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“performance,” or just an assemblage of images, but “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”; in the society of the spectacle, “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (12). I believe that the spectacle, as the “heart of society’s real unreality” (13), is in fact both the object and the medium of the magical realist narrative: although perceived as supernatural and out of this world, the magical realist image is nevertheless accepted by the reader as just another component of his or her “verifiable” world, an attribute that has itself undergone important semantic changes in the past few decades. Therefore, Ana María Manzanas’s rhetorical question targeting the present status of the real/imaginary dichotomy is relevant for our future understanding of magical realism: “If the real verges on what has traditionally been considered the unreal, and the tangible is made up of almost intangible entities such as atoms, protons, electrons, and quarks, then what becomes of the imaginary and the magical?” The critic’s conclusion that “many zones of the imaginary no longer stand in an oxymoronic relationship to the real, for the oxymoron is dispelled in the open arena of the possible and the heterogeneous” (“Romance” 59) may evidently prompt a quo-vadis type of reflection about the consistency of future magical realist texts, whose main narrative strength used to be founded on the very inconsistency of their ontological structure—on the oxymoronic cohabitation of the real and the imaginary. If what we now call reality is just as unverifiable by our senses as the supernatural, could it be that the realism in magical realism is coming around full circle, headed back for the Aristotelian representation model of mimesis? The answer is likely to be found in twentieth-century representation theories.
By the 1980s, Debord’s society of the spectacle has further morphed into Jean Baudrillard’s world of simulacra. For Baudrillard, society is past the moment of the spectacle because of the gradual loss of all referent: what is left is just simulation, that is, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). On the other hand, according to Slavoj Žižek, it is our passion for the thrill of reality that might also prompt us to avoid it (Desert of the Real 9–10). Viewed from