and seen as nothing less than 'a perfect mimesis' of the 'hyperreality' of Latin America, Marquez being a kind ofsuperrealist who reflects this bizarre reality in his fiction. Conversely, essential strangeness defines the very being of Latin America, both accounts for its 'historical failure' and constitutes its value. Ironically, this so-called marvellous reality of Latin America does not seem to raise questions about ho^ it is to be known. And further, this same marvellous reality only seems to lay it open to a peculiarly Western, historically singular postmodern epistemology which universalises the self-conscious dissolution of the bourgeois subject across both space and time. My intention here is not to contest these readings of Marquez, chosen more or less at random, but to show that his fiction inhabits a social and conceptual space in which the problem of ascertaining meaning assumes a political (and epistemological) dimension distinctly different from the current postmodern scepticism about meaning in Europe and America. Further,'! want to locate those aspects of his fiction which provide, or at least seem to provide, a mode of access for this discourse and which enable such recuperation into Euro-American postmodernism. Marvellous realism is both a cognitive and transformative mode grounded in the historical and political being of Latin America. Indeed to see marvellous realism or the reality from which it emerges as essential, changeless or exotic is to accept the Western category of the Third World as alterity, to consent unthinkingly to parallel categories such as primitive and modem, tribal and national. Marquez does not set up the real and the marvellous as antithetical realism,' he refuses either to construe himself as the other or to indulge in a simpleminded rejection of rationalism. In The Autumn of the Patriarch the 'sainthood' of the dictator's mother is rationally exposed as a fraud, shown to be a lucrative part of the several illusions imposed on him even as other 'miracles' are instated as real, e.g., the dictator has the secret of a salt which can cure lepers and make cripples walk. As Marquez says in The Fragrance of'Guava : 'Even the most seemingly arbitrary creation has its rules. You can throw away the fig leaf of rationalism only if you don't descent into chaos and irrationality. .2 Both the inscription of the marvellous in the real (and vice versa), as well as the disjunctures in the real and in its perception are produced by the cultural heterogeneity of Latin America and by the distortions (economic and political) of colonialism and neocolonialism. The simultaneity of the heterogenous in Latin America is a matter of historical sedimentation; it results from the physical co-existence of different ethnic groups—native Indian, Arab, African, Indochinese, Asian and Spanish—each laden with their respective cultural baggage of myth, oral narrative, magic, superstition, Roman Catholicism, Cartesian education and Western rationalism. Simultaneity is the restless product of a 38 January-June 1985