0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
I just got the news that magical realism is dead. The great literary form that made Latin American literature as popular as the mambo has been assassinated by parricides and I missed it. Should we hold a wake? Does this mean Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be assumed bodily into heaven clutching his great novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," in the way his character Remedios the Beauty ascended heavenward clutching two bed sheets?
The most vocal parricide, I've discovered, is Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean-American writer who in 1996 replaced Garcia Marquez's imaginative town of Macondo with his own mock town of McOndo. He says the old theme of Latin American identity, "Who are we?" is out. The new theme, "Who am I?" is in. No more collective epics. McOndo wants down-and-dirty realism about individuals.
Coinage of the phrase "magical realism" was, the last time I looked, credited to Angel Flores of Queens College in New York, and first appeared in a paper he read in New York in 1954. Briefly put, he saw the movement taking shape after World War I in such figures as Kafka and the painter Giorgio di Chirico, with influential ancestors such as Gogol, Poe, Melville and Strindberg. He cited Kafka's influence on Jorge Luis Borges in the latter's 1935 "A Universal History of Infamy" as the start of the trend in Latin America: "With Borges as pathfinder... a group of brilliant stylists developed around him [and]... the general direction was that of magical realism." He saw it as the "transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal... magnificently flowering... and, let us hope, perennial."
Read More on News
In the 1960s the movement's Latin American inheritors exploded with high-quality novels, creating the "Boom"--extraordinary work by, among others, Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Jose Lezama Lima and Jose Donoso, who wrote a 1972 book about the Boom. With the Boom, magical realism went into orbit.
My first novel, "The Ink Truck" (1969), is a surreal comedy about a disastrous newspaper strike. I knew nothing of magical realism, yet Kafka had already invaded my imagination, as had mystical Gypsies, ghosts from Dickens, Thornton Wilder, Shakespeare, etc. Pirandello's plays, Bunuel's and Bergman's films had galvanized me, as had dreams. So I decided "The Ink Truck" would hover six inches off the ground; not quite a levitating priest, but close. I called it quasi-surreal, not magical realism.
Then in 1970 I reviewed "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the first work I'd read from the Boom, which was not yet so designated. I wrote that it was "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." Two years later I went to Barcelona to interview Garcia Marquez (Gabo), who was unknown in the United States despite his book's growing fame. From noon till 2 a.m. we discussed everything worth discussing and became casual friends. Two major American magazines rejected the interview, one editor advising me to "let him go get famous, then we'll run it." The Atlantic ran it, introducing Gabo to the United States. When he and I talked, we didn't mention magical realism; only his use of surrealism. "In Mexico," he said, "surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."
As McOndonians now reject magical realism, I--never part of any movement--had, with my first novel (and all later work) rejected some of my own literary ancestors, notably the Naturalists--the great Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, even John Dos Passos, one of my true heroes--for all of whom the individual was inevitable grist for hostile social forces. I was a journalist, and such writing, however ambitious as social criticism, seemed deterministic, and an extension of crusading journalism. I wanted the unconscious in my fiction, the crisis in the deepest part of the self, the dream element, and "The Ink Truck" was a wild, if undisciplined, gesture in those directions. In later novels--"Ironweed" and "Very Old Bones," for example--I kept, but reined in, the surreal, for I wanted my work grounded, not hovering. Today McOndonians comparably separate themselves from the Macondo genre, for its spate of imitators, says Fuguet, "transformed fiction writing into the fairy-tale business." His battle cry is: "Latin America is no longer cute."
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" wasn't cute, it was original, as was the work of Kafka, maestro of the phantasmal; Hemingway, the terse, poetic master, and Joyce, the linguistic genius, who all were imitated to the point of planetary grand larceny. They gave us new methods of seeing reality. Their swarm of imitators, in using these new tools, were taking shortcuts to originality. McOndonians want no Macondo-made tools. Fair enough.
But magical realism itself--not perennial? Gone? When I interviewed Gabo we talked about the death of the novel, and he concluded: "If you say the novel is dead, it is not the novel. It is you who are dead." So if one insists magical realism is dead, is there a correlation? Perhaps. I think any McOndonian insister should check his pulse.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines