Free English Language Essays - Magical Realism Solitude
Magical Realism in One Hundered Years Of Solitude and The House Of The Spirits
If someone made a list of recent magical realist works, there were certain characteristics that those works on the list would share. The term also pointed to a particular array of techniques that writers could put to specialized use. Now the words have been applied so haphazardly that to call a work "magical realism" doesn't convey a very clear sense of what the work will be like.
If a magazine editor these days asks for contributions that are magical realism, what she's really saying is that she wants contemporary fantasy written to a high literary standard---fantasy that readers who "don't read escapist literature" will happily read. It's a marketing label and an attempt to carve out a part of the prestige readership for speculative works.
I don't object to using labels to make readers more comfortable, to draw them to work that they might otherwise unfairly dismiss. But by over-using the term, we've obscured a distinctive branch of literature. More importantly from my perspective, we've made it harder for new writers to discover the tools of magical realism as a distinct set allowing them to create work that portrays particular ways of looking at the world.
If writers read a hundred works labelled "magical realism," they will encounter such a hodgepodge that they may not recognize the minority of such works that are doing something different, something those writers may want to try themselves.
The miraculous, on the other hand, is described with a precision that fits it into the ordinariness of daily life. When one of the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude is shot in the head, the blood from his body flows out into the street in a path that takes it all the way to the feet of the character's grandmother---a miracle.
But along the way, the path of the blood is described in detail, and the miraculous journey is rooted in the day-to-day activities of the village and the grandmother's household. An even better example is the character so beautiful, that she is followed everywhere by a cloud of butterflies. This extraordinary trait is brought to earth somewhat by the observation that all of the butterflies have tattered wings. The miraculous, looked at closely, is mundane.
Magical realism is a distinctive form of fiction that aims to produce the experience of a non-objective worldview. Its techniques are particular to that world view, and while they may at first look something like the techniques of sophisticated fantasy, magical realism is trying to do more than play with reality's rules. It is conveying realities that other people really do experience, or once experienced.
As a tool, magical realism can be used to explore the realities of characters or communities who are outside of the objective mainstream of our culture. It's not just South Americans, Indians, or African slaves who may offer these alternative views. Religious believers for whom the numinous is always present and miracles are right around the corner, believers to whom angels really do appear and to whom God reveals Himself directly, they too inhabit a magical realist reality.
While I don't expect the words "magical realism" to revert to their specialized use, I hope that writers won't lose sight of the special literature those words once pointed to exclusively. Magical realism is fascinating to read, and I hope to see more writers exploring its possibilities and conveying to "mainstream" readers ways of thinking that can help all of us to somewhat re-enchant the world. "Magical realism" has become a debased term. When it first came into use to describe the work of certain Latin American writers, and then a small number of writers from many places in the world, it had a specific meaning that made it useful for critics.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928, in the small town of Aracataca, Colombia. He started his career as a journalist, first publishing his short stories and novels in the mid-1950s. When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in his native Spanish in 1967, as Cien años de soledad, García Márquez achieved true international fame; he went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Still a prolific writer of fiction and -journalism, García Márquez was perhaps the central figure in the so-called Latin Boom, which designates the rise in popularity of Latin American writing in the 1960s and 1970s. One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most important, and the most widely read, text to emerge from that period. It is also a central and pioneering work in the movement that has become known as magical realism, which was characterized by the dreamlike and fantastic elements woven into the fabric of its fiction.
In part, the magic of García Márquez's writing is a result of his rendering the world through a child's eyes: he has said that nothing really important has happened to him since he was eight years old and that the atmosphere of his books is the atmosphere of childhood. García Márquez's native town of Aracataca is the inspiration for much of his fiction, and readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude may recognize many parallels between the real-life history of García Márquez's hometown and the history of the fictional town of Macondo.
In both towns, foreign fruit companies brought many prosperous plantations to nearby locations at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the time of García Márquez's birth, however, Aracataca had begun a long, slow decline into poverty and obscurity, a decline mirrored by the fall of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Even as it draws from García Márquez's provincial experiences, One Hundred Years of Solitude also reflects political ideas that apply to Latin America as a whole. Latin America once had a thriving population of native Aztecs and Incas, but, slowly, as European explorers arrived, the native population had to adjust to the technology and capitalism that the outsiders brought with them. Similarly, Macondo begins as a very simple settlement, and money and technology become common only when people from the outside world begin to arrive.
In addition to mirroring this early virginal stage of Latin America's growth, One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the current political status of various Latin American countries. Just as Macondo undergoes frequent changes in government, Latin American nations, too, seem unable to produce governments that are both stable and organized.
The various dictatorships that come into power throughout the course of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, mirror dictatorships that have ruled in Nicaragua, Panama, and Cuba. García Márquez's real-life political leanings are decidedly revolutionary, even communist: he is a friend of Fidel Castro. But his depictions of cruel dictatorships show that his communist sympathies do not extend to the cruel governments that Communism sometimes produces.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, then, is partly an attempt to render the reality of García Márquez's own experiences in a fictional narrative. Its importance, however, can also be traced back to the way it appeals to broader spheres of experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude is an extremely ambitious novel.
To a certain extent, in its sketching of the histories of civil war, plantations, and labour unrest, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells a story about Colombian history and, even more broadly, about Latin America's struggles with colonialism and with its own emergence into modernity.
García Márquez's masterpiece, however, appeals not just to Latin American experiences, but also to larger questions about human nature. It is, in the end, a novel as much about specific social and historical circumstancesdisguised by fiction and fantasyas about the possibility of love and the sadness of alienation and solitude.
The founder and patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía represents both great leadership and the innocence of the ancient world. He is a natural explorer, setting off into the wilderness first to found Macondo and then to find a route between Macondo and the outside world. In this tale of creation he is the Adam figure, whose quest for knowledge, mirrored in the intellectual pursuits of his descendants, eventually results in his family's loss of innocence.
José Arcadio Buendía pushes his family forward into modernity, preferring the confines of his laboratory to the sight of a real flying carpet that the gypsies have brought. By turning his back on this ancient magic in favour of his more modern scientific ideas, he hastens the end of Macondo's Eden-like state.
For José Arcadio Buendía, however, madness comes sooner than disillusionment. Immediately after he thinks he has discovered a means to create perpetual motiona physical impossibilityhe goes insane, convinced that the same day is repeating itself over, and over again.
In a sense, his purported discovery of perpetual motion achieves a kind of total knowledge that may be too deep for the human mind to withstand. Perpetual motion could only exist in a world without time, which, for José Arcadio Buendía, is what the world becomes and, in a sense, is what time throughout the novel becomes: past, present and future often overlap. This overlapping of time allows José Arcadio Buendía to appear to his descendants in the form of a ghost, so that his presence will always be felt in Macondo.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía (I) is One Hundred Years of Solitude's greatest soldier figure, leading the Liberal army throughout the civil war. At the same time, however, he is the novel's greatest artist figure: a poet, an accomplished silversmith, and the creator of hundreds of finely crafted golden fishes.
Aureliano's inability to experience deep emotion contributes to his great battle poise and artistic focus, yet Márquez's depiction of the Colonel melting away his hard work and starting all over again signals that this poise and focus is not worth its price.
Aureliano is never truly touched by anything or anyone. His child bride, Remedios Moscote, seems at first to have a real effect on him. When she dies, however, he discovers that his sorrow is not as profound as he had expected. During the war, he becomes even more hardened to emotion, and, eventually, his memory and all his feelings are worn away.
He has all of his poems burned, and, by the end of his life, he has stopped making new golden fish. Instead, he makes twenty-five and then melts them down, using the metal for the next batch. In this way, he lives solely in the present, acknowledging that time moves in cycles and that the present is all that exists for a man like him, with no memories.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía's attempted suicide shows us how deep his despair is when he realizes that civil war is futile and that pride is the only thing that keeps the two sides fighting. His disillusionment is a moving commentary on the despair that arises from futility but, also, on the futility that arises from despair.
Of all the characters in the novel, Úrsula Iguarán lives the longest and sees the most new generations born. She outlives all three of her children. Unlike most of her relatives, Úrsula is untroubled by great spiritual anxiety; in this sense, she is probably the strongest person ever to live in Macondo. She takes in Rebeca, the child of strangers, and raises her as her own daughter; she welcomes dozens of passing strangers to her table; she tries to keep the house from falling apart.
Úrsula's task is not easy, since all of her descendants become embroiled in wars and scandals that would cause any weaker family to dissolve. With Úrsula as their mainstay, however, the Buendías are irrevocably linked, for better or for worse. To keep the family together, Úrsula sometimes is quite harsh; for example, she kicks José Arcadio and Rebeca out of the house when they elope.
This decision is partly a result of her unyielding fear of incest. Even though Rebeca and José Arcadio are not technically related, Úrsula is terrified that even a remotely incestuous action or relation will result in someone in the family having a baby with the tail of a pig. Her own marriage to José Arcadio Buendía is incestuous because they are cousins, and she constantly examines her children's behaviour for flaws, frequently saying, [I]t's worse than if he had been born with the tail of a pig. Because of her fear of incest, Úrsula is a contradictory character: she binds the family together, but is terrified that incest, the extreme of family bonding, will bring disaster to the Buendía house.
Aureliano (II) is the purest example in One Hundred Years of Solitude of the solitary, destructive Buendía thirst for knowledge. He is utterly isolated by his grandmother, Fernanda del Carpio, because she is ashamed that he was born out of wedlock. He never even leaves the house until he is fully-grown. As he lives in solitude, however, he acquires a store of knowledge almost magical in scope.
He knows far more than he could have read in his family's books and seems to have miraculously accessed an enormous store of universal knowledge. After having an incestuous relationship with his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula, Aureliano watches the last of the Buendía line (their son, born with the tail of a pig) being eaten by ants.
He finally translates the prophecies of the old gypsy, Melquíades, which foretell both the act of translation and the destruction of Macondo that occurs as he reads. Aureliano is therefore Macondo's prophet of doom, destroying the town with an act of reading and translation that is similar to our reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Although the realism and the magic that One Hundred Years of Solitude includes seem at first to be opposites, they are, in fact, perfectly reconcilable. Both are necessary in order to convey Márquez's particular conception of the world. Márquez's novel reflects reality not as it is experienced by one observer, but as it is individually experienced by those with different backgrounds.
These multiple perspectives are especially appropriate to the unique reality of Latin Americacaught between modernity and pre-industrialization; torn by civil war, and ravaged by imperialismwhere the experiences of people vary much more than they might in a more homogenous society. Magical realism conveys a reality that incorporates the magic that superstition and religion infuse into the world.
This novel treats biblical narratives and native Latin American mythology as historically credible. This approach may stem from the sense, shared by some Latin American authors, that important and powerful strains of magic running through ordinary lives fall victim to the Western emphasis on logic and reason. If García Márquez seems to confuse reality and fiction, it is only because, from some perspectives, fiction may be truer than reality, and vice versa.
For instance, in places like Márquez's hometown, which witnessed a massacre much like that of the workers in Macondo, unthinkable horrors may be a common sight. Real life, then, begins to seem like a fantasy that is both terrifying and fascinating, and Márquez's novel is an attempt to recreate and to capture that sense of real life.
From the names that return generation after generation to the repetition of personalities and events, time in One Hundred Years of Solitude refuses to divide neatly into past, present, and future. Úrsula Iguarán is always the first to notice that time in Macondo is not finite, but, rather, moves forward repeatedly. Sometimes, this simultaneity of time leads to amnesia, when people cannot see the past any more than they can see the future.
Other times the future becomes as easy to recall as the past. The prophecies of Melquíades prove that events in time are continuous: from the beginning of the novel, the old gypsy was able to see its end, as if the various events were all occurring at once. Similarly, the presence of the ghosts of Melquíades and José Arcadio Buendía shows that the past in which those men lived has become one with the present.
Although language is in an unripe, Garden-of-Eden state at the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when most things in the newborn world are still unnamed, its function quickly becomes more complex. Various languages fill the novel, including the Guajiro -language that the children learn, the multilingual tattoos that cover José Arcadio's body, the Latin spoken by José Arcadio Buendía, and the final Sanskrit translation of Melquíades's prophecies. In fact, this final act of translation can be seen as the most significant act in the book, since it seems to make the book's existence possible, and gives life to the characters and story within.
As García Márquez makes reading the final apocalyptic force that destroys Macondo and calls attention to his own task as a writer, he also reminds us that our reading provides the fundamental first breath to every action that takes place in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
While the novel can be thought of as something with one clear, predetermined meaning, García Márquez asks his reader to acknowledge the fact that every act of reading is also an interpretation, and that such interpretations can have weighty consequences. Aureliano (II), then, does not just take the manuscripts' meanings for granted, but, in addition, he must also translate and interpret them and ultimately precipitate the destruction of the town.
While the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude consider total forgetfulness a danger, they, ironically, also seem to consider memory a burden. About half of the novel's characters speak of the weight of having too many memories while the rest seem to be amnesiacs. Rebeca's overabundance of memory causes her to lock herself in her house after her husband's death, and to live there with the memory of friends rather than the presence of people.
For her, the nostalgia of better days gone by prevents her from existing in a changing world. The opposite of her character can be found in Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who has almost no memories at all. He lives in an endlessly repeating present, melting down and then recreating his collection of little gold fishes.
Nostalgia and amnesia are the dual diseases of the Buendía clan, one tying its victims to the past, the other trapping them in the present. Thus afflicted, the Buendías are doomed to repeat the same cycles until they consume themselves, and they are never able to move into the future.
One Hundred Years of Solitude draws on many of the basic narratives of the Bible, and its characters can be seen as allegorical of some major biblical figures. The novel recounts the creation of Macondoand its earliest Edenic days of innocence, and continues until its apocalyptic end, with a cleansing flood in between. We can see José Arcadio Buendía's downfallhis loss of sanitybecause of his quest for knowledge.
He and his wife, Ursula Iguarán, represent the biblical Adam and Eve, who were exiled from Eden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The entire novel functions as a metaphor for human history and an extended commentary on human nature. On the one hand, their story, taken literally as applying to the fictional Buendías, evokes immense pathos. But as representatives of the human race, the Buendías personify solitude and inevitable tragedy, together with the elusive possibility of happiness, as chronicled by the Bible.
Gypsies are present in One Hundred Years of Solitude primarily to act as links. They function to offer transitions from contrasting or unrelated events and characters. Every few years, especially in the early days of Macondo, a pack of wandering gypsies arrives, turning the town into something like a carnival and displaying the wares that they have brought with them.
Before Macondo has a road to civilization, they are the town's only contact with the outside world. They bring both technologyinventions that Melquíades displaysand magicmagic carpets and other wonders. Gypsies, then, serve as versatile literary devices that also blur the line between fantasy and reality, especially when they connect Macondo and the outside world, magic and science, and even the past and present.
The meaning of the thousands of little gold fishes that Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes shifts over time. At first, these fishes represent Aureliano's artistic nature and, by extension, the artistic nature of all the Aurelianos. Soon, however, they acquire a greater significance, marking the ways in which Aureliano has affected the world. His seventeen sons, for example, are each given a little gold fish, and, in this case, the fishes represent Aureliano's effect on the world through his sons.
In another instance, they are used as passkeys when messengers for the Liberals use them to prove their allegiance. Many years later, however, the fishes become collector's items, merely relics of a once-great leader. This attitude disgusts Aureliano because he recognizes that people are using him as a figurehead, a mythological hero that represents whatever they want it to represent. When he begins to understand that the little gold fishes no longer are symbolic of him personally, but instead of a mistaken ideal, he stops making new fishes and starts to melt down the old ones again and again.
The railroad represents the arrival of the modern world in Macondo. This devastating turn leads to the development of a banana plantation and the ensuing massacre of three thousand workers. The railroad also represents the period when Macondo is connected most closely with the outside world.
After the banana plantations close down, the railroad falls into disrepair and the train ceases even to stop in Macondo any more. The advent of the railroad is a turning point. Before it comes, Macondo grows bigger and thrives; afterward, Macondo quickly disintegrates, folding back into isolation and eventually expiring.
