{"id":29563,"date":"2014-04-23T21:00:23","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T01:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=29563"},"modified":"2014-04-23T21:41:41","modified_gmt":"2014-04-24T01:41:41","slug":"gabriel-garcia-marquez-whose-magic-in-magic-realism-was-rooted-in-the-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=29563","title":{"rendered":"Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez Whose Magic in Magic Realism Was Rooted in the Real."},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/p>\n

SALMAN RUSHDIE<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Gabriel<\/a>

Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez-pic courtesy of: praag.org<\/p><\/div>\n

Gabo lives!<\/p>\n

The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive. Somewhere a dictatorial \u201cpatriarch\u201d is still having his rival cooked and served up to his dinner guests on a great dish; an old colonel is waiting for a letter that never comes; a beautiful young girl is being prostituted by her heartless grandmother; and a kindlier patriarch, Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Buend\u00eda, one of the founders of the new settlement of Macondo, a man interested in science and alchemy, is declaring to his horrified wife that \u201cthe earth is round, like an orange.\u201d<\/p>\n

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien\u2019s Middle-earth, Rowling\u2019s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of \u201cThe Hunger Games,\u201d the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature\u2019s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner\u2019s Yoknapatawpha, R. K. Narayan\u2019s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.
\n
\n\u201cOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d is 47 years old now, and despite its colossal and enduring popularity, its style \u2014 magic realism \u2014 has largely given way, in Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the sheer size of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s achievement. The most highly regarded writer of the next generation, Roberto Bola\u00f1o, notoriously declared that magic realism \u201cstinks,\u201d and jeered at Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s fame, calling him \u201ca man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many presidents and archbishops.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a childish outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence of the great colossus in their midst was more than a little burdensome. (\u201cI have the feeling,\u201d Carlos Fuentes once said to me, \u201cthat writers in Latin America can\u2019t use the word \u2018solitude\u2019 any more, because they worry that people will think it\u2019s a reference to Gabo. And I\u2019m afraid,\u201d he added, mischievously, \u201cthat soon we will not be able to use the phrase \u2018100 years\u2019 either.\u201d) No writer in the world has had a comparable impact in the last half-century. Ian McEwan has accurately compared his pre-eminence to that of Charles Dickens. No writer since Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.<\/p>\n

\"Salman<\/a>

Salman Rushdie ~ & ~ Charles Dickens<\/p><\/div>\n

The great man\u2019s passing may put an end to Latin American writers\u2019 anxiety at his influence, and allow his work to be noncompetitively appreciated. Fuentes, acknowledging Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s debt to Faulkner, called Macondo his Yoknapatawpha County, and that may be a better point of entry into the oeuvre. These are stories about real people, not fairy tales. Macondo exists; that is its magic.<\/p>\n

The trouble with the term \u201cmagic realism,\u201d el realismo m\u00e1gico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, \u201cmagic,\u201d without paying attention to the other half, \u201crealism.\u201d But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn\u2019t matter. It would be mere whimsy \u2014 writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It\u2019s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works. Consider this famous passage from \u201cOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as Jos\u00e9 Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buend\u00eda house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs .\u2008.\u2008. and came out in the kitchen, where \u00darsula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Holy Mother of God!\u2019 \u00darsula shouted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something utterly fantastic is happening here. A dead man\u2019s blood acquires a purpose, almost a life of its own, and moves methodically through the streets of Macondo until it comes to rest at his mother\u2019s feet. The blood\u2019s behavior is \u201cimpossible,\u201d yet the passage reads as truthful, the journey of the blood like the journey of the news of his death from the room where he shot himself to his mother\u2019s kitchen, and its arrival at the feet of the matriarch \u00darsula Iguar\u00e1n reads as high tragedy: A mother learns that her son is dead. Jos\u00e9 Arcadio\u2019s lifeblood can and must go on living until it can bring \u00darsula the sad news. The real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force. It becomes more real, not less.<\/p>\n

\"Gabriel<\/a>

Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez-(March 6, 1927-April 17, 2014)-pic courtesy of: sedraselections.tumblr.com\/<\/p><\/div>\n

Magic realism was not Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez studied Rulfo\u2019s masterpiece \u201cPedro P\u00e1ramo\u201d closely, and likened its impact on him to that of Kafka\u2019s \u201cMetamorphosis.\u201d (In the novel\u2019s ghost town of Comala it\u2019s easy to see the birthplace of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Macondo.) But the magic-realist sensibility is not limited to Latin America. It crops up in all of the world\u2019s literatures from time to time, and Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez was famously well read.<\/p>\n

Dickens\u2019s unending court case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in \u201cBleak House,\u201d finds a relative in \u201cOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d in the unending railway train that passes by Macondo for a week. Dickens and Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez are both masters of comic hyperbole. Dickens\u2019s Circumlocution Office, a government department that exists to do nothing, inhabits the same fictional reality as all the indolent, corrupt, authoritarian governors and tyrants in Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Kafka\u2019s Gregor Samsa, metamorphosed into a large insect, would not feel out of place in Macondo, where metamorphoses are treated as commonplace. Gogol\u2019s Kovalyov, whose nose detaches itself from his face and wanders around St. Petersburg, would also feel at home. The French Surrealists and the American fabulists are also of this literary company, inspired by the idea of the fictionality of fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps more interesting, routes. Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez knew very well that he belonged to a far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying, \u201cIn Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.\u201d And then: \u201cThe Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.<\/p>\n

But, to say it again: The flights of fancy need real ground beneath them. When I first read Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez I had never been to any Central or South American country. Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.<\/p>\n

\"OYS042414\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I knew Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It\u2019s little wonder I fell in love with it \u2014 not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous \u201cwonder tales\u201d of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism. My world was more urban than his, however. It is the village sensibility that gives Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s realism its particular flavor, the village in which technology is frightening but a devout girl rising up to heaven is perfectly credible; in which, as in Indian villages, the miraculous is everywhere believed to coexist with the quotidian.<\/p>\n

He was a journalist who never lost sight of the facts. He was a dreamer who believed in the truth of dreams. He was also a writer capable of moments of delirious, and often comic, beauty. At the beginning of \u201cLove in the Time of Cholera\u201d: \u201cThe scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.\u201d At the heart of \u201cThe Autumn of the Patriarch,\u201d after the dictator sells the Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador\u2019s nautical engineers \u201ccarried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.\u201d The first railway train arrives in Macondo and a woman goes mad with fear. \u201cIt\u2019s coming,\u201d she cries. \u201cSomething frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.\u201d And of course, unforgettably:<\/p>\n

\u201cColonel Aureliano Buend\u00eda organized 32 armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17 male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.\u201d<\/p>\n

For such magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of us all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Salman Rushdie<\/strong> is the author of 11 novels and, most recently, the autobiographical memoir \u201cJoseph Anton.\u201dThis essay is reproduced from the \u201cNew York Times\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By SALMAN RUSHDIE Gabo lives! The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive. Somewhere a dictatorial \u201cpatriarch\u201d is still having his rival cooked and served up to his dinner guests …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez Whose Magic in Magic Realism Was Rooted in the Real.’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29563"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29583,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563\/revisions\/29583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}