Re-reading Marquez’s Memoir
Manash Bhattacharjee Many writers and critics have complained about the term “magic realism” used to describe much of Latin American writing by the world publishing market. It was the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier who put a more apt phrase for the kind of Latin American fiction that was forcibly translated as magic realist. He called such works of fiction: marvelous real (“lo real marvilloso”). Europe is infamous for creating binaries after the Enlightenment experience wherein “magical” was opposed to “real” the way “irrational” was opposed to “reason”. So “magic realism” served as an oxymoronic fusion where the two binaries were retained to serve the double tension between the West’s own self-conscious distinction: between a magic deemed to be medieval and realism deemed to be modern within its own history, as well as between “other” cultures which are supposedly still in the grips of “magic” but – and it’s impossible not to be polemical here – in contact with the modern European form of fiction, also attains the claims of realism. In contrast, the term “marvelous real” simply conjures up an image of a fictional world where the word “marvelous” does not suggest something other than the real, but holds the marvelous as an attribute of the ordinary aspects of real life itself. Carpentier distinguished his idea of “lo real marvilloso” by contrasting it with the most vibrant literary movement in Europe during his time, surrealism: “In the first place, the sensation of the marvelous presupposes a faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints… Thus the idea of the marvelous invoked in the context of disbelief – which is what the surrealists did for so many years – was never anything but a literary trick”. Surrealism was a violent escape from the traps of Christian values and bourgeois life. It was a fusion of Marx and Rimbaud: a radical aesthetics aiming to liberate society by re-inventing love. In their search for a new future, the surrealists aimed to destroy conventional notions of both (Christian) morality and (bourgeois) reality by embracing the psychic/irrational depths of language. It led them to search and recover the resonances of pre-moral/primordial/pagan origins. Some of the primordial/pagan influences were however marketed into the imagination through a colonial route from non-European cultures. The surrealist movement can also be read as an attempt to counter the various factors which produced in modern Europe what Weber called “disenchantment”, in the wake of capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Against this rationalization of life and faith, the surrealists introduced an aesthetic of re-enchantment. But, as Carpentier right pointed out, instead of welcoming faith, the surrealists took a critical look at faith, influenced by secular/Marxist traditions. Figures like Salvador Dali were however more ideologically ambiguous than leftist surrealists. Carpentier’s criticism however, taking the example of Dali’s paintings, is that surrealism’s attempt was “the fabrication of the marvellous”. It is a criticism regarding the codification and manufacturing by Dali and other surrealists of a marvellous reality which wasn’t palpable in modern Europe as opposed to the raw translation by Latin Americans like Marquez of the marvellous which was tangibly experienced in their culture. Though this view holds water, it is important to qualify this crucial distinction. In the case of Latin American fiction, the marvellous was pretty much an easily obtainable material, from which a mise-en-scène could then be created. In surrealism, one could detect the structural influence of the Freudian revolution, with imageries of dream-states and the techniques of deciphering and interpreting them having a huge impact not only on Dali’s paintings, but also on Andre Breton’s concept of “automatic writing”. Carpentier argued how in Latin America, “the marvellous was around every corner”, whereas in Paris “one had to milk reality with great effort in order to extract the marvellous”. Carpentier seems to separate (artistic) labour and magic. He didn’t suspect the possibility that only labour can offer the radical means left in a culture besieged by the power discourses of religious beliefs and bourgeois rationality, to extract, however painfully, remnants of the lost and the buried forces (imageries) of culture. The surrealist enterprise of labour however suffers from a sociologically, if not existentially, alienated productivity. This alienation can be grasped if one bears in mind that while the post-colonial Latin Americans kept alive their ties with the popular, the surrealists experimented within the artificial confines of an elite environment. The difference also lies in the condition (or situation) which the surrealists faced, where the exceptional had to be produced against the everyday. The surrealists, being revolutionary atheists fighting Christian dogmas, also found it difficult to say what Gabriel Garcia Marquez, despite being a communist, could suggest from a popular register of culture: “If you don’t believe in god, at least be superstitious”. This difference endorses Carpentier’s attempt to see the Latin American literary-scape vis-à-vis Europe through a prism of radical otherness and elsewhere-ness. Latin American fiction, like any genuine fiction from the non-West, holds up a different version and vision of the world and of life. Even though the modern form of the novel began in Europe, with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Milan Kundera’s assertion of the novel being “Europe’s creation” is merely an assertion about the creation of a form which has been re-created differently elsewhere. Writers from other cultures, faced with a Europeanizing modernity forced through their colonial histories, have tried to fuse the novel form with its older forms of story telling. The imaginations of fiction in such countries were, in a way, a paradoxical experience of appropriation and resistance. The fact that Marquez could achieve this specific task of fusing the Western form of the novel with his Columbian roots of storytelling is just a case in point. But writers from different cultures have not been necessarily busy in mimicking Europe. They also parodied their own world. As much as Europe was part of their colonized history, in effect, sometimes Europe itself got parodied. Marquez was of course busy