by Ilan Stavans
Carpentier used the term again in his essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” a lecture given at the Caracas Athenaeum on May 22, 1975, and included in his book La novela hispanoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo. In it, Carpentier offered a more sustained literary analysis of the style in Latin American literature. Other intellectuals such as Arturo Uslar Pietri employed the term. In the United States, critics such as Ángel Flores debated it. Flores suggested that it derived from Kafka’s vision. Some argue that the style originated with Borges and Rulfo but others disagree. The critic Luis Leal wrote: “Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultural forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in close or open structures. What is the attitude of the magic realist toward reality? . . . the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts.”15
There’s another, chronologically older component to magic realism that needs to be acknowledged: surrealism. André Breton, during a trip to Mexico in 1938 that was commissioned by the French government, became infatuated with the country’s primitivism. He met the political activist and Russian exile Leon Trotsky, with whom he coauthored Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendent, and whose circle of friends included the muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Breton was amazed by the way, in festivities such as the Day of the Dead, the living and the deceased coexisted in the Mexican practice of religion. More than a decade before, in 1924, he had defined surrealism in a manifesto as pure psychic autonomism. He believed that autonomism, a way to let the subconscious free, was present in Mexican culture. Breton developed the concept of le hazard objectif, objective chance, juxtaposing coherence and chaos. What made the reality he encountered on his trip to Mexico so enchanting was precisely the role chaos played in it.
As Breton was making his statements, psychoanalysis was gaining professional ground in Europe. Sigmund Freud’s theories—of sexual forces defining a person’s life since childhood and of dreams as a window to the unconscious, a means by which the internal struggle emerges into the realm of awareness—had at first been rejected as unfounded. But after World War I, these theories became fashionable among members of the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes in Austria, England, France, and Germany. The surrealist revolution in art was an extension of this awareness. As Freud himself had pointed out, art itself was an expression of the hidden, irrational, sexual messages kept in check by reason. Breton, in his Surrealist manifesto, explored the idea of the marvelous along these lines, making it synonymous to that which is strange, unexpected, dreamlike, and even macabre. “All that is marvelous is beautiful,” he stated, and, “only the marvelous is beautiful.” He was infatuated with writers such as Jonathan Swift and Edgar Allan Poe, whose work, in his view, gave artistic expression to animalistic forces within the human mind. In Breton’s opinion, these authors gave free rein to their inner child, revealing the impulsive, uncivilized components of human life.
Although Breton visited only Mexico on his trans-Atlantic journey (in his L’Anthologie de l’humour noir, published in 1940, he made references to his trip, direct and otherwise), his vision, metonymically, was taken to encompass Latin America as a whole.
García Márquez’s international audience immediately acknowledged the surrealist component in his magic realism. Tales like “La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada” (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, also known in its abbreviated form as Innocent Eréndira), about a girl whose grandmother forces her to prostitute herself with hundreds of men in order to pay back a debt she owes her, were read as parables of a misconstrued, primitive sexuality that still existed in Latin American. Similar moral judgments were made about stories such as “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” (The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World), both published in the same collection as “Innocent Eréndira.” (In English, the former originally appeared in New American Review, edited by Harper & Row editor Ted Solotaroff, and the latter in Playboy.) These pieces, which could be read as either reverses or extensions of the other (unlike García Márquez’s other stories, these two are subtitled: “A Tale for Children”), explore manhood and the male body. In the first, the local community reacts to the sudden appearance of an angel of advanced age who has fallen from the sky; in the second, a similar premise is explored as a giant washes up from the sea.
They were understood as meditations on religion in a landscape where Christianity had assimilated elements from the indigenous cultures, creating a hybrid in which monotheism and idolatry coexisted. García Márquez frequently inserts in his cast of characters a priest who acts as the official spokesman of the Church but is viewed by the townspeople as untrustworthy—as either more interested in his own advancement or representative of foreign powers whose influence is only symbolic. These stories were also seen as a commentary on political corruption in a region defined by violent civil wars and the inability to become fully democratic.
The publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967 almost single-handedly turned magic realism into a fashion. The prohibition against incest serves as the novel’s leitmotif. The Buendías attempt to avoid it in a clan where cousins are physically attracted to one another, where the same prostitute satisfies the sexual needs of various generations of family men, where beauty defines certain women to such an extent as to make them celestial. One Hundred Years of Solitude was proof that Breton was right in his theory of Latin America as a region where the marvelous is synonymous with the bizarre and where unstoppable sexual impulses are allowed to run wild. García Márquez’s saga also supported Franz Roh’s assumption: Macondo on Colombia’s Caribbean coast did not share the mores of the industrialized nations of Europe and the United States. Macondo was defined by exaggerated, fantastical features, such as the epidemic of insomnