Gabriel García Márquez (16 page)

The emergence of
El Boom
was immediately linked to the style of magic realism (also known as magic
al
realism), which has since been in fashion globally. It wasn't just that Latin
American writers such as García Márquez were the new kids on the block, it was that their style appeared to be unique: a blend of exoticism, magical thinking, and sexual exuberance. They often set their plots in humid jungles.

The pressure on the writers of
El Boom
was enormous. The Yale critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal put it this way: “Jacques Vaché was right: ‘Nothing kills a man more than having to represent a country.' With Latin American writers, the burden was even greater. It matters little in what part of the vast continent they were born. Their readers (foreign as well as national) expect them to represent Latin America. As they read their works they ask: Are they Latin American enough? Is it possible to detect in their works the pulse of the heart, the murmur of the plains, the creeping of ferocious tropical insects, or similar clichés? Why must they always talk about Paris, London, or New York (or Moscow or Peking) instead of talking about their quaint hamlets, their endemic dictators, their guerrillas?” Rodríguez Monegal added: “The Latin American writer has had to prove he is Latin American before proving he is a writer. Who would think of asking Pound to be more North American and less Provençal? Who would complain that Nabokov has left out the silence of the vast Russian steppes in his novels? Why doesn't anyone attack Lawrence for having dared to write a novel called
Kangaroo?
But Latin American writers are always invited to prove their origin before they are asked to show their skills. In dealing with them, criticism seems more preoccupied with geographical and historical than with literary matters.”
¹⁰

This argument developed by Rodríguez Monegal stresses the unevenness of global culture up until the sixties. Before the time, the sense was that only Europe, enamored with its own logocentrism, could produce literary works of high caliber. This resulted in a condescending approach to anything that came from other regions of the world. Art that came from
anywhere else was seen as an anthropological artifact: an item reflecting the metabolism of a bizarre civilization. Rodríguez Monegal suggests “a new curiosity about forms of culture based on other assumptions and values; the awareness (rather late, to be sure) that even within the Western fold there had long existed minorities who did not share in whiteness of skin, the Christian faith, or capitalistic affluence; the related realization that from its very beginnings the West itself had survived and prospered through the assimilation of alien cultures; the reemergence of China and the Arab world as powers to be reckoned with—all these factors have helped to abolish the rather naïve image of a unified Western culture, happily autonomous and self-sufficient.”
¹¹

The term “magic realism” has attached itself to García Márquez like a parasite. The signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn't come from the world of soap operas. The category has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while, it denoted an attempt to blur the boundary between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic: it is as useful in cataloging García Márquez's second-rate successors, such as Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and others, as it is in understanding Franz Kafka's exposé of the middle class in
The Metamorphosis,
Lewis Carroll's perversely innocent
Alice in Wonderland,
Salman Rushdie's baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in
Midnight's Children,
Naguib Mahfouz's labyrinthine novels about Cairo, and Toni Morrison's phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in
Beloved.
They have all been linked to magic realism, with varying degrees of success.

The first to use the term “magic realism” was the German art critic Franz Roh in his book
Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei.
¹²
He used it to refer to the pictorial output of the Postexpressionist period,
beginning around 1925. Roh described the way the artists' innovations pushed beyond the limits of Expressionism and showed “an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects.” Roh's essay was translated into Spanish and published in Madrid in 1927 in José Ortega y Gasset's magazine
Revista de Occidente.
The impact of the piece in the Spanish-speaking world is subject to debate. It was certainly read by the intellectual elite on the Iberian peninsula, but Ortega y Gasset's magazine had only a minuscule circulation across the Atlantic Ocean. To what extent it was read in cultural capitals like Mexico City and Buenos Aires is impossible to assess.

Alejo Carpentier, in the prologue to his novel
El reino de este mundo
(The Kingdom of This World, 1949), which he also included in his collection
Tientos y diferencias
(Insinuations and Differences, 1964), wrote: “Toward the end of 1943, I had the good fortune to be able to visit the kingdom of Henri Christophe—the poetic ruins of Sans-Souci, the massive citadel of La Ferrière, impressively intact despite lightning bolts and earthquakes—and to acquaint myself with the still Norman-style Cap-Haitien (the Cap Français of the former colony) where the street lined with long balconies leads to the cut-stone palace inhabited once upon a time by Pauline Bonaparte.” Carpentier attacked European artists for being unable to understand the complexity of the New World. “We should note that when André Masson tried to draw the forest on the island of Martinique, with the incredible entangling of its plants and the obscene promiscuity of certain fruits, the marvelous truth of the subject devoured the painter, leaving him virtually impotent before the empty page. And it had to be a painter from America, the Cuban Wilfredo Lam, who showed us the magic of tropical vegetation and the uncontrolled Creation of Forms in our nature—with all its metamorphosis and symbiosis—in monumental paintings whose expression is unique in contemporary art.”

