished by realism. Instead, the
structural difference of the magic from the real, or rather, from the organized
‘image’ of the world set up by the realist narration, is central to magical realism.
Gilles Deleuze enables us to rethink the relationship between the real and the
magic radically, by inverting the hierarchy of different and same. The usual
approach to magical realism privileges the creation of unity and equivalence
between two elements that are seen as incompatible and unequal, that is, as two
altogether different modes of being. However, taking Gilles Deleuze’s ontologi-
cal imperative of the univocity of Being as a starting point forces us to consider
how both the real and the magic could be seen as part of the same ontological
principle, but still appear as structurally different. Magical realism, rather than
bringing together the disparate, enacts a divergence of the same, something
that is one of the unique powers of art to Deleuze.
A reading of magical realism using Deleuze’s concept of series reveals that
the structure of the real and the magical corresponds to Deleuze’s fundamental
distinction between two sides of Being: the actual and the virtual. Indeed, the
realism appears as ‘real’ precisely because it reflects the convergent, ordered
structure of all actual things, all things in the here and now. The magic appears
as different because of its divergence from such a structure. Analysed in this
way, the realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude emerges as a part of a regime of
signs. The structured order that governs meaning under this regime, and makes
realism appear as a transparent representation of an external reality, is the same
order that underpins the social organization of the State with its rigid segmen-
tation of territory and people. Magic, in contrast, is not bound by this order,
and thus appears as deterritorialized, able to move across the boundaries of the
segments of the State as embodied by the convergent series of realism.
However, as it is without territory, the magic is removed from, even antitheti-
cal to, the structure of society, history and identity. So much so, that the deter-
ritorialization of the text effected by the magic leads to apocalyptic endings
in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children. Indeed, in Life of Pi we
saw that the magical sign is precisely a non-human becoming, a stripping away
of the human organization that characterized realism. There is therefore no
political message encoded by the magic in magical realism, rather it is the real-
ism of the genre that reveals the structure of a particular social organization.
The magic does not negate the realism of the magical realist text, however, but
rather complements it by allowing us to think the virtual. This thought of the

