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June 14, 2007

MARQUEZ'S "TOTAL" NOVEL

Many thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for providing an open link to Ilan Stevens's appreciation of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

100 Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela today is watched by far more people than all the readers of García Márquez's novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. But like the firefly, the soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience's passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable. True, when read closely, as I've been doing this semester with my students, it's clearly first and foremost a melodrama, albeit a magisterial one, with syrupy scenes of unrequited love, sibling animosity, and domestic back stabbing.

But the signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn't come from the world of soap operas. Known as "magical realism" — a category loosely connected to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier called "lo real maravilloso" — the term has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while it denoted an attempt to erase the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic. It helps in cataloging García Márquez's second-rate successors, like Isabel Allende, as it does in understanding Salman Rushdie's baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in Midnight's Children and Toni Morrison's phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in Beloved. All have been linked to "magical realism," with various degrees of success.

Posted by TEV at 12:30 AM in World Beat, Worthy Titles |

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