"The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms" by Amaryll Chanady

Chanady opens her essay by restating Luiz Costa Lima's argument that there has been a "scandalous prohibition" of fiction, described as "the systematic control of the imaginary by the dictates of a restrictive conception of mimesis based on verisimilitude, decorum, and imitation of consecrated masters and legitimated models" since the 16th century, roughly the time when medieval theocentrism gave way to the Enlightenment and reason; it wasn't until the Romantic era that writers rebelled against such societal controls over the imaginary (125). In Latin American fiction, rather than self-examination writer instead focused on their surroundings, partially because of the European insistence that the New World geography was exceptional and partially because Latin Americans were engaging in identity-building (126).

Chanady goes on to examine both Angel Flores' and Luis Leal's essays on the nature of magical realism. She notes Flores' obvious attempts to find a place for magical realism that will earn Latin American fiction the global respect it deserves. Chanady has problems with Flores' version of magical realism as she sees the opulent narratives of Columbus to be at adds with the cold, cerebral Kafka (128). She also doesn't believes Flores is mixing the fantastic in with magic realism with his statements about magic realist writers clinging to reality versus the fairy tale, which does not; she suggests the solution of looking at the innovative nature of the imagination in magical realist works, contrasting them to the stock structure of fairy tales (129). Flores (as well as Carpentier) also seem to hold mimetic writing in scorn, yet Lima (and Chanady) feel as though magical realism "introduces poeisis into mimesis" which better expresses our condition of modernity (130). Furthermore, Flores can't have it both ways--magical realism can't be both a global phenomenon and unique to Latin American.

Chanady then switches to Leal's essay, arguing that the most problematic part is his idea that magical realism is fundamentally an "attitude towards reality, not a literary mode or technique" (132). Rather than tracing magical realism to Kafka, Leal instead traces it to Roh. Like Carpentier's relations with the surrealists, this creates another problem, namely the context of magical realism within the mindset of a colonized society (133). The argument shifts from Flores' quest for respect to one where these critics want Latin American fiction to be considered equal or superior to the Western European canon, and in fact this resistance can be seen as the primary component to magical realist writing: "Latin American intellectuals have frequently emphasized the ideological dimension of literature, even going so far as to consider formal and stylistic brilliance as 'ancillary' or instrumental and secondary, with respect to the political and social content" (136-7). This component marks the main difference between Carpentier and the surrealists, Chanady says, going on to describe how Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World has a cyclical, "primitive" structure that is itself a critique of Western storytelling traditions (138).

Another main difference is the ontological, as opposed to epistemological, nature of Latin American magical realism. Unlike fantasy stories that work towards estranging the reader with fear and wonder by the fantastic breaking through to the world of the real, the magical realist text (using Cortazar as an example) has the supernatural event simply be with no mutually accepted center. "Reality is not an empirical given but a constantly changing "constellation" or group of figures that is the product of the individual imagination" (139).

Chanady concludes her essay thus: "The development of the literary modes associated with the neofantastic and magical realism that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America cannot be attributed to a naive essentialist argument to the supposed marvelous reality of the continent or ascribed to the unidirectional flow of metropolitan influence. It is conditioned by various factors, such as a critical stance with respect to canonical rational and especially positivistic paradigms in the context of neocolonial resistance, the tradition of the artist's vindication of the imagination and subversion of hegemonic models, the French Surrealists' indictment of restrictive empirical knowledge and valorization of non-European mentalities, the appropriation of the indigenous Other as a marker of difference, and the general delegitimation of values and conceptual frameworks of the past few decades" (141).

The essay is useful for clarifying and/or crystallizing certain key ideas at the root of Latin American magical realism and for the critique and synthesis of the essays from Flores, Leal, and Carpentier. One question, then, is how applicable are these ideas to non-Latin writers? While the final paragraph may be staking a claim specifically for the Latin American variety of magical realism, it's interesting to consider the ideas in different lights as well.

Also, this essay builds bridges to other generic definitions and claims. The idea that in Latin American fiction, the form and style take a back seat to the political and social commentary sounds strikingly similar to the claims made about science fiction in Freedman's work, namely that the genre has been ghettoized for placing the importance of a work's ideas ahead of its style. Even more clearly, Chanady's emphasis on ontology over epistemology in magical realism, and the creation of multiple relative versions of reality, speaks directly to McHale's central thesis in Postmodernist Fiction.