virtual is precisely the creation of the new, embodied in magical realism in its
magical elements. The magic functions in the way that a sign of art uniquely
does to Deleuze, that is, it reveals the nature of univocal Being as actual and
virtual, and the virtual as a double or supplement to the actual. As the endings
of Beloved and Sexing the Cherry suggest, the magic can have a catalytic function
in the realist order of society and history. Such a function, however, is far from
the postcolonial political engagement that some critics attempt to define in
magical realism.
Together with his approach to Deleuze, Peter Hallward’s analysis of postcolo-
nial theories provides a clue to the implications of a redefinition of magical
realism in the above Deleuzian terms. In a few brief but influential statements
on postcolonial literature by critics and writers we found the imperative to
reading magical realism in specific historico-political terms confused with theo-
retical approaches that precluded such specific engagement. Hallward has
identified a similar predicament in postcolonial theory as a whole, suggesting
that the problem was grounded in the fact that postcolonial theories are based
on philosophies of what he called the singular and thus incompatible with the
historical specificity often called for by their proponents. Importantly, Hallward
also identifies Deleuze’s thought as one of singularity where all things and indi-
viduals are predicated on one creative, impersonal and non-relational force –
virtual Being – making all specifics secondary and redundant. Hallward’s thesis
thus makes it apparent that the structural difference between the realism and
the magic in the magical realist texts invites two very different ways of reading.
The realism can clearly be read through a Marxist or historicist perspective,
highlighting the specific politics of the text. However, such a reading does not
fully account for the magic, which simply cannot be reduced to any coherent
representation of the real conditions of society and politics. Instead, the magic
needs to be read through a singular theoretical model to be fully understood.
While the postcolonial theory provides one such model, Bhabha’s ‘hybrid
signifier’, it is limited in its insistence on reintroducing historical specificity and
subjective agency. A Deleuzian approach, however takes a singular reading of
magic to its logical conclusion.
To Deleuze, the absolute deterritorialization that characterizes the virtual is
revolutionary, insofar as it allows thought to escape the limits of the rigid struc-
ture of the actual. The creative act of Being that the virtual embodies in the sign
of art can become a revolutionary act as the invention of a new people. This is
a people that is necessarily ‘missing’, that is, not yet actual, and thus not yet
determined or limited by any real historical situation. If the realism of magical
realism articulates the vicissitudes of a real culture and people, the magic
emerges from a place and moment where culture is articulated, through the
invention of new myths – myths whose origins, or people, are as yet missing.
However, since the virtual is not an image of the actual, this thinking of a new
Conclusion 149
people through magic cannot determine the nature of this people in any way:
in The Famished Road magic acted as a catalyst to various visions of a new people,
some heralding freedom, some heralding corruption and greed.
When freed from the yoke of being a genre that erases the differences
between the real and the magic, and therefore simply subverts realism and all
that it stands for, magical realism can truly become the ‘literature of replenish-
ment’ that One Hundred Years of Solitude exemplified to John Barth. Rather than
indicating Barth’s simple ‘synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism
and magic myth, political passion and non-political artistry’,1 inverting the
hierarchy of the same and different by means of Deleuze’s ontology exposes
the real and the magic as apparently indiscernible yet radically different. The
order of realism is the expression of the territorial field of history and politics,
and reveals this realm’s inherent structural rigidity as its limit. It defines the
magic as that which escapes this limit, and becomes a supplement to realism,
not by negating it, by adding fanciful elements, or supplying an alternative
world-view, but as an element which allows for the imagining of a new people
unfettered by the constraints of existing politics, society and culture; unfet-
tered, indeed, by the real.
Notes
Chapter 1
1
Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski, ‘Introduction’, Hinchcliffe and Jewinski (eds),
Magic Realism and Canadian Literature: Essays and Stories (Waterloo: University of
Waterloo Press, 1986): 5–10, 6.
2
Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim At Home (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1977), 108.
3
Franz Roh, ‘Magic Realism: Post-expressionism’, Lois Parkinson Zamora and
Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995): 15–32, 23.
4
Out of the very few critics who have actually applied his concept to literature,
Seymour Menton is perhaps most notable. However, his Magic Realism Rediscov-
ered, 1918–1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983) overwhelmingly focuses
on painting and offers only loose parallels to a range of authors including Franz
Kafka, Natalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Bertold Brecht, as well as García
Márquez.
5
Alejo Carpentier, ‘On the Marvelous Real in America’, Zamora and Faris: 75–88,
84.
6
Carpentier, ‘Baroque’, 106.
7
Angel Flores, ‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature’, Zamora and
Faris: 109–118.
8
Franz Kafka, ‘The Metamorphosis’, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Nahum N.
Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (London: Minerva, 1992):
89–139, 89.
9
Flores, 115–116.
10
Gonzáles Echevarría, Carpentier, 113–123.
11
William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’, Forum for Modern Language Studies,
29/1 (1993): 75–85, 79–80. Hereafter MRT and page number.
12
Stephen Slemon, ‘Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Discourse’, Zamora and
Faris: 407–426, 409. Hereafter MRPD and page number.
13
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystifica-
tion of Narrative (London: Eurospan, 2004), 136, 140.
14
Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘The Politics of Magic’, Stephen M. Hart and Ouyang (eds),
A Companion to Magical Realism (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005): 153–154, 153.
15
Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12/2 (1986):
301–325, 311. Hereafter OMRF and page number.
16
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991), 6.
Notes 151
17
Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye
(London: Routledge, 1998), 15–16. Hereafter WAF and page number.
18
Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic
Realism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 2. Hereafter MGP and page number.
19
Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar
‘Zeta’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 7–8. Hereafter PNC and page number.
20
Theo L. D’Haen, ‘Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged
Centres’, Zamora and Faris: 191–208, 193.
21
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002);
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987) and Constructing
Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992).
22
Hutcheon, Poetics, 57–73.
23
D’Haen, 195.
24
Linda Hutcheon, ‘“Circling the Downspout of Empire”: Post-Colonialism and
Postmodernism’, ARIEL, 20/4 (1989): 149–175, 151–152.
25
Hutcheon, ‘Downspout’, 153.
26
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 65.
27
Ahmad, 69.
28
Wendy B. Faris, ‘Scheherezade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern
Fiction’, Zamora and Faris: 163–190, 163.
29
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’, Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and
Other Nonfiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984): 193–206, 204.
30
Faris, ‘Scheherezade’s’, 163.
31
Faris, ‘Scheherezade’s’, 167–174, 174.
32
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 26.
33
Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unre-
solved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985), 5. Hereafter MRF and page number.
34
Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa
(London: Penguin Books, 1972), 243. Hereafter OHYS and page number.
35
Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, ‘The Origins and Development of Magic Realism in
Latin American Fiction’, Hinchcliffe and Jewinski: 49–60, 50.
36
Brenda Cooper, ‘Does Marxism Allow for the Magical Side of Things? Magical
Realism and a Comparison between One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of
Spirits’, Social Dynamics, 17/2 (1991): 126–154, 149.
37
Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and The Third World (London: Macmillan,
1989), 54.
38
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), 300. Hereafter MC
and page number.
39
Brennan, 114.
40
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, ‘Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and
Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s’, Zamora and Faris: 1–11, 6.
41
Zamora and Faris, 3.
42
Robert R. Wilson, ‘The Metamorphoses of Space: Magical Realism’, Hinchcliffe
and Jewinski: 61–74, 68. Hereafter MS and page number.
152 Notes
43
Zamora and Faris, 3.
44
Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Magical Realism at World’s End’, Literary Imagination, 3/1
(2001): 105–133, 118.
45
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith
and Irreverence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5.
46
Warnes, 7.
47
Warnes, 152.
Chapter 2
1
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone
Press, 1994), 50. Hereafter DR and page number.
2
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London:
Continuum, 2004), 243. Hereafter LS and page number.
3
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11. Hereafter DC and page number.
4
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), 85. Hereafter B and page number.
5
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London:
Continuum, 2006), 22–23.
6
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Zone Books, 1990), 332. Hereafter EP and page number.
7
Peter Hallward, ‘‘‘Everything is Real”: Gilles Deleuze and Creative Univocity’,
New Formations, 49 (2003): 61–74, 61.
8
Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
(London: Verso, 2006), 153.
9
Peter Hallward, ‘The Singular and the Specific: Recent French Philosophy’,
Radical Philosophy, 99 (2000): 6–18, 9.
10
Peter Hallward, ‘Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest’, Radical Philosophy,
81 (1997): 6–21, 18.
11
Constantin Boundas, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Boundas (ed.), Deleuze Reader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992): 1–23, 13–14.
12
Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii.
13
Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations
from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 117.
14
In particular Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London:
Athlone Press, 1984) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987). Hereafter AO or TP respectively
and page number.
15
Hallward, Out, 82.
16
Hallward, ‘Redemption’, 6.
17
Peter Hallward, ‘The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish Deleuze
from Foucault’, Angelaki, 5/2 (2000): 93–111, 98.
18
Hallward, ‘Limits’, 97 (quoting DR 37).
Notes 153
19
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 48. Hereafter KM and
page number.
20
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 67. Hereafter C2 and page number.
21
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 41. Hereafter PS and page number.
22
Hallward, ‘Everything’, 63.
23
Lewis Carroll, ‘Preface to The Hunting of the Snark’, The Complete Illustrated Works
(London: Chancellor Press, 1993): 730–731.
24
See for example Raymond Williams, ‘Realism’, Keywords: A Vocabulary for Culture
and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1990), 257–262.
25
Lilian Furst, ‘Introduction’, Furst (ed.), Realism (London: Longman, 1992): 1–23;
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 554–557; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 9–34.
26
Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), French Literary Theory
Today, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 11–17.
27
Philippe Hamon, ‘Major Features of Realist Discourse’, Furst: 166–185, 172–183.
28
Hallward, ‘Redemption’, 14.
29
Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1–19, 247–253, 329–335.
Hereafter AP and page number; Hallward, ‘Singular’: 6–18.
30
Hallward, ‘Singular’, 8.
31
This statement, of course, echoes Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of the postmodern
referred to in the Introduction, raising the interesting question, beyond the
scope of this volume, to what extent postcolonial and postmodern theories have
developed concomitantly.
32
Hallward, ‘Singular’, 8.
33
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 101. Here-
after LC and page number.
34
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 72.
35
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 38.
Chapter 3
1
Regina Janes, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1991), 106.
2
Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Amadis in America’, Robin Fiddian (ed.), García Márquez
(London: Longman, 1995), 62, 60.
3
Doris Sommer and George Yudice, ‘Latin American Literature from the ‘Boom’
On’, Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000): 859–881, 864.
4
Shannin Schroeder, Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas (Westport:
Praeger, 2004), 123–126.
154 Notes
5
Lois Parkinson Zamora, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude in Comparative Literature
Courses’, María Elena Valdés and Mario J. Valdés (eds), Approaches to Teaching
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1990): 21–32, 29–30.
6
James Higgins, ‘Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad’, Gene H. Bell-
Villada (ed.), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 33–53, 38.
7
Edwin Williamson, ‘Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred
Years of Solitude’, Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (eds), Gabriel García
Márquez: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 45–63, 45.
8
Janes, 86.
9
Williamson, 46.
10
Janes, 121.
11
Gerald Martin, ‘On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism in García Marquez’, McGuirk
and Cardwell: 95–116, 115.
12
Martin, 110.
13
Janes, 81; D. P. Gallagher, ‘Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, 1928)’, George R.
McMurray (ed.), Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez (Boston: G. K. Hall &
Co, 1987): 113–129, 114; and Gene H. Bell-Villada, ‘Introduction’, Bell-Villada,
Casebook: 3–16, 8.
14
Michael Wood, Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 19; Myron I. Lichtblau, ‘In Search of the
Stylistic Key to Cien años de soledad’, Kemy Oyarzún and William W. Megenney
(eds), Essays on Gabriel García Márquez (Riverside: University of California, 1984):
103–112, 106.
15
Robin Fiddian, ‘Introduction’, Fiddian: 1–28, 12–13; Gene H. Bell-Villada, García
Márquez: The Man and His Work (London: University of North Carolina Press,
1990), 107.
16
Bell-Villada, The Man, 98.
17
Bell-Villada, The Man, 102.
18
Hallward, ‘Redemption’, 14 (quoting TP 304).
19
McMurray, Márquez, 90.
20
George R. McMurray, ‘‘The Aleph’ and One Hundred Years of Solitude: Two
Microcosmic Worlds’, in Charles Rossman and Yvette E. Miller (eds.), Special Issue:
Gabriel García Márquez, Latin American Literary Review, 13/25 (1985): 55–64, 60.
21
Lichtblau, 105.
22
Avril Bryan, ‘Virginity: Contrasting Views in the Works of Miguel de Unamuno
and Gabriel García Márquez’, La mujer en la literature caribeña: Proceedings of the Sixth
Conference of Hispanists (St Augustine: University of West Indies, 1983): 168–184,
180–183.
23
Arnold M. Penuel, Intertextuality in García Márquez (York: Spanish Literature
Publications, 1994), 67.
24
Gabriela Mora, ‘An Approach Using Ideology and History’, Valdés and Valdés:
79–88, 86–87.
25
McMurray, ‘The Aleph’, 61.
26
Hallward, ‘Everything’, 72.
27
Helen Carr, ‘Introduction: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern
World’, Carr (ed.), From My Guy to Sci-fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmod-
ern World (London: Pandora Press, 1989): 3–14, 7.
Notes 155
28
Damian Grant, Salman Rushdie (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999), 1.
29
Hutcheon, Politics, 5.
30
Nyla Ali Khan, The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism (London:
Routledge, 2005), 46.
31
M. D. Fletcher, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Salman Rushdie’s Fiction’, Fletcher
(ed.), Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1994): 1–22, 14.
32
Elleke Boehmer, ‘Neo-Orientalism, Converging Cities, and the Postcolonial Criti-
cism of Rushdie’, Liselotte Glage and Rüdiger Kunow (eds), ‘The Decolonizing
Pen’: Cultural Diversity and the Transnational Imaginary in Rushdie’s Fiction (Trier:
WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2001): 15–23, 16.
33
Brennan, 32.
34
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998),
35–36.
35
Massumi, 102.
36
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (London, Continuum, 2005), 69.
37
Brennan, 99.
38
Brennan, 117.
39
Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, Lindsey Tucker (ed.), Critical Essays
On Angela Carter (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998): 24–30, 30.
40
Carter, ‘Notes’, 29.
41
42
43
William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’, Forum for Modern Language
Studies, 29/1 (1993): 75–85, 80–82. See my Introduction for a synopsis of
Spindler’s typology.
44
Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1998), 169, 173–174.
45
Andrzej Ga˛siorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward
Arnold, 1995), 134.
46
Mary Russo, ‘Revamping Spectacle: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Alison
Easton (ed.), Angela Carter (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000): 136–160, 143.
47
Paulina Palmer ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman: Angela Carter’s
Magic Flight’, Sue Roe (ed.), Women Reading Women’s Writing (Brighton: Harvester,
1987): 179–205, 198.
48
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage 2003), 15. Hereafter NC and
page number.
49
Day, 186.
50
Clare Hanson, ‘ “The Red Dawn Breaking over Clapham”: Carter and the Limits
of Artifice’, Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of
Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism (London: Longman, 1997): 59–72, 66.
51
Linden Peach, Toni Morrison (London: Macmillan, 2000), 19.
52
Rafael Perez-Torres, ‘Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread – Beloved as
Postmodern Novel’, Nacy J. Peterson (ed.), Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical
Approaches (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997): 91–109, 106.
53
Maggie Sale, ‘Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral
Traditions and Beloved’, Barbara H. Solomon (ed.), Critical Essays on Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998): 177–188, 183.
156 Notes
54
Barbara Hill Rigney, ‘‘‘Breaking the Back of Words”: Language, Silence, and the
Politics of Identity in Beloved’, Solomon: 138–147, 146.
55
Peach, 15.
56
Marc C. Conner, ‘From the Sublime to the Beautiful: The Aesthetic Progression
of Toni Morrison’, Conner (ed.), The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the
Unspeakable (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000): 49–76, 71–72.
57
Peach, 23–24.
58
Bernard W. Bell, ‘Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remem-
berances of Things Past’, Solomon: 166–176, 167–168.
59
Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005), 6–7. Hereafter BD and page
number.
60
Hutcheon, Politics, 5.
61
Marianne DeKoven, ‘Postmodernism and Post-Utopian Desire in Toni Morrison
and E. L. Doctorow’, Peterson: 111–130, 125.
62
James Phelan, ‘Toward A Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult,
the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved’, Peterson: 225–244, 230.
63
Trudier Harris, ‘Beloved: “Woman, Thy Name Is Demon” ’, Solomon: 127–137,
134.
64
Denise Heinze, ‘Beloved and the Tyranny of the Double’, Solomon: 205–210,
208.
65
Conner, 51.
66
Susan Corey, ‘Toward the Limits of Mystery: The Grotesque in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved’, Conner: 31–48, 43.
67
Conner, 70–71.
Chapter 4
1
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 132.
2
Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1999); Julio Cortázar, ‘Bestiary’, Blow-Up and Other
Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968): 67–84.
3
Sabine Sielke, ‘ “The Empathetic Imagination” – An Interview with Yann Martel’,
Canadian Literature, 177 (2003): 12–32, 14.
4
Steve Street, ‘Review of Life of Pi’, The Missouri Review, 27/1 (2004): 179–180,
179.
5
Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), 192. Hereafter LP and
page number.
6
Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, ‘ “Yann Martell”, Burns and Hunter (eds),
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 192 (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 212;
Pankaj Mishra’, ‘Review of Life of Pi’, New York Review of Books, 50/5 (2003):
17–18.
7
W. R. Greer, ‘Review of Life of Pi’, at http://www.reviewofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review.
8
Kafka, 89.
9
Agusto Monterroso, ‘El dinosaurio’, Obras completa y otros cuentos (Mexico City:
Juaquín Mortiz, 1971): 77 (my translation).
Notes 157
10
Francie Lin, ‘Floating on Faith: Review of Life of Pi’, Los Angeles Times Book Review
(16 June 2002): 7.
11
Florence Stratton, ‘‘‘Hollow at the core”: Deconstructing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi’,
Studies in Canadian Literature, 29/2 (2004): 5–21, 10.
12
Stratton, 19.
13
Werner Wolf, ‘Migration Towards a Rewarding Goal and Multiculturalism with a
Positive Centre: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as a Post-Postmodernist Attempt at
Eliciting (Poetic) Faith’, Klaus-Dieter Ertler and Martin Löschnigg (eds), Canada
in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 2004):
107–124; Charlotte Innes, ‘Review of Life of Pi’ Nation 275/6 (2002): 25–29; Gary
Krist, ‘Taming the Tiger: Review of Life of Pi’, The New York Times Book Review,
107/27 (2002), http://tinyurl.com/afr3a3; Lin, 7.
14
Francis King, ‘A Ghastly Crew: Review of Life of Pi’, Spectator, 288/9067 (2002):
43.
15
June Dwyer, ‘Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narra-
tive’, Modern Language Studies, 35/2 (2005): 9–21, 12
16
James Mensch, ‘The Intertwining of Incommensurables: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi’,
Contributions to Phenomenology, 56 (2007): 135–147, 139.
17
Dwyer, 16.
18
Mensch, 135–136.
19
André Brink, ‘Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African
Literature’, Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds) Writing South Africa: Litera-
ture, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998): 14–28, 15.
20
Brink, ‘Interrogating’, 21–22.
21
Brink, ‘Interrogating’, 27.
22
Brink, ‘Interrogating’’, 15.
23
Elleke Boehmer, ‘Endings and New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transi-
tion’, Attridge and Jolly: 43–56, 57.
24
Brink, Mapmakers, 221.
25
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, ‘Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André
Brink’, Commonwealth, 25/2 (2003): 17–31, 26.
26
Lorna Sage, ‘Escape from Paradise: Review of Devil’s Valley’, New York Times
(21 March 1999), http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21
sagelt.html.
27
André Brink, Devil’s Valley (London: Vintage, 2000), 18–19. Hereafter DV and
page number.
28
Ute Kauer, ‘The Need to Storify: Re-inventing the Past in André Brink’s Novels’,
Anne Holden Rønning and Lene Jogannessen (eds), Readings of the Particular:
The Postcolonial in the Postnational (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2007): 57–70, 61.
29
Joseph-Vilain, ‘Magic’, 29.
30
31
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, ‘André Brink and the Afrikaner Heritage Author’,
Commonwealth, 27/1 (2004): 27–37, 37.
32
Kauer, 62.
33
34
35
158 Notes
36
Kauer, 66.
37
38
Susana González, ‘Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry: Rewriting “Woman” through
Fantasy’, Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy and José Angel García Landa
(eds), Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1996), 293.
39
Elizabeth Langland, ‘Sexing the Text: Narrative Drag as Feminist Poetics and
Politics in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry’, Narrative, 5/1 (1997): 99–107;
Lucie Armitt, ‘Storytelling and Feminism’, Sonya Andermahr (ed.), Jeanette Win-
terson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (London: Continuum, 2007): 14–26; Laura
Doan, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern’, Doan (ed.) The Lesbian
Postmodern (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 137–154.
40
Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Journey Through Time, Space and Imagination: Review of
Sexing the Cherry’, New York Times (27 April 1990): C33.
41
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1989), 9–10. Hereafter
SC and page number.
42
Philip Tew, ‘Wintersonian Masculinities’, Andermahr: 114–129, 126; Langland, 103.
43
Susana Onega, Jeanette Winterson (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006), 80.
44
Tiziana Giordano, ‘Hybrid Fictions and Bodies: Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are
Not The Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing the Cherry’, Michele Bottalico and Maria
Teresa Chialant (eds), Studi di letteratura (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane,
2003): 225–246, 226.
45
Giordano, 246.
46
Lynne Pearce, ‘‘‘Written On Tablets of Stone”? Jeanette Winterson, Roland
Barthes, and the Discourse of Romantic Love’, Suzanne Raitt (ed.), Volcanoes and
Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (London: Onlywomen Press Ltd,
1995): 147–168, 148.
47
Lynn Pykett, ‘A New Way with Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism’,
Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds), ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and
the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 48–60, 60.
48
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Vintage,
1996).
49
Jeffrey Roessner, ‘Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing
the Cherry and Angela Carter’s Wise Children”, College Literature, 29/1 (2002):
102–122, 112.
50
Pykett, 60.
51
Shena MacKay, ‘The Exotic Fruits of Time: Review of Sexing the Cherry’, Times Liter-
ary Supplement, 4511 (21 September 1989).
52
Doan, 153.
53
Cath Stowers, ‘Journeying with Jeanette: Transgressive Travels in Winterson’s
Fiction’, Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds), (Hetero)sexual Politics (London:
Taylor and Francis, 1995): 139–154, 148.
54
Maria Lozano, ‘‘‘How you Cuddle in the Dark Governs How You See the History
of the World”: A Note on Some Obsessions in Recent British Fiction’, Susana
Onega (ed.), Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995): 117–134, 129, 133.
55
Pykett, 56.
Notes 159
56
Paulina Palmer, ‘Foreign Bodies: The Grotesque Body of Fiction of Jeanette
Winterson’, Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 11 (2003): 81–93, 82.
57
Roessner, 110.
58
Cath Stowers, ‘‘‘No Legitimate Place, No Land, No Fatherland”: Communities of
Women in the Fiction of Roberts and Winterson’, Critical Survey, 8/1 (1996):
69–79, 72.
59
Roessner, 111.
60
Bente Gade, ‘Multiple Selves and Grafted Agents: A Postmodernist Reading of
Sexing the Cherry’, Marianne Bengtson, Marianne Børch and Cindie Maagaard
(eds), Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson (Copenhagen: Scholars’
Press, 1999): 27–40, 31.
61
Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 1993), 104.
62
Kim Middleton Meyer, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Evolving Subject: “Difficulty into
Dream’’’, Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, Contemporary British
Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003): 210–225, 217.
63
Middleton Meyer, 218.
64
Gade, 38.
65
Winterson, Objects, 28.
Chapter 5
1
Ahmad, 1–42; Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial
Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987): 27–58.
2
Salman Rushdie, ‘Gabriel García Márquez’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Penguin Books / Granta, 1991): 299–307, 301.
3
Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’,
Social Text, 15 (1986): 65–88. Hereafter TWL and page number.
4
For an articulate example, see Ahmad, 95–122.
5
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, Bhabha (ed.), Nation and
Narration (London: Routledge, 1990): 1–7, 7.
6
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 221.
7
Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, 4.
8
Grant, 15.
9
Liselotte Glage and Rüdiger Kunow ‘Introduction: Rushdie and the New Interna-
tional Theme’, Glage and Kunow: 7–14, 7.
10
Faris, Ordinary, 25, 29.
11
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002), 66.
Hereafter PU and page number.
12
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 173.
13
Ronald Bogue, ‘Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come’, Bogue, Deleuze’s
Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): 93–105, 99.
14
Bogue, Essays, 99–100. Bogue quotes Écritures de Pierre Perrault, actes du colloque
‘Gens de paroles’, 24–28 mars 1982, Maison de la Culture de La Rochelle (Montreal:
La Cinémathèque québécoise et Éditions Édilig, 1983), 56.
160 Notes
15
Bogue, Essays, 102.
16
Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-
Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 160.
17
Simona Bertacco, Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch (Bern: Peter Lang,
2002), 159.
18
Stanley E. McMullin, ‘“Adams [sic] Mad in Eden”: Magic Realism as Hinterland
Experience’, in Hinchcliffe and Jewinski: 13–22, 13–15.
19
Hutecheon, Canadian, 175.
20
Marie Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian
Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 20.
21
Robert Kroetsch, The Crow Journals (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1980), 60.
22
Robert Lecker, ‘Bordering On: Robert Kroetsch’s Aesthetic’, Journal of Canadian
Studies, 17/3 (1982): 124–133, 125, 131.
23
Hutecheon, Canadian, 6.
24
Gunilla Florby (ed.), The Margin Speaks: A Study of Margaret Laurence and
Robert Kroetsch from a Post-Colonial Point of View (Lund: Lund University
Press, 1997), 76.
25
McMullin, 19.
26
Kathleen Wall, ‘What Kroetsch Said: The Problem of Meaning and Language in
What the Crow Said’, Canadian Literature, 128 (1991): 90–105, 103.
27
Wall, 91.
28
Geert Lernout, ‘Twenty-Five Years of Solitude’, Canadian Literature, 104 (1985):
52–64, 59.
29
Bertacco, 172.
30
Lecker, 127.
31
Lecker, 128.
32
Peter Thomas, ‘Keeping Mum: Kroetsch’s Alberta’, Journal of Canadian Fiction,
2/2 (1973): 54–56, 55.
33
Kroetsch, Journals, 11.
34
Hutcheon, Canadian, 175.
35
Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
1978), 74. Hereafter WCS and page number.
36
Kroetsch, Journals, 69.
37
Christine Jackman, ‘What the Crow Said: A Topos of Excess’, Studies in Canadian
Literatures, 16/2 (1992): 79–92, 79.
38
Lecker, 132.
39
Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert
Kroetsch (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1982), 124.
40
Jackman, 90.
41
Quoting Dash, J. Michael, ‘Marvellous Realism – The Way out of Negritude’,
Caribbean Studies, 13/4 (1973): 57–70, 66.
42
Stephanie Jones, ‘A Novel Genre: Polylingualism and Magical Realism in Amitav
Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,
66/3 (2003): 431–441, 433.
43
Jones, 434.
44
Pradip Dutta, ‘A Voice Among Bullet Holes: The Circle of Reason’, R. K. Dhawan
(ed.), The Novels of Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1999): 39–45, 42.
Notes 161
45
John C. Hawley, Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction (Delhi: Foundation Books,
2005), 164.
46
Kavita Daiya, ‘“No Home But in Memory”: Migrant Bodies and Belongings,
Globalization and Nationalism in The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines’,
Brinda Bose (ed.), Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives (Delhi: Pencraft Interna-
tional, 2003): 36–55, 37.
47
Hawley, Ghosh, 10.
48
Robert Dixon, ‘‘‘Travelling in the West”: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh’, Tabish
Khair (ed.), Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003):
9–35, 15.
49
Dixon, 14.
50
Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (London: Granta Books, 1998), 27. Hereafter
CR and page number.
51
Jones, 440.
52
Ulka Joshi, ‘The Circle of Reason: Caught up in Circles’, Indira Bhatt and Indira
Nityanandam (eds), The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Creative Books,
2001): 25–33, 32.
53
G. J. V. Prasad, ‘Rewriting the World: The Circle of Reason as the Beginning of the
Quest’, Bose: 56–66, 66.
54
Brinda Bose, ‘Introduction’, Bose, 18.
55
Derek Wright, New Directions in African Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1997), 152.
56
John C. Hawley, ‘Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Post-modernity’,
Research in African Literatures, 26/1 (1995): 30–39, 30.
57
Jo Dandy, ‘Magic and Realism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Songs of Enchant-
ment and Astonishing the Gods: An Examination of Conflicting Cultural Influences
and Narrative Traditions’, Stewart Brown (ed.), Kiss and Quarrel: Yorùbá/
English, Strategies of Mediation (Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, 2000),
63, 56.
58
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage, 1991), 266–267. Hereafter FR
and page number.
59
Wright, Directions, 158.
60
Maggi Phillips, ‘Ben Okri’s River Narratives: The Famished Road and Songs of
Enchantment’, Derek Wright (ed.), Contemporary African Fiction (Bayreuth: Breitinger,
1997): 167–179, 170.
61
Wright, Directions, 160.
62
Edna Aizenberg, ‘The Famished Road: Magical Realism and the Search for Social
Equity’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 43 (1995): 25–30, 29.
63
Phillips, 178.
64
Mariaconcetta Costantini, Behind the Mask: A Study of Ben Okri’s Fiction (Rome:
Carocci Editore, 2002), 220.
65
Felicia Oka Moh, Ben Okri: An Introduction to his Early Fiction (Enugu: Fourth
Dimension Publishers, 2000), 87.
66
Costantini, 203.
67
David C. L. Lim, The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in
Selected Writings of Ben Okri and K. S. Maniam (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005),
87–88.
162 Notes
68
Jane Wilkinson, ‘Ben Okri’, Wilkinson (ed.), Talking with African Writers: Interviews
with African Poets, Playwrights & Novelists (London: James Currey, 1992): 77–89,
87–88.
69
Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, ‘Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road’, Research in African Literature, 26/1 (1995): 40–52, 50.
70
Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation
(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2005), 153.
Chapter 6
1
Barth, 204.
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—, New Directions in African Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1997).
Young, Robert, and Hollaman, Keith (eds), Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology
(New York: Longman, 1984).
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, ‘The End of Innocence: Myth and Narrative Structure in
Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad’, Hispanic
Journal, 4/1 (1982): 23–40.
—, ‘The Myth of Apocalypse: Human Temporality in García Márquez’s Cien años de
soledad’, Symposium, 32/4 (1978): 341–55.
—, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American
Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
—, and Faris, Wendy B. (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995).
Index
À la recherche du temps perdu 31, 68, 77 affects 74

