Terry Pratchett apparently said that magic realism is a polite way of saying that you write fantasy. Gene Wolfe, that magic realism is fantasy written by those who speak Spanish. Which is all very witty and nice, but theres no denying that every once in a while, an author comes along and does something which forces us to shake our heads in disbelief and say, Wait, how come I never thought up something this simple before? If you werent careful, you could say that Marquez wrote what he liked. Which is true, in the same way Joyce wrote what he liked in the encapsulated but chaotic chapters of Ulysses, and Kafka gave up on chiseled dialogue and scene construction for his particular brand of unbridled paranoia, and Proust used fiction to channel Memory in its messiness that followed its own sense of order and propriety. One could go on. But it is very telling that Marquez considered Kafka to be the author who taught him that it was possible to write differently. The Third Resignation (probably his first published short story) is about a child afflicted by a very strange malaise: he is dead. It is the first Marquez I read and understood, inasmuch as his stories are meant to be understood. Marquezs too-much-ness is something that English Literature had been profoundly uncomfortable with post-Enlightenment. Anything that imaginative couldnt really mean anything serious. And while there had been several progenitors of magic realism in America and England, they had long since been relegated to the forsaken territories of popular fiction. Which is why it gladdens my heart that a writer such as Marquez came along when he did. He taught the English speaking world to breathe easy and trust in the child in all of them, who wasnt as naive as theyd initially thought. Rest in peace, Mr Marquez.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 22:01:13 +0000
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