At first, the English encyclopaedia that Meme receives from her American friend is a symbol for the way the American plantation owners are taking over Macondo. When Meme, a descendant of the town's founders, begins to learn English, the foreigners' encroachment on Macondo's culture becomes obvious.
The concrete threat posed by the encyclopaedia is later lessened when Aureliano Segundo uses it to tell his children stories. Because he does not speak English, Aureliano Segundo makes up stories to go with the pictures. By creating the possibility for multiple interpretations of the text, he unwittingly diffuses the encyclopaedia's danger.
The golden chamber pot that Fernanda del Carpio brings to Macondo from her home is, for her, a marker of her lofty status; she believes that she was destined to be a queen. But while the gold of the chamber pot is associated with royalty, the function of the chamber pot is, of course, associated with defecation: a sign of the real value of Fernanda's snooty condescension. Later, when José Arcadio (II) tries to sell the chamber pot, he finds that it is not really solid gold, but, rather, gold-plated. Again, this revelation represents the hollowness of Fernanda's pride and the flimsiness of cheap cover-ups.
Perhaps we should also look at one of Marquez's contemporaries: Isabel Allende. One of the most successful contemporary Latin American woman novelists, Isabel Allende was born in 1942. Although she was born in Lima, Peru, Allende is Chilean. As a child, she travelled throughout Latin America and beyond, thanks to her father and stepfather's diplomatic careers. In 1962, Isabel Allende married Manuel Frias. Allende soon gave birth to their daughter Paula and their son Nicolas.
Allende worked as a journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Chile beginning in 1967. Her uncle Salvador Allende became, in 1970, the first socialist to be elected president of Chile. In 1973 Salvador Allende was assassinated in a military coup led by General Augusta Pinochet. Due to increasing political tensions in Chile, in 1975, Allende and her family fled to Venezuela.
She lived there for thirteen years, continuing to work as a journalist, and beginning to write novels. In 1987, Allende and Frias were divorced. A year later, Allende married Willie Gordon in San Francisco and settled down in nearby San Rafael, California. In 1992, her daughter Paula died of porphyria.
Written and first published in Spanish in 1982, The House of the Spirits, was Allende's first book. It received enormous critical and popular acclaim and, in 1985, was translated into English. In 1993, it was released as a film with a star-studded cast. Following The House of The Spirits, Allende has written numerous other novels, including The Stories of Eva Luna,The Infinite Plan, and a biography of her daughter, Paula. She is still writing today.
Many elements in The House of the Spirits are based on Allende's own life. The political events in the unnamed country in the novel are quite similar to those that occurred in Chile. As Allende later explained in Paula, many of the characters in The House of the Spirits are based on members of her own family.
In fact, The House of the Spirits began as a letter Allende wrote to a dying uncle. However, The House of the Spirits is a novel, and there is no exact correlation between it and any real events or characters.
The House of the Spirits is a prime example of magical realism, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Primarily a Latin American tradition, magical realism is characterized by the simple, straightforward presentation of strange, magical events. For example, characteristics such as Clara's clairvoyance are compared to her brother's lameness.
The characters in magical realist fiction experience and accept the unbelievable with calm rationality. When Clara dreams that her mother's severed head is missing, for example, she borrows a car and goes to find it, and then she puts it in a hatbox and forgets about it. Magical realist novels are often long family sagas, told with little respect for clear temporal succession. They often employ strategies of foreshadowing and repetition which are prevalent in The House of the Spirits, especially in Clara's predictions of future events and in the recurrence of the names Pedro and Esteban.
Bibliography
Joe Jenkins, Magic Realism and the Grotesque, Heinemann, May 1991
Mary James, The Macondo Effect, McMillan, January 1996
Malcolm Spike, The Life of Isabel Allende, Microsoft Encarta, 1998
Paul Hopkins, The House of the Spirits: A second look, The LA revision site; www.paulhopkins.org.uk, March 1999
Fernando Gonzalez, The Boston Globe MAGAZINE, April, 1993
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