Magic realism was perceived by critics to be a response to Europe's realist literary mores, where the distinction between what is real and what is imagined, between day-to-day consciousness and madness, was at the core of the intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment. Works like
Don Quixote
tested the limits of this view but did not dismantle it. For some historians, the impulse was “to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism.” For them, in a work of magic realism “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort.”
¹³

Carpentier described how, during his visit to Haiti, he stumbled upon something he called the
real marvelous
—
lo real maravilloso.
“But I also realized that the presence and authority of the real marvelous was not a privilege unique to Haiti but the patrimony of all the Americas, where, for example, a census of cosmogonies is still to be established. The real marvelous is found at each step in the lives of the men who inscribed dates on the history of the Continent and who left behind names still borne by the living: from the seekers after the Fountain of Youth or the golden city of Manoa to certain rebels of the early times or certain modern heroes of our wars of independence, those of such mythological stature as Colonel Juana Azurduy.” For Carpentier the break brought by
lo real maravilloso
was with religion. He wrote: “the sensation of the marvelous presupposes a faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints, in the same way that those who are not Quixotes cannot enter, body and soul, the world of Amadis de Gaula or Tirant lo Blanc.” Carpentier added: “Because
of the virginity of its landscape, because of its formation, because of its ontology, because of the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black, because of the Revelation its recent discovery constituted, because of the fertile racial mixtures it favored, the Americas are far from having used up their wealth of mythologies.”
¹⁴

Carpentier used the term again in his essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” a lecture given at the Caracas Athenaeum on May 22, 1975, and included in his book
La novela hispanoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo.
In it, Carpentier offered a more sustained literary analysis of the style in Latin American literature. Other intellectuals such as Arturo Uslar Pietri employed the term. In the United States, critics such as Ángel Flores debated it. Flores suggested that it derived from Kafka's vision. Some argue that the style originated with Borges and Rulfo but others disagree. The critic Luis Leal wrote: “Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultural forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in close or open structures. What is the attitude of the magic realist toward reality? . . . the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts.”
¹⁵

There's another, chronologically older component to magic realism that needs to be acknowledged: surrealism. André Breton, during a trip to Mexico in 1938 that was commissioned by the French government, became infatuated with the country's primitivism. He met the political activist and Russian exile Leon Trotsky, with whom he coauthored
Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendent,
and whose circle of friends included the muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Breton was amazed by the way, in festivities such as the Day of the Dead, the living and the deceased coexisted in the Mexican practice of religion. More than a decade before, in
1924, he had defined surrealism in a manifesto as pure psychic autonomism. He believed that autonomism, a way to let the subconscious free, was present in Mexican culture. Breton developed the concept of
le hazard objectif,
objective chance, juxtaposing coherence and chaos. What made the reality he encountered on his trip to Mexico so enchanting was precisely the role chaos played in it.

As Breton was making his statements, psychoanalysis was gaining professional ground in Europe. Sigmund Freud's theories—of sexual forces defining a person's life since childhood and of dreams as a window to the unconscious, a means by which the internal struggle emerges into the realm of awareness—had at first been rejected as unfounded. But after World War I, these theories became fashionable among members of the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes in Austria, England, France, and Germany. The surrealist revolution in art was an extension of this awareness. As Freud himself had pointed out, art itself was an expression of the hidden, irrational, sexual messages kept in check by reason. Breton, in his Surrealist manifesto, explored the idea of the marvelous along these lines, making it synonymous to that which is strange, unexpected, dreamlike, and even macabre. “All that is marvelous is beautiful,” he stated, and, “only the marvelous is beautiful.” He was infatuated with writers such as Jonathan Swift and Edgar Allan Poe, whose work, in his view, gave artistic expression to animalistic forces within the human mind. In Breton's opinion, these authors gave free rein to their inner child, revealing the impulsive, uncivilized components of human life.

Although Breton visited only Mexico on his trans-Atlantic journey (in his
L'Anthologie de l'humour noir,
published in 1940, he made references to his trip, direct and otherwise), his vision, metonymically, was taken to encompass Latin America as a whole.

García Márquez's international audience immediately acknowledged the surrealist component in his magic realism. Tales like “
La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada
” (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, also known in its abbreviated form as Innocent Eréndira), about a girl whose grandmother forces her to prostitute herself with hundreds of men in order to pay back a debt she owes her, were read as parables of a misconstrued, primitive sexuality that still existed in Latin American. Similar moral judgments were made about stories such as “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and
“El ahogado más hermoso del mundo”
(The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World), both published in the same collection as “Innocent Eréndira.” (In English, the former originally appeared in
New American Review,
edited by Harper & Row editor Ted Solotaroff, and the latter in
Playboy.
) These pieces, which could be read as either reverses or extensions of the other (unlike García Márquez's other stories, these two are subtitled: “A Tale for Children”), explore manhood and the male body. In the first, the local community reacts to the sudden appearance of an angel of advanced age who has fallen from the sky; in the second, a similar premise is explored as a giant washes up from the sea.

They were understood as meditations on religion in a landscape where Christianity had assimilated elements from the indigenous cultures, creating a hybrid in which monotheism and idolatry coexisted. García Márquez frequently inserts in his cast of characters a priest who acts as the official spokesman of the Church but is viewed by the townspeople as untrustworthy—as either more interested in his own advancement or representative of foreign powers whose influence is only symbolic. These stories were also seen as a commentary on political corruption in a region defined by violent civil wars and the inability to become fully democratic.