Anti-Oedipus 152n14 Africa 5, 86–7, 134, 136–7, 139, 144
A Thousand Plateaus agency 4, 109
becoming 24, 27, 64 creative 38, 106, 111
human identity 60 lack of 60, 127, 135, 140
literature 112 political 60, 101, 128
multiplicity 61, 112 subaltern 38, 107, 109, 139
nomads 129 subjective 107, 1121, 140, 148
the possible 50 Ahmad, Ajiaz 9, 153n31
regime of signs 47–8 Aizenberg, Edna 139
segmentarity 45 Aldama, Fredrick Louis 7–8, 12
signs 51, 69 allegory
the State 45–6 in Devil’s Valley 89
abiku 136, 137–40 in The Circle of Reason 127
Absolutely Postcolonial 37–8, 58, 103–4, in The Famished Road 136–9, 141, 143
106–7 in Life of Pi 81
abstract machine 23, 26 in Midnight’s Children 108
actual 19–23, 73–8, 112, 142, 146–8 and Third-World literature 105, 115
and counter-actualization 103 anthropological magical realism 3, 5,
and crystalline sign 74–8, 81, 86, 93, 12, 63, 105
101, 122 antinomy see also contradiction 3, 6–8,
and literature 36 10–12, 14–17, 36, 146
in The Famished Road 142 apartheid 86–7, 89–90
and the human (and motor-sensory apocalypse 13, 43, 62, 65–7, 71,
schema) 73–5, 81, 86, 98, 100 125, 135
in Life of Pi 81, 86 apprenticeship of signs 46, 51, 55, 68,
and the ‘missing people’ 113–15, 148 77, 116
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 45, arborescence 23
47, 52, 54–5 Aristotle 19–20
and realism 33, 38, 71–2 art see also signs of art; ‘superior
and redemption 23–8 viewpoint’
and series 28–32 Ben Okri on 144
in Sexing the Cherry 98, 100–2 and Beloved 67–68
and Signs of Art 51, 77–8, 98, 113, Deleuze and Guattari on 26–8, 73–5,
148 99,102, 112–14, 125–6, 144
and the State 45, 47 Deleuze on 55–6, 73–5, 77–8, 93,
and territory 112–13 102, 103, 112–17, 144, 147–9
and time 54, 76, 100–2 and Devils Valley 91, 93
actualization 20–1, 76 and The Famished Road 142, 144
182 Index
art (Cont’d) and crystalline signs 93

