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In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is born with his eyes wide open, as the author himself, Gabriel García Márquez, was reported to have come forth from the womb.1 This image of a wide-eyed child—eyes swollen and enlarged, looking like a full moon—will serve us nicely in considering the theme of wonder in the New World. From the time of the Discovery through the twentieth century, representations of this previously unknown continent would resemble these bulging eyes, pregnant with an extraordinary capacity for wonder. Wonder was on the tongue of explorers and writers of these lands to the point of excess, and they would use its language with Baroque-like extravagance and with a frequency rivaled only by appeals to exile. One Hundred Years of Solitude has remained something like scripture in Latin American literature because it captured these wide-ranging moments of life in the New World, wonder and exile alike. As I see it, then, representations of the New World are often close to the spirit of this great novel, somewhere on the border between wonder and exile, sometimes with one more than the other, but more commonly, with an ambiguous and messy mixture of both. Whatever the case, the language of both wonder and exile is as common to the Americas as the experience of dispossession; in fact, they are one with dispossession, different manifestations of it. In the course of my study, I examine this claim thoroughly, that wonder is an experience of dispossession in the order of knowledge, while exile means dispossession in place and location. Though wonder and exile are universal experiences, my study argues that they reach a point of saturation in the momentous events surrounding the Discovery of the New World and in the bewildering events that follow. The New World, thus, gives us an intense case to study, one that is as profuse and extravagant with its wonders as it is with its agonies. one wonder and exile Mystical and Prophetic Perspectives  L wonder and exile in the new world The focus of the book is with poets and writers of the New World and, more specifically, with their theological inclinations. When exploring these figures, then, my attention will turn to the mystical and prophetic trajectories of these writers to see what they can teach us about the language of wonder and exile. At times, my concentration will be on the space between wonder and exile (e.g., the shared experience of dispossession) and, at other times, my concern is with the distinct accents of wonder and exile, mysticism and prophecy. In this regard, I claim that the mystics have a special fluency when it comes to the language of wonder, and the prophets, an unmistakable and tortured familiarity with exile—and both of them, a pro- ficiency with the strange and wondrous concept of God. As unbelievable or impossible as the idea of God is to some moderns, I find it equally impossible to neglect the question in a study devoted to the wonders of the New World. I am following the lead of Jorge Luis Borges when he insisted that any anthology of fantastic literature must include the theologians: “I compiled at one time an anthology of fantastic literature. I have to admit that the book is one of the few that a second Noah should save from a second flood, but denounce the guilty omission of the major and unexpected masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Eriugena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. In fact, to what do the prodigies of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe amount . . . confronted by the creation of God?”2 The book before the reader owes much to a claim of this kind and, for this reason, is distinct from strictly literary or cultural accounts of the themes of wonder and exile. My book, too, denounces the guilty omission of the name “God” from studies of fantastic, magical literature. There is nothing more uncanny, nothing more unsettling and fantastic than the thought of God, and to banish the theologians from the wonders of this genre equals the wrong done to the poets when Plato exiles them from his republic. So much is lost in this banishment, so many dreams and emotions —and so many wonders. Whatever else it is, wonder owes much to this strange and curious name that cannot be spoken. Wonder and Mystical Languages of Unknowing Wonder...

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