Is magical realism dead?
Probably not. Its champion is. Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 Nobel Prize winner, died at 87 in Mexico City. His word mastery and acerbic humor will be missed.
Magical realism is seeing a fantasy-world amidst stark reality, a technique that intertwines the mystical and sensual with the everyday trials and tribulations of ordinary people, making their lives extraordinary. It has influenced many authors since Garcia Marquez, and not just Hispanic authors. He wasn’t the first either. Kafka and some of the early dystopian sci-fi writers practiced magical realism—nowadays King and Koontz practice it in their cross-genre alloying of horror and sci-fi. Many tales about drug addiction and mental cases contain elements of magical realism, but it can creep into mysteries, thrillers, and that nebulous and catch-all genre we call literary fiction.
My personal discovery of Garcia Marquez was probably a bit different than your average gringo’s. While my sojourn in Colombia led to a cultural immersion so profound that I soon found myself dreaming in Spanish, I didn’t feel capable of tackling the grand master’s tomes until late in that sojourn. I’m not going to claim that one must read a great author in his own language—modern translators are rarely literal and often profoundly capture the author’s true meaning—but I’ve never read Gabby in English. You’re probably familiar with the great trio—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love During the Time of Cholera (these are my title translations that don’t necessarily agree with accepted ones)—each novel a masterpiece and each novel totally different.
Autumn of the Patriarch is probably the most unusual member of the trio. Gabby’s old dictator is a combination of every Latin American strongman—indeed, of every dictator the world has known, from Hannibal to Idi Amin. It’s long-winded and run-on and represents a new style twist for the master—he’s experimenting, and I believe the experiment turned out well. For me, Autumn is his best book, but critics will probably disagree (do I care?). The new reader of Garcia Marquez probably should start with the novellas. The General in His Labyrinth can be considered a precursor to Autumn. The Chronicle of an Announced Death is another experiment, a successful back-to-front mystery that makes Jeffery Deaver’s recent book just seem like amateurish writing.
My admiration for Gabby’s writing influenced my own. The scenes that include the two mutants, Juanito and Horacio, in Survivors of the Chaos, represent my pathetic homage to magical realism. Both these characters are survivors of the Chaos and the nuclear holocaust that ends Soldiers of God. Horacio makes the boy Juanito a man, and the latter does his part to allow humanity to dream again about the stars. All that action takes place in Colombia, a bow to the country that produces the best coffee in the world and the country that produced the best Hispanic author—Gabby was and is a literary giant.
Magical realism is surreal at times, and perhaps Garcia Marquez is literature’s Salvador Dali, but Gabby had the better eye for detecting and portraying the human condition. His words portray pathos and humor and how the very ordinary becomes the extraordinary, even in conditions of poverty and squalor. And, although he’d probably deny it, the awakening of the human spirit. Love in the Time of the Cholera has more romance and pathos than Romeo and Juliet—a story of unrequited love that makes your average vampire romance, so popular today, pale and trite. Gabby achieved what few authors can manage—fame for the ages and an enduring reputation as a great storyteller.
Garcia Marquez is an example of an author unappreciated by small-minded people who disagreed with his politics. He was an outspoken proponent of Marxist ideology, so much so that the U.S. government wouldn’t let him enter the country several decades ago (I don’t remember details, but I think it was even after he received the Nobel). Mario Vargas Llosa has become the other side of the ideological coin among Latino authors, and, here in the U.S., Michael Crichton and Orson Scott Card became proponents of conservative causes (SF tends to create its fair share of right-leaning authors, mostly Libertarians). I argued in a previous post that an author’s politics, whose pet issues are often present in his books, at least between the lines, shouldn’t detract from your enjoyment of his stories if said author spins a damn good yarn. Garcia Marquez spun several. Moreover, any good writer places characters on his stage that reflect the full spectrum of humanity—from good to evil, from progressive to conservative, from heterosexual to alternate lifestyles, and so forth—even though their personal philosophies aren’t the main issues or themes in the story.
We hadn’t heard much from Gabby in recent years. He was taking a deserved rest and enjoying his fame. And maybe preparing to bring some magical realism into the great oblivion that awaits us all? As usually happens, we earthbound folks can only grieve the loss of a great artist—in this case, a man who changed literature for the better.
In libris libertas….