and Life of Pi 82–3, 86 de-specified 37
Koetsch on 120, 145 and difference 20, 22, 28–9, 49
painting 1–2, 150n4 and Kroetsch 120
powers of 56, 82–3, 86, 73, 78, 99, orientation of 23, 43, 71, 112, 116
102, 115, 147 and Romanticism 97
and Sexing the Cherry 99–100 and signs 49
and What the Crow Said 125 and signs of art 47, 51, 55–6, 62, 78,
Winterson on 96, 98 93, 102
assemblage 23, 26, 45, 47–8, 112, 142 as univocal 19–29, 47, 73, 76, 78
Asturias, Miguel Ángel 3, 10 passim and the virtual 19–30 , 25–7, 56, 73,
authorial reticence 11–13 76, 78, 102, 106, 142
‘Axolotl’ 3 passim belief
in fiction or stories 83, 92
Badiou, Alain 21–2, 24–6, 29 in God 83
Bakhtin, Mikhail 5 passim Hindu 128, 134
baroque 2 in magic 2–3, 34, 50, 110
Barth, John 9, 149 traditional 6, 109
Barthes, Roland 32–4 Bell-Villada, Gene 44
becoming 24, 26, 27, 60, 62, 64, 77, Beloved 66–72, 102, 113, 125–6,
86, 147 133, 148
animal 24 memory 67–70
in Life of Pi 83–4 slave narrative 67
in ‘The Metamorphosis’ 35 slavery 67–9, 71, 126
in Midnight’s Children 60, 62 Bergson, Henri 21, 75–7, 94, 99
in Sexing the Cherry 98 Bertacco, Simona 120
in What the Crow Said 122–5 ‘Bestiary’ 15, 79 passim
and Being 55 Bhabha, Homi K.
and history 113 cultural difference 106, 130, 134
imperceptible or indiscernible 24–5, colonial discourse 39
27, 77 hybrid signifier 106–9, 117, 148
in Life of Pi 85–6 hybridity 38, 106–9, 130, 140
‘missing people’ 114, 117 ‘in-between space’ 106–9, 119
molecular 62 magical realism 9, 105, 107
non-human 78, 102, 116, 147 postcolonial literature 127
in Devil’s Valley 88, 92 in What the Crow Said 119–20,
in Life of Pi 82–6 122–4, 126
in Sexing the Cherry 100 in Circle of Reason 130, 132,
in What the Crow Said 124 134, 139
other 55, 60, 66 body without organs 23
being Boehmer, Elleke 57, 87, 144
as actual and virtual 19–30, 51, 73, Bogue, Ronald 116
76, 78, 102, 112–13, 142, 146–7 Borges, Jorge Luis 3, 6, 79 passim
and art 28, 47, 74, 78, 113 Bose, Brinda 135
and Bergson 76–7 ‘boom’, Latin American literary 1–2,
conditions of 56, 62, 73, 102, 41, 57, 81, 105
112–13 Boundas, Constantin 22
as creative agency or force 22, 78, 93, Brennan, Timothy 14, 57, 62
102, 103, 106, 111, 113, 116 Brink, André 86–94
Index 183
Canada 8, 117–18, 120 in Life of Pi 80–2

