The earlier comparison of European modernism and its Latin American counterpart, modernismo emphasized stylistic and formal similarities between both literary movements.  Yet, as Naomi Lindstrom has explained, among the modernistas, there also existed an interest in the bizarre, in, for example, "the transmigration of souls and mystically perfect numbers and vibrations" (Lindstrom 21).  Though both European and Latin American modernism "ransacked the cultural past in search of reusable and adaptable themes and forms..." (22), the mystical interests of the modernistas, influenced no doubt by their exotic natural world and their alien indigenous cultures, would help steer Latin American writers away from European tradition, toward a new form of literary expression. 

            Magical realism has been called the central characteristic of Latin American fiction since the publication of Rulfo's Pedro Paramo.  Though not all Latino writers of fiction use its narrative techniques, it would be impossible to dismiss its importance for a number of reasons which can be more effectively detailed after a closer look at what is meant by the term.   Of special importance as well, is the fact that magical realism encourages us to apply a dual, non Anglo-American perspective for our study, since in itself, the technique reflects a mixture of European and Latin American literary energies.

            Tzvetan Todorov's discussion of the Fantastic literary genre predates most references to the term magical realism, yet his categories often coincide with those aspects of magical realism relevant to Latino works.[21] Todorov's claim that the fantastic "occupies the duration of...[an] uncertainty" (25) where the reader "hesitates" between  "types of natural causes and supernatural causes" (26) is not substantially different from Angel Flores's definition of "Magic Realism" as an "amalgamation of realism and fantasy" (189) in which, as Young and Hollaman explain, the "domination of any one way of looking at things is, at least temporarily, placed in jeopardy" (2).   Examining Todorov's narrative grid (Todorov 44), we find, on one side, the "Uncanny" (or merely "strange") which, because it ultimately presents rational solutions for supernatural occurrences, corresponds to "the real."  On the other side, Todorov's "marvelous" which ultimately denies rational explanation thus parallels the "magical" (or "marvelous" if we retain Alejo Carpentier's term).  In this schema,  magical realism coincides with Todorov's "Fantastic," the border (a potent term for Latinos), between and overlapping into this pair of narrative classes.  Todorov argues extensively that the Fantastic exists in works like James' The Turn of the Screw, where the reader is left with ambiguous events unresolved, (is it dream or reality, a ghost or madness?).  The Fantastic, he states, is "a particular case of the more general category of the 'ambiguous vision'" (33).   Young and Hollaman claim a similar criteria for magical realism since in it there must be an "irreducible element, something that cannot be explained by logic" (4).  They refer to magical realism as "a hybrid [form of narrative] that somehow manages to combine the 'truthful' and 'verifiable' aspects of realism with the magical effects we associate with myth, folktale, [and] tall story (2).   As Chanady explains, this is to consider magical realism a "narrative mode" and not as a genre or attitude toward the world (2).  One finds, for example, the use of magical realism throughout literature in writers such as Sterne, Poe, or Kafka, and in works like Gogol's "The Nose" or Virginia Woolf's Orlando.  The bizarreness of supernatural elements is, in these works, grounded in concrete realism as magical events (a nose going out in search of its face, a man/woman living hundreds of years) coexist with the plausible and are left unexplained.  Though Gregory Samsa's transformation is fantastic, the details of his environment are believable to the point of being mundane.  Todorov relates the Uncanny (the Real) with the knowable past, the marvelous with the unknowable future, and the fantastic with the "pure limit between the past and the future:" the present.  The "strange interlude," between real and unreal, between past and future, leaves the reader questioning, and this open-ended, polyphonic quality of magical realist narratives accounts, in part, for their popularity among Latin American (and subsequently Latino) writers.  Employed as a tool with which to examine the conflicting truths of "New World"/"Old World" concepts, magical realism becomes essential, so much so that critics since the 1960's have seen it as the principle characteristic of 20th Century Latin American Fiction. 

    Early magic realists, like Miguel Angel Asturias, combined the stylistic devices of European modernism with an interest in ethnology or the study of human races and their relations.  While Asturius portrayed the Mayan farmers of Guatemala in the 1930's, a decade later Lydia Cabrera composed her "Transpositions" (the name she gave to her compilations of Afro-Cuban folk tales).  In the late 1940's and early 1950's, Alejo Carpentier traced the cultural and political lives of ex-slave Africans in the Caribbean in works like The Kingdom of this World.   Throughout the region, Latin American writers expressed interest in indigenismo, the study of native American indigenous cultures,[22] one component of their gradual shift in emphasis away from the self, often apolitical  absorption of European modernist thought toward the cross-cultural dimensions of a New World environment.

As Latin American writers continued to express their own vision of the world around them, the literature began to reflect a focus upon an "interior reality" as opposed to the outer (Martinez  "Ron Arias" 12).  Veering away from realism, but concerned with the political and cultural vitality of their environments, the "Boom" generation of writers worked within a "New American Reality."  According to critics in the mid 1950's, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (The New Hispanic American Novel) came about with the publication of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Peamo and Agusto Yanez's Al filo del agua (Guizado 135).  As Fuentes's book makes clear, the New Hispanic American Novel also owes a debt to European critical thinking, specifically to Robbe-Grillet. 

            Robbe-Grillet saw the "new novel" as one that visually describes and measures characters and objects without instilling the objects with human meanings, or the characters with morality.  The writing is therefore a scientific, objective approach which, (while never completely possible) makes objects and people "real" again; that is, uncontrolled by the author's borders or interpretations, unbiased by his or her traditions and perspectives.  Such writing serves to "free us from our own conventions" (Robbe-Grillet 468 - 470).   Presenting characters, objects, or gestures as they are, without interpretation or moral judgment makes them newly "real," because to instill meaning in every object is to make only the significance of that object important and thus the object itself disappears.  Hence, the "new reality" and a "new novel," less involved with "passion."  In poetry, Pound's imagist doctrine calling for the "direct treatment of the thing" in order to "make it new" parallels Robbe-Grillet's idea.  The distinction being that for Pound, the object becomes "the adequate symbol," the "luminous detail" while Robbe-Grillet dismisses the significance or symbolic level entirely.   This sort of attention to scientific detail, coupled with the modernist desire to avoid what Flores calls "mawkish sentimentalism," or what Pound labeled "poppy-cock...emotional slither" (Essays 12) and a general appeal to a sophisticated reader "versed in subtleties" became central to mid-twentieth century Latin American fiction (A. Flores 191).

Continue Chapter 2 Part II