In the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier writes the following: ‘Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing, America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvellous real?’ (Carpentier, p. 88). Carpentier's formulation of magical realism, as a mode of literature emerging essentially from the largely untapped and Baroque magnificence of his continent's geography, history, diversity and mythology, has been taken by many scholars as seminal. Indeed, magical realism is still often regarded, several decades later, as primarily a Latin American phenomenon, despite the international success of novels such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, amongst others, which are regularly cited as skilful examples of magical-realist texts.

In this essay, I examine the territorial claim, echoed by prominent writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez, by applying their literary assertions to the text and background of Ovid's Metamorphoses. This work lies far behind the muddied waters of contemporary literary movements and influences, and is positioned prominently in the Classical Western tradition against which Latin American magical-realists regard themselves as reacting. By observing how Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed in 7 A.D. Rome, uses magical-realist modes to represent its political, mythological, geographical and literary settings, and by examining García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel with a very different background, I aim to deepen an understanding of magical-realist writing's potential relation to the author's external reality.

Two New Worlds