Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature (review)

To call magical realism "dated," "hackneyed," or "ambiguously defined" squares with the current literary sentiment surrounding the term. Perhaps reacting against Fredric Jameson's foray into linking magical realism to film and postcolonial discourse, concluding that "magical realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features," many scholars, especially since the mid-1990s following the publication of Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Farris's Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), have attempted to redraw the boundaries of the term and philologically recuperate the original meaning with which the German art critic Franz Roh might have imbued it back in 1925. Fortunately, Eva Aldea's new book, Magical Realism and Deleuze, eludes this reductive and outdated temptation that has haunted so many of critics of magical realism who seem to either deploy the term recklessly onto anything bearing postmodernist attributes or retrace the term's steps back to its so-called "original meaning."

As is necessary with any book of this nature—namely, one that primarily discusses such an amorphous and loaded literary term—Aldea devotes her first chapter to tracing the history of "magical realism" which involves intersections at various moments with Marxism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and several properly philosophical valences, among others. Ultimately, Aldea sides with and, therefore, takes as a point of departure the definition of the term proposed by Amaryll Chanady in Magical Realism and the Fantastic (1985): roughly, that magical realism appears as an antinomy between two levels of reality—the natural and the supernatural—within the text that exist on a semantic level and are resolved in the end. Aldea explains that, for Chanady, the "authorial reticence," the absence of an explanation for the magical event, implies "an absence of a hierarchy between two codes of reality presented, and therefore effects a resolution of the contradiction between them" (11). It is precisely this absence of hierarchy that allows Aldea to insert into the equation the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Aldea's second chapter lays the groundwork for the theoretical apparatus with which she later approaches postcolonial magical realist works. Deleuze (notably abetted by his readers Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward) offers her a theory of the univocity of Being that understands seemingly incompatible antinomies as part of the same ontological principle, even if they appear structurally different. In terms of magical realism, then, Aldea critiques the consensus among critics that the genre is defined by the creation of unity and equivalence in a relationship between the seemingly incompatible and unequal elements of the "real" and the "magical." Instead, she posits via Deleuze a conception of magical realism that understands these two elements as part of the same ontological principle, but still appearing as structurally different forms of a singular Being.

An elaboration of the ways in which Deleuze's ontology of Being might work itself out in magical realist literary texts concerns the next chapter of Aldea's book. Beginning with a required engagement of the most famous example of the genre, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, she turns her theoretical gaze toward more quintessentially postcolonial novels for the remainder of the chapter, including discussions of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. What her readings of these canonical works show, Aldea argues, is a fundamental misreading by critics of magical realism of the historical and social content that permeate these novels. While these critics situate this content in magical aspects, Aldea contests that they reside, instead, in each novel's realism, drawing substantially from Hallward's understanding of the "two different poles of the ontological orientation of things in Deleuze's thought: towards the actual or towards the virtual" (71). The magical, thus, remains deterritorialized from the structures of history, society, and identity with which previous interpreters had often equated it.

Aldea's penultimate...