The‘Magic’Gobblesupthe‘Realism’
A.J.Canagaratna
Like almost all literary critical terms, ‘realism’
is very elastic. A curious feature about the noun ‘realism’
is that magnet-like it seems to attract all kinds of
qualifying adjectives which only help to make confusion
worse confounded.
One such adjective is ‘magic’ . Under the rubric of
‘magic realism’, one finds lumped together such diverse
writers as Brogues, Marquez, Salman Rushdie and Gunter
Grass. Literary labels such as ‘magic realism’ and ‘absurd
drama’ tend to be somewhat misleading as they are
likely to blur the specific differences between writers who
operate broadly in the absurdist mode, produce works
which possess their own distinctiveness; one is hardly
likely to mistake the work of one for the other. For instance,
Genet’s plays have a political dimension which
Beckett’s don’t have. Similarly, though Salman Rushdie
and Gunter Grass are categorised as ‘magic realists’ by
some critics, along with Marquez, neither Rushdie nor
Grass traffics in the supernatural, as Marquez does in
One Hundred Years of Solitude. Besides Grass and
Rushdie use fantasy for politically satiric ends. This dimension
seems to be missing in “One Hundred Years of
Solitude.”
Marquez’s novel is regarded as one of the
ur-texts of magic realism and a whole cult has grown
round it; It has won the plaudits of so many renowned
critics so that any one who tries to query the claim that it
is one of the ‘undeniable classics of the century’ feels
like the boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked.
Undeniably the narrative is like a tidal wave
which swaps the reader off his/her feet. It’s only on a
second reading that the nagging doubts take firm root.
It’s not the supernatural element that necessarily disturbs
one.
All literature depends on conventions and certainly
one can have no objection to a serious writer
structuring his/her work using the conventions of the
supernatural. I’m not referring here to ghost stories, horror
stories and such like genres or types which make no
claim to operate in the realistic mode, though the successful
ones are chillingly real.
Rather, I’m thinking of the restrained use of the
supernatural element in Hilary Mantel’s “Mr.Fludd.”
In that novel, Mantel resurrects a long-dead person
(Mr.Fludd) who rescues a lively novitiate from the con-fines
of a constricting convent, settles her in a hotel and
disappears after paying all the bills. Here the ‘supernatural’
has been so successfully assimilated and integrated
with the mundane that one willingly suspends
one’s disbelief. Mantel uses the convention of the supernatural
to point up the soul-destroying routine of an Irish convent.
As far as I’m concerned, the trouble with
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is that the magical/
supernatural element seems to have taken the bit between
its teeth and run away. The effect, on this reader at
least, is that the ‘magic’ has gobbled up the ‘realism’.
The pervasive effect of the larger-than-life characters and
happenings like the heavenly ascent of Remedios the
Beauty ( an irreverent parody of Mary’s Ascension) is to
make the massacre of over 3000 people during the strike
of the workers of the banana company sound like the
stuff of legend. And it so turns out that except for Jose
Arcadio Segundo and one or two others, no one else in
Macondo believes that this massacre really occurred.
Someone could argue that the success of the company’s
propaganda campaign in brain-washing almost the entire
population into believing that the massacre never
took place is a pointed political indictment of the manner
on which foreign capitalist companies operated in the
‘banana republics’ of South America. But this is rather
specious as the overall political thrust ( if any) is deflected
by the over(?) -indulgence in the magical / supernatural
element for its own sake and the sex orgies
which serve no other purpose than an exhibition of Spanish
machismo.
‘Machismo’, this word makes one realise that
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is really an epic novel
in which Marquez celebrates, albeit in a muted key, the
Conquistador’s conquest of the new World. Buendia’s
founding of the republic of Macondo is a miniature replay
of the Spanish conquest. Buendia himself seems to
be a literary mutant of Don Quixote. Aaron Norgrave
writing about the “Piano in Race and Class” (Vol.40,
No.3,July-Sept.98’) states that the epic novel depicts the
totality of relations as naturally given but rounded from
without by a controlling ideology…. The epic novel celebrates
a society in the face of both theoretical and practical
attacks by presenting heroes who are lone champions
of the system’s values who, locked in their myths,
embody society’s contradictions and thereby overcome
them.” Buendia and his son the Colonel are two such
champions.
The controlling ideology seems to be
Hispanism: hence the celebration of machismo and the
flaunting of sexual prowess. The reverse side of this
ideology is the bit role assigned to the autochthonous
people and women; as if to compensate for this, the gypsies,
especially Melquicades who is endowed with al-most
mystical powers, are glamorized and the matriarch
Ursula who is Spanish, naturally looms larger than
life.
The air of exoticism is so all-pervasive that
it makes one feel that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is
the literary equivalent of orientalism. It is the product,
to use Raymond Williams’ phrase of a ‘Residual culture’:
a rich existing amalgam of legend, religious mysticism
and prodigious feats ( especially sexual) . This
novel makes one feel that, whatever its provenance,
magic realism is a specifically Latin American phenomenon
and will wilt if transplanted wholesale elsewhere.
For Tamil writers ( and readers) who in their
disillusionment with socialist realism are in danger of
being seduced by ‘magic realism’, which in my opinion
is a mode pregnant with reactionary possibilities, a
comparison with K.Rajanarayan’s “Kopallakiramam”
will be illuminating. The CO-presence of the legendary
and quotidian actuality in that novel is accepted by the
reader without any sense of strain because unlike in "One
Hundred Years of Solitude" where the chosen strategy
of authorial narration leaves no space for the author-narrator
to distance himself from the events he is narrating,
Rajanarayan recounts the legendary/ miraculous
through the mouth of the matriarch and her account is
ironically counterpointed by the unspoken thoughts of
Akkaya who thinks the matriarch is exaggerating. This
counter-pointing makes it possible for the reader to accept
the co-presence of the legendary and the mundane
actuality, without any sense of jarring incongruity.
How then account for the fad ( for that is what
I think it is ) of magic realism? Perhaps the reading
public fed up with photographic naturalism and the introverted
inspection of innards, longs for escape into an
exotic world filled with improbable heroes and prodigious
events. Above all it longs for narration, a long
lost art. Marquez has very skillfully tapped into the readers’
subterranean lodgings and through his gift for
fabulation and by projecting the self as the other has
cleverly concealed his real project of celebrating the
Hispanic conquest of the New World.
Even a work which creates a world that is not
subject to ordinary realism must possess its own inner
imaginative logic and consistency, this is lacking in
Marquez’s novel whose narrative laws are entirely arbitrary,
unlike in Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” where
once the initial assumption that children born at midnight
on 15 August 1947 are in telepathic communication
with each other is granted, the rest holds together
through its competing inner imaginative logic ( Regi
Siriwardena-personal communication).
Mr.A.J.Canagaratna is one of the few Tamils in Sri Lanka,
who has been writing essays and criticism in English for decades.
His translations from Thamil to English is considerable.
'Third Eye' Magazine (Januray 2000).