capitalism in Midnight’s Children 60
in Circle of Reason 127–8, 132 in Nights at the Circus 65
in The Famished Road 137, 142 in One Hundred Years of
magical realism as complicit with 16 Solitude 44–50, 52–4
in Nights at the Circus 63 and realism 33–4, 36
and pre-capitalist society (economy, in What the Crow Said 121
modes of production) 4–5, 16, Cooper, Brenda 5–7, 12–13, 139–40
104–5, 108, 110, 121, 127–8, Cortázar, Julio 3, 6, 15, 79 passim
132, 137 Costantini, Mariaconcetta 143–4
in What the Crow Said 121 counter-actualization 20–1, 23, 35, 49
and writers of magical realism 12 and becoming 60
carnivalesque 5, 9, 57, 63–4 and cinema 74
Carroll, Lewis 31, 35 passim and indiscernibility 76, 78, 103
Carpentier, Alejo 2–4, 7, 10, 41, 57 and redemption 25, 28
passim 104, 137 passim and series 32
Carr, Helen 56 crisis see also trance 114, 116, 132–4,
Carter, Angela, 8 passim 56, 63–6, 98 141, 144
catalyst also conduit, leaven 72, 102, contradiction see also antinomy
115, 126, 132–5, 140, 142, 149 between the real and the magical 3,
Césaire, Aimé 103 5, 10–12, 36, 73
Chanady, Amaryll 10–12, 14–18, 32–3, in definitions of and approaches to
48, 146 magical realism 1, 12, 16, 57, 146
chaos 26, 73–4, 78, 80, 93, 125 in Devil’s Valley 90
Cinema 2 in Nights at the Circus 65
crystalline sign 74–7, 81, 91, 93, in Midnight’s Children 58
101, 116 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 62
‘missing people’ 114–15 in Sexing the Cherry 95
motor-sensory schema 74–7, 81, 116 The Crow Journals 120, 124
Third World cinema 114–16, 132 crystalline image 74–8
cinema see also film 27, 116, 132 crystalline sign 77, 116
The Circle of Reason 126–36, 141 in Devil’s Valley 88, 91–3
apocalypse 135 in The Famished Road 141
family 127, 130, 132 in Life of Pi 81–3, 86
migrants 127–9, 133–5 in Sexing the Cherry 101
political action 133–5 in What the Crow Said 122
reason 128–9, 133–5 crystalline narration 75
Coetzee, J.M. 8 passim Cuban Revolution 41
Cogito 20, 47–8 culture
colonialism see also postcolonialism Canada 115, 118, 120–6
4, 8, 17, 41, 43, 147 clash or conflict of 4–6, 12, 105,
in Bhabha 106–8, 126 107–8, 110, 140, 147
and Canada 118–20 conditions of 109, 122, 125–6,
and realism 12, 39 130, 145
Conner, Marc C. 67, 70–1 encounter or meeting of 5–6, 8,
convergence (of series, systems, 105–9, 130, 140
lines) 29, 31–2, 75, 77–8, 147 extinction of 106–7, 117, 120,
in Beloved 70 123, 134
in Devil’s Valley 89, 92 and memory 90
184 Index
culture (Cont’d) Dialogues II

non-Western culture also native actual and virtual 25
culture 15–16, 43, 63, 90, 118, identity 60
121, 124 104 writing 27, 49, 55, 62, 140
and politics see politics Dib, Mohammed 38 passim
and religion 85 différance 106
Western culture 3, 5–6, 12, 15–18, difference
63, 96, 105, 109, 128, 130, 140 in Bhabha 38, 106, 108–9, 130
and world-view also versions of reality, in Deleuze
experience 3, 6–8, 12, 15–17, in Beloved 68
43–4, 108, 128, 147 in Devil’s Valley 92–3
as superstructure 110–11 in Midnight’s Children 60
cultural difference 106, 108–9, 127, in One Hundred Years of Solitude 49
130, 134, 144, 147, 147 and ontology 18, 19–23, 25, 28, 33–4
cultural diversity also pluralism, mix and postcolonial theory 38, 103
92, 85, 87, 108–9, 127, 130, 134, in series and systems 28–2
144, 147 and signs of art 51, 68, 77–8
cultural hegemony 4, 110–11 Difference and Repetition
cultural hybridity 5–8, 12, 16, 57, 96, Being also actual and virtual 19–21,
106–9, 118, 130, 144 28, 142
cultural identity 37–8, 86, 92, 130 cogito 47
laws of nature 33
D’Haen, Theo 8 series 29–31
Day, Adrian 65–6 ‘The Dinosaur’ 81
Dayia, Kavita 127 disjunctive synthesis 28–36, 38, 49
Decolonization 41, 43 divergence also divergent
Defamiliarization 3 element 29–34, 72, 146–7
Derrida, Jacques 105 in The Circle of Reason 129
Descartes, René see also Cogito 20 in Devil’s Valley 89–90, 92–4
despotic regime 47, 69–71, 126 in The Famished Road 138
deterritorialization 24–6, 35, 76, 116 in Life of Pi 81, 83, 86
and assemblages 112 in Midnight’s Children 59–60
in Beloved 67 in Nights at the Circus 64
in Circle of Reason 127–30, 133 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 44,
in The Famished Road 140, 142 49–50, 52, 54
in Midnight’s Children 59–62 in Sexing the Cherry 113
in Nights at the Circus 65–6 and signs of art 77–8
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 45, in What the Crow Said 121–4
52, 54–6 Dixon, Robert 128
in postcolonial theory 38 Doan, Laura 97
as revolutionary 113, 146 double bind 13, 40, 43, 73, 103, 107,
Devil’s Valley 66–94, 96, 100 108, 149
Great Trek 87–9 Dream Tigers 79
history 87–9, 91 dreams
myth 88–92 in Devil’s Valley 91, 93
stories 88–94 in The Famished Road 138, 143
women 87, 89, 91, 93 in Sexing the Cherry 101
Index 185
duration 76–8, 94, 99–102 fantasy (genre) 2, 11, 14–16

Durix, Jean-Pierre 6–7, 13, 109 in Midnight’s Children 56–7, 109
Dwyer, June 83–5 in Sexing the Cherry 94, 96
Faris, Wendy 4, 9–10, 14–15, 109
economics feminism 63, 94, 97, 101
in The Circle of Reason 127, 128–9 film 4, 104–5, 111, 115, 123
in Deleuze and Guattari 22–3 flight also flying; see also line of flight
in The Famished Road 139 in Devil’s Valley 92
and Jameson 105, 110 in The Famished Road 142–3
and Kroetsch 120 in Nights at the Circus 64
and postcolonial theory 38 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 50, 53
and series 33 in Sexing the Cherry 95, 98–9, 101
élan vital 76 Flores, Angel 2
empiricism also positivism 7, 15, 19, focalizer 11–12, 34
32–4, 73, 79–80, 95 folklore 13
epistemology 9, 108 Forster, E. M. 106, 122
Esquivel, Laura 1 passim Fowles, John 8 passim
essence 28, 49, 51, 53, 55, 68, 106, Furst, Lillian 32
116 future
ethnic see native and Bergsonian duration 94
Europe 2, 6, 8 Brink on 87
ex-centricity 8–9, 118 in The Circle of Reason 125, 133,
Expressionism 2 135–6
eyewitness 58, 79, 89 in The Famished Road 138–9, 141
in Midnight’s Children 58
fairy tales 2, 11, 110 possibilities of 113, 133
family 15, 33, 35 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 54
in Beloved 69, 71 in Sexing the Cherry 100–2
in The Circle of Reason 130, 132, 136 in What the Crow Said 123, 125
in Devil’s Valley 88–9, 91
in The Famished Road 137 Gade, Bente 100–1
in Midnight’s Children 58, 60 García Márquez, Gabriel
in Nights at the Circus 63 and definitions of magical realism 1,
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 42–3, 3, 6, 9–12
52–3, 54 One Hundred Years of Solitude 41–56
in Third World literature 127 Ga˛siorek, Andrzej 64
in What the Crow Said 121 gender 37, 92, 94–9, 135
The Famished Road 136–45 geography
abiku 136–40 in The Circle of Reason 131
allegory 136–9, 141 and definitions of magical realism 3,
independence 136–7 6, 18
myth 137–8, 141–2, 149 in Devil’s Valley 88
spirits 136–41, 144 in The Famished Road 136
Fanon, Franz 103 in Life of Pi 80, 82
the fantastic 6, 9, 34, 49, 87, 95, 125 in Midnight’s Children 58, 71
Todorov 10–11, 15 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 44–5
fantasy 74, 91, 111 and realism 32, 72
186 Index
geography (Cont’d) the real and the magical 11, 16

in Sexing the Cherry 95 of the State 58, 63–4
in What the Crow Said 120 West and non-West 3, 13, 105
Ghosh, Amitav 87, 137, 142, 145 Higgins, James 42
The Circle of Reason 126–36 Hinchcliffe, Peter 1
ghosts historicism see also Marxism 109, 111,
in Beloved 70 113, 122, 128, 144, 146
in The Circle of Reason 131 historiographic metafiction 57, 88–9,
in Devil’s Valley 90, 92, 94 101
in Midnight’s Children 59 history also a-historicity
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 50 colonial also imperial 4, 119
in What the Crow Said 123 in Beloved 67–8, 71
Giordano, Tiziana 96 in The Circle of Reason 126–9, 131,
Glage, Liselotte 109 133, 135–6
Glissant, Eduard 38 passim in definitions of magical realism 5,
globalization 127, 135 12, 16
Gonzáles Echevarría, Roberto 1–3, in Deleuze (and Guattari) 22, 46,
7, 9 113–14, 116–17
González, Suzana 84 in Devil’s Valley 86–91, 93
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. 60 in The Famished Road 136, 140, 144–5
Grant, Damian 100 and Federic Jameson 104–5, 107–11
grotesque 64, 98–9, 137, 143 in Life of Pi 80, 82
Guattari, Félix see A Thousand and magic 72, 147–9
Plateaus?; Kafka: Toward a of magical realism 1–2
Minor Literature; What is in Midnight’s Children 57–8, 62, 71
Philosophy in Nights at the Circus 63, 66, 71
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 41–4,
Hallward, Peter see also Absolutely 46, 54, 56
Postcolonial, singular, specific, and realism 32–3, 72
specified in Sexing the Cherry 94–6, 98–9, 101–2
and Deleuze 21–5, 28, 36, 47, 56, and the singular 37–8
71, 148 in What the Crow Said 120, 122–4, 126
and postcolonial theory 36–9, 58, 62, Hodgins, Jack 118
103–4, 107–9, 148 human
Hamon, Philippe 32–3, 44 and animal 35, 60, 64, 69, 80–5, 98,
Hanson, Claire 66 119, 122–3
Hardt, Michael 22 deterritrialization of 35, 60, 70, 77
Harris, Trudier 70 and fiction 57, 68
Harris, Wilson 3 passim and God 85
Hawley, John 127 non-human also in-human;
heartland see metropolis surpassing of; going beyond 27,
Heinze, Denise 70 71, 72–4, 77–8, 102, 116, 147
hierarchy also non-hierarchy in Beloved 68–72
of Being 25, 106, 112 in Devil’s Valley 92
colonial 147 in The Famished Road 140–1, 143
human, animal and God 85 in Life of Pi 80–6
identity and difference also same and in Sexing the Cherry 98–100
different 19, 21, 147, 149 in What the Crow Said 122–4
Index 187
order also culture, society, life, and postcolonial texts and

reason 38, 45 theory 37–8, 106–8, 118
in Beloved 68–9, 125 reconstruction of 65, 71–2, 125, 133
and history 57, 68 and series 29–31, 34
in Life of Pi 80–6 in Sexing the Cherry 94, 101–2
in Nights at the Circus 64, 80–1, 84, sexual 37, 63, 101, 106
86, 124–5, 143, 147 as specified 64–6, 69
in One Hundred Years of in What the Crow Said 125–6
Solidtude 50, 53, 55 ‘illusion of representation’ 20, 33–6,
and realism 72, 73, 83–6, 102, 130, 68, 47–8
136, 147 Imaginary Homelands 104
and segmentarity 45 immanence 19, 22–4, 26, 35–6, 68,
and spirit 99, 136, 140–1, 143 82, 104
suffering also misery 117, 126, 130, imperceptibility see indiscernibility
133, 142, 136 ‘in-between’ 104–6, 107, 119, 122–3,
human rights 13 127, 132
Hutcheon, Linda 8–9, 57, 117–20 incompossibility 91, 93
hybrid signifier 106–9, 117, 148 independence 4, 46, 58, 105, 135–7
in The Circle of Reason 130, 132, India 13, 126
134, 139 in The Circle of Reason 128–31, 134
in What the Crow Said 119–20, 122–4, in Midnight’s Children 57–62, 108
126 indigenous see native
hybridity 5–8, 12, 16, 103, 118, 139 indiscernibility also imperceptibility
Bhabha on 38, 106–9, 130, 139–40 between actual and virtual 27, 76, 86
in The Famished Road 144 in art 27, 78, 123, 125
in Midnight’s Children 57 and becoming 24, 27
in Sexing the Cherry 96 in the crystalline image or sign 76–8,
92, 123
identity in Devil’s Valley 92
in Beloved 67–72 between human and non-human 64,
in Bhabha 106–8, 130 77, 86, 92–3, 98, 102, 116
black 67, 69, 92 between imaginary and real 77, 86,
in Canadian literature 118–21 88, 91–3
in The Circle of Reason 127–33 in Life of Pi 83
cultural 38, 41, 85–6, 92, 107–8, 130 of meaning 124
in Devil’s Valley 87, 92–3 between real and magic 86, 88, 92
and difference 19–21, 29–31 in Sexing the Cherry 100, 102
in The Famished Road 138, 141 in time 100
in Life of Pi 85–6 intertextuality 6–8
loss or lack of 31, 50, 60–2, 65–6, involuntary memory see also Proust 68
71–2, 108, 128–31, 147
in Midnight’s Children 56–62 Jackman, Christine 125
national or regional 3–4, 41, 43, James, Henry 3
56–62, 87, 105, 108, 114, 118, Jameson, Frederic
127, 138 influence 4–5, 7, 9, 12, 16, 104,
in Nights at the Circus 64–6 108–9, 118, 144
personal also subjective 47, 57–62, on magical realism in film 4–5, 104
64–6, 70–1, 108, 125 The Political Unconscious 110–13
188 Index
Jameson, Frederic (Cont’d) The Location of Culture 106–7, 109, 117,

on Third-World literature 104–5, 123, 132, 140
107–8, 114–15 Logic of Sense
in The Circle of Reason 127–8, 130 counter-actualization 21
in The Famished Road 137, 138 disjunctive synthesis 28–9, 32
in What the Crow Said 121 language 30
Janes, Regina 41–3 nonsense 31
Jewinsky, Ed 1 object = x 29–31, 52
Jin, Meiling 106 series 28–32
Joseph-Vilain, Mélanie 88–91 time 54
Lozano, Maria 98
Kafka, Franz 2–3, 81
Deleuze (and Guattari) on 26, 31, MacKay, Shena 97
35–6, 81, 116, 141 macropolitical 23
Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature 26, 31, major language 35
35–6, 81, 114, 116, 140–3 Martel, Yann 78–86
Kant, Immanuel 20, 74 Martin, Gerald 43
Kauer, Ute 88, 90–2 marvellous 2, 10–11
King, Francis 83 Marxism see also superstructure, modes
The Kingdom of this World 2 of production
Kroetsch, Robert 117–26, 130, and The Circle of Reason 128, 133
132, 145 and The Famished Road 137–8, 140,
144
Latin America 1–4, 6, 10, 12, 41–4, 57, Jameson 104–5, 108–11, 117
62, 78–9, 81, 104–5, 121 and postcolonial theory 103–4, 109
literary ‘Boom’ 1–2, 41, 57, 81, 196 and realism 104–48
laws of nature 15, 33–4, 53, 60, 64–5, and What the Crow Said 121
74, 81 Massumi, Brian 22, 60
Lecker, Robert 119–20, 125 matter-of-fact (narration)
‘legending’ 115–16, 120, 123 in Beloved 69
Lernout, Geert 120 in definitions of magical realism 3,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 30 11–12, 14, 16–17
Life of Pi 78–86, 88, 90, 92–3, 98, 100, in Life of Pi 81
102, 147 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 44, 50
culture 85–6 and realism 32–3, 49
religion 81, 83, 85 in Sexing the Cherry 95
time 80, 82 Max and the Cats 78
Like Water for Chocolate 1 passim McHale, Brian 8–9
Lim, David 144 McMullin, Stanley E. 118
line of flight 23–4, 27, 140 Menton, Seymour 150n4
in The Famished Road 140, 142 Mensch, James 84–5
in Kafka 35–6 metamorphosis 98
in Life of Pi 80 ‘The Metamorphosis’ 2–3, 36, 81
in Midnight’s Children 60 metaphysical magical realism 3
in Nights at the Circus 64 metatextuality 7–8
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 53 metropolis also centre, heartland 8–9,
‘literature of replenishment’ 9 63–4, 104, 118–19, 121
Lo real meravilloso 2 Meyer, Middleton 101
Index 189
micropolitics 23 native culture or world-view also

Midnight’s Children 1, 8, 56–67, 69, 79, indigenous, ethnic 3, 7, 11–12,
111, 136 15–16, 37, 114, 144
apocalypse 13, 62, 65, 67, 135, 137 in Devil’s Valley 90
hybridity 108 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 41, 43
identity 56–60, 62, 65–6, 71–2, 108, in What the Crow Said 118–19, 121, 124
138, 147 neo-colonialism 43, 147
Indian writing 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich 21
migrants, migration 12, 46, 126–9, Nights at the Circus 8, 63–7, 71–2, 96, 125
131–6 nomads, nomadism 23, 112
minor literature 26, 35–6, 38, 114, in The Circle of Reason 126, 129–31,
135, 140 135
minority see also minor literature 7, in Midnight’s Children 61
114–16, 135 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 45–6,
mise-en-abyme 55 54–5
‘missing people’, ‘new people’ 111,
114–15, 117, 148 object = x 29–31, 34, 38
in The Circle of Readon 131, 133–5, 138 in Beloved 70
in The Famished Road 138, 140–2 in The Circle of Reason 127, 129, 131,
mode of production see also 134
Marxism 109–12, 121, 124, 127–8 in Devil’s Valley 92
modernism 9, 96 in The Famished Road 140
Moh, Felicia Oka 144 as hybrid signifier 106, 108
molar 23, 137 in Life of Pi 81
molecular 23–4, 62 in Midnight’s Children 60, 108
monkey 189 in Nights at the Circus 64–6
Monterosso, Augosto 81 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 52–4
Morrison, Toni 66–72 in What the Crow Said 122, 124
motor-sensory schema 74–7, 116 Okri, Ben 4, 87, 136–45
in Life of Pi 80, 82, 86 omens also premonitions 41, 50–1, 59,
in Sexing the Cherry 98, 100 123, 127
multiplicity 5, 19, 21–2, 57, 60–2 One Hundred Years of Solitude 1, 9, 11,
myth 3, 5, 9, 105, 111, 115–16, 148–9 13, 41–56, 72, 147, 149
in The Circle of Reason 131–5 apocalypse in 13, 43, 55
in Devil’s Valley 88–92 and Beloved 67, 70
in The Famished Road 137–8, 141–2 and The Circle of Reason 126–7, 135
in Midnight’s Children 13, 57, 59–60 and Devil’s Valley 88, 92, 94
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 41–3, and The Famished Road 136
53 indiscernibility in 78, 94
in Sexing the Cherry 94 and Life of Pi 79, 82
rewriting of 111, 119–20, 122 and Midnight’s Children 57–9, 62
and the State 59–60, 89, 133, 138 and Nights at the Circus 63, 65
in What the Crow Said 119–20, 122–3, and Sexing the Cherry 96
125–6 time in 46, 48, 53–5, 58, 75
and What the Crow Said 118, 121,
Naipaul, V. S. 104 123, 125
nationalism 12–13, 62, 67, 108, 127 Onega, Susan 95
Nation and Narration 105 ontological magical realism 2–3, 9, 12
190 Index
ontological orientation 71, 112, 116 in Sexing the Cherry 95–6, 98, 101–2
ontology 9–10, 17–18, 19–29, 47, in What the Crow Said 119–20, 122, 124
56, 73–7, 102, 112–13, 116, positivism see empiricism
146–7, 149 Post-Expressionism (painting) 1–2
organic narration 75–7, 81–2, 88, 116 postcolonial literature
Orientalism 39 and Canada 118–19
Ouyang, Wen-Chin 4 and definitions of magical realism 3,
4–10, 12–13, 103–11, 148
Palmer, Paulina 64, 98, 101 Hallward 37–40, 103–4, 109
paradox (in magical realism) 18–19, Jameson 4–7, 9, 12, 104–5, 107, 109,
144, 146 111, 118, 127
paradoxical object 29 and South Africa 87
Parfume 1 postcolonial theory 36–8, 103–9, 117,
patriarchy 92, 97 139, 148
Peach, Linden 67 postmodernism 1, 4–10, 12, 69, 105,
Pearce, Lynne 96 117, 119
percepts 74 Pour la suite du monde 115
Perrault, Pierre 115, 123, 141 Prasad, G. J. V. 135
Phelan, James 70 premonitions see omens
phenomenological magical realism 2–3 pre-capitalist society also pre-capitalist
Phillips, Maggie 138–9 economy, modes of
philosophy production 4–5, 16, 104–5, 108,
Badiou 21–2, 24–5, 28 110, 121, 127–8, 132, 137
Bergson 75 Proust and Signs
Deleuze 19–28, 36, 103, 111–12, 116 art 56, 68, 77, 78, 102, 106, 113
Deleuze and Guattari see also What is essence 106, 113
Philosophy? 23, 26–7, 73, 117, involuntary memory 68
126, 144 signs 49, 51
Hallward 21–3, 25, 28, 37, 103, superior viewpoint 57–8, 91, 113
109, 148 time 77, 100
plane of immanence also plane of unity 77–8, 93
consisitency 19, 23–4, 26, 104 Proust, Marcel 31, 34–5, 68, 77
Plato 20 pure time also pure past 54, 75–8, 94,
pluralism see also multiplicity 19, 22, 92 99–100, 102
The Political Unconscious 110–11 Pykett, Lynn 96–8
politics
Andre Brink on 86–7 reader
in The Circle of Reason 127–9, 133–5 belief or non-belief in magic 7,
in definitions of magical realism 4–5, 10–11, 15, 32, 34, 49
9, 12–13, 17–18, 41–2, 146–9 hesitation 7, 10–11
in Deleuze 21–4, 27 realist narrative
in Deleuze and Guattari 22–3, 26–7, 35 in Beloved 68
in The Famished Road 136–42, 144 in The Circle of Reason 126–8, 130
in Midnight’s Children 57, 60 in definitions of magical realism 5,
in Nights at the Circus 63 12, 14–16, 18, 146–7
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 41–4 and Deleuze 32–6, 48–9, 75
postcolonial 37–40, 103–5, 107–17 in Devil’s Valley 89, 91, 93
and realism 33, 71–2, 73 in The Famished Road 136
Index 191
in Life of Pi 79–82 in Nights at the Circus 64–6

in Midnight’s Children 61 in What the Crow Said 125–6
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 44, and Marxism 110
48–9, 51, 53 in series 29–30
and postcoloniality 39 social 22, 37, 39, 110, 112, 114–15
in Sexing the Cherry 96 in The Circle of Reason 126, 128
in What the Crow Said 118, 121, 124 in The Famished Road 144
reality effect 32, 45, 47–8, 51, 75, 79, 89 in What the Crow Said 118–20, 125
reason also rationality 14–15, 17, 33 religion 5, 79, 81, 83–5, 89, 116, 128,
in Beloved 69 134
in The Circle of Reason 128–35 Christianity 79, 85, 87–8
in Life of Pi 80, 83–4 Hinduism 79, 85, 128, 134
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 47–8, Islam 79, 81, 85
50–1, 54–5 Remedios the Beauty 11, 49, 53–4
and the State 47–8, 51–2 resistance 12, 117, 144–5
redemption 24–8, 82, 138, 144 resonance 29–32, 34–5, 38, 77–8, 112
referentiality 31, 33–5, 51, 55, 76, 116 in Beloved 68
representation see also illusion of in Devil’s Valley 92
representation in Nights at the Circus 66
in The Circle of Reason 127–8, 131 in One Hundred Years of Solitude
and the Cogito 47 52–3, 55
in Midnight’s Children 58, 60, 62 reterritorialization 35–6, 49
in minor literature 26, 35 in Beloved 66, 69
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 41–2, in The Circle of Reason 133
45 in The Famished Road 138
and postcoloniality 39 in Midnight’s Children 59
of reality also of the world 8, 14, 61, in Nights at the Circus 65–6
71, 104, 112, 114, 145, 147–8 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 51–2,
and realism 35, 93 55
in Sexing the Cherry 101 revolution
and the signs of art 74, 77, 90 Cuban 41
in What the Crow Said 124 in The Circle of Reason 128, 132–3, 136
regime of signs 46–51, 53–4, 77, in Deleuze (and Guattari) 24, 26,
115–16, 147 109, 113–14, 116–17, 142, 145
in Beloved 69, 71 in The Famshed Road 140, 142, 144
in The Circle of Reason 130 in Jameson 110–11
in Devil’s Valley 89 in Sexing the Cherry 101–2
in Life of Pi 85–6 rhizome 23
in Midnight’s Children 58–9 Robinson Crusoe 79, 83–4
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 47–50, Roessner, Jeffrey 96, 98–9
53–4, 147 Roh, Franz 1–2
in What the Crow Said 123–4 romanticicm 2, 96–7, 110, 138
relationality 22, 28, 37, 39, 56, 62, Rushdie, Salman 1, 3–4, 6, 8, 13,
75–6, 103, 112, 114, 148 56–62, 67, 104–5, 108–9, 126–7,
and assemblages 112 136, 138
and identity
in Beloved 66–8, 71 Sage, Lorna 88
in Midnight’s Children 62 Said, Edward 38–9
192 Index
Sale, Maggie 67 signs of art 51, 62, 72, 73–8, 102, 106,
science 5, 26–7, 54, 73, 79–80, 128–30, 113, 116–17, 148
134 in Beloved 68
Scilar, Moacyr 78 passim in Devil’s Valley 93
sedentary 23, 112 in The Famished Road 139
segmentarity 24, 45–7, 72, 112, 147 in Life of Pi 82–3, 85–6
in Beloved 69 in Midnight’s Children 59, 62
in The Circle of Reason 131, 133 in One Hundred Years of Solitude 55–6
in Devil’s Valley 89 in What the Crow Said 123, 125
in The Famished Road 136–7 simulacrum 77, 116–17, 122
in Life of Pi 80, 82, 85 the singular 22, 36–40, 56, 103–4,
in Midnight’s Children 58–9 106–7, 148
in Nights at the Circus 63–5 in Beloved 70–1
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 45–7, in The Famished Road 139, 144
52–5 in Midnight’s Children 60, 62
in Sexing the Cherry 99 in Nights at the Circus 65
in What the Crow Said 121 slavery 67–9, 70–1, 87, 106, 115, 126
series see also convergence; divergence; slave narrative 67
disjunctive synthesis 28–36, 72, Slemon, Stephen 4, 17, 118, 125
76–7, 147 ‘The South’ 3 passim
in Devil’s Valley 89, 92 South Africa 86–8
in The Famished Road 136, 140 the specific 22–4, 37–40, 66, 103–4,
in Life of Pi 80, 82 107
in Midnight’s Children 60 the specified 37–9, 64–6, 69, 71, 103
in Nights at the Circus 64 Spindler, William 3, 5, 9, 11–12, 17,
in One Hundrd Years of Solitude 44–6, 63, 105
48–50, 52–4 Spinoza, Baruch 21
and postcolonial theory 38 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 38
proliferation or ramification stories
of 29–31, 34–6, 38, 44, 49, in Beloved 71
52, 140 in Devil’s Valley 88–94
in Sexing the Cherry 99 in The Famished Road 143
in What the Crow Said 121 Latin American 10, 41
Sexing the Cherry 94–102, 113, 132, in Life of Pi 83, 86
142, 148 in Sexing the Cherry 95–6, 101
gender 94–8 in Third World literature 115–16
history 94–6, 98, 101–2, 148 Stowers, Cath 98–9
political action 101–2, 132–4 Stratton, Florence 82
sexuality 94, 96–8 Street, Steve 79
time 94–8, 100–2 subaltern 38, 104, 107, 109, 139
transformation; flight; body; subject see also Cogito 22, 62, 65, 102
Sexuality 94, 96–8, 106 absence or negation of 9, 60, 74–5,
signification 30–1, 51, 109 84, 112, 117, 132, 141
gap in or incomplete 105–7, 122, and agency 60, 107, 112, 128,
131 140, 148
regime of signs of 48, 69, 77 and postcolonial theory 37–9, 58,
signifier and signified 30–1 105, 107
Index 193
and the regime of signs of Ulka, Joshi 135

subjectification 47–8, 50–1, uncanny 3, 10–11, 34, 106, 139
55, 58 United States 7, 118
subjectivity 2–3, 22, 37, 91, 96 Univocity of Being 19–29, 37–8, 47, 76,
Deleuze on 47, 51–2, 56, 68, 74, 76, 104, 146–7
91, 106, 112 unreal 3, 6–7, 15, 75, 92
sublime 70–1
supernatural 2–3, 5, 10–15, 79, 95, Valdez Moses, Michael 16
127 Vargas Llosa, Mario 41
‘superior viewpoint’ 55, 77, 91, 93, 102 Vautier, Marie 119
superstructure see also Marxism 110–12 virtual
supplement 73, 78, 97, 102, 122, 148–9 and Being 19–30, 35, 49, 51, 56,
surrealism 104 73–6, 78, 93, 102, 106, 112, 113,
Süskind, Patrick 1 passim 146–8
symbols 30, 35, 41, 51 as chaos 26, 73–4, 78, 93, 125
in Beloved 68, 70 and counter-actualization 20–1, 23–5,
in The Circle of Reason 127, 132, 134 28, 32, 36, 49, 39, 74, 76, 78, 103
in The Famished Road 137–8 and the crystalline sign 74–8, 86,
and Jameson 113 93–4, 101
in Life of Pi 81–2 as double of actual 27, 78, 102,
in Midnight’s Children 59 141–2, 148
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 52–6 and language 30–1, 33, 35–6, 38,
in What the Crow Said 124 81–2, 106, 108, 124–5
syncretism also syncretization 5, 12, 57, and ontological orientation 23, 71,
108, 109 112
and redemption 23–28
territory also territorialization; see also and resonance 30–1, 34–5, 38, 77
deterritorialization, revelation of 51, 77–8, 102, 113
reterritorialization) 27, 35, 45, and revolution 24, 26, 101–2,
72, 73, 112–14, 116, 147–9 113–14, 132, 140, 148
and apartheid 86–7 and series 28–36, 38, 77, 140, 147
in Beloved 67, 69–71 and signs of art 51, 77–8, 139
in The Circle of Reason 127–34, 136 and time 54, 75–8, 94, 100–2,
in The Famished Road 136–8, 140–3 106, 132
in Life of Pi 80, 82 Voyage to the Seed 3 passim
in Midnight’s Children 59
in Nights at the Circus 65 Wall, Kathleen 119
in One Hundred Years of Solitude 46, Warnes, Christopher 16–17
48–9, 51, 53–4, 56 Weltanschauung see world-view
in What the Crow Said 121, 124–6 the West see culture
Third World 9, 13, 63, 127, 132 What is Plilosophy
in Deleuze 114–16, 132 art 26–7, 74, 99, 117, 123, 126
Third World literature 104–5, 107, 111 becoming 61, 102, 113
tiger 15, 78–84, 93, 122 ‘new people’ 113, 117, 126, 144
Todorov, Tzvetan 10–11, 15 philosophy 23
trance see also crisis 116, 132–3, 141 protective rules 74–5
The Turn of the Screw 3 passim revolution 113
194 Index
What is Plilosophy (Cont’d) in Nights at the Circus 63–4

ways of thought 26, 73 in One Hundred Years of Solitude
writing 61–2 53–4
What the Crow Said 117–26, 127–8, 131, in Sexing the Cherry 95–8
133, 141–2 in What the Crow Said 119, 124–5
apocalypse 125 world-view also Weltanschauung 3,
myth 119–20, 122–3, 125–6 11–12, 15–16, 33–4, 43, 105, 108,
Native Indians 118–19, 121 128–9, 137, 146–7, 149
Williamson, Edwin 42 Wright, Derek 136, 138
Wilson, Robert R. 14–17
Winterson, Jeanette 94–102, 134 Yorùba 136–8, 141
women
becoming-woman 24, 60 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 14–15, 42
in Devil’s Valley 87–93 zones of indiscernibility see
in Midnight’s Children 59, 60 indiscernibility

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Magical Realism and Deleuze

Continuum Literary Studies Series

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Continuum Literary Studies

© Eva Aldea, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-4411-0998-9 (hardcover)

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Chapter 1 Introduction: Magical Realism 1

BD Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005).

Works by Gilles Deleuze

AO Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

KM Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,

Introduction: Magical Realism

A History of Magical Realism:

transcendental paintings of the Expressionists with a return to reality emerging

contemporary views of magical realism, as we can see in the typology of the

Reality and Text: Postcolonial or Postmodern?

In his widely read 1988 article ‘Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse’,

magical or fantastic’ (OMRF 311). Jameson’s definition thus coincides, at least

emergence and thematics of magical realism within a postcolonial environment,

a specific cultural experience, because of the absence of an antinomy between

Realism and The Resolution of Antinomy

Chanady emphasizes that the fantastic is essentially different from what

territory staked out by Todorov: according to Wilson, if the supernatural is

away’ and ends up concluding, rather unsurprisingly, that ‘magical realism in

magic in magical realism is continually perceived as different, even though it is

Gilles Deleuze and Magical Realism

Introduction: The Importance of Ontology

univocal Being. To Deleuze, difference, rather than identity, is therefore pri-

Difference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be cancelled;

The difference-in-itself of the virtual is pure intensity, or rather, differences

Deleuze and the Univocity of Being

Deleuze’s ontology thus provides us with the inversion of the hierarchy of

contrary to the commonly accepted image (Deleuze as liberating the anar-

If we consider some of Deleuze’s earlier monographs, in which he elaborated

readings of Deleuze, for he sees Deleuze as a philosopher of the singular. To

seeks to understand the individuation of all possible beings and experiences

The Deleuzian concept of Being is therefore an example of a singular philoso-

Deleuze and Redemption

Hallward suggests such a tendency towards the virtual is a redemptive move-

The question posed by Deleuze is the question of Being. From beginning to

Exclusive importance should not be attached to becomings-animal. Rather

there is coalescence and division, or rather oscillation, a perpetual exchange

Being: univocal Being is, in itself, redemption. Because Being is immediately

involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through

Thus literature exceeds the limited field of politics in the actual:

this point of indiscernibility is precisely constituted by the smallest circle, that

Series and Systems

of a sandwich – an orange – reading a newspaper is both coexistent in time

straightforwardly referential. However, if we consider the function of the

Series and Magical Realism

operate in an unlimited field of immanence’ (KM 86). The proliferation of

Hallward and the Postcolonial Problem

historical, social and economic situation from which it is seen to be produced is

singular, then it is not a subversion that is unproblematically political. Indeed,

Models of Magical Realism

Introduction: A Model of Magical Realism –

If magic is seen as part of the world of Macondo, it is difficult to see it as a

Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in Deleuzian Terms:

A Regime of Signs and the Apprenticeship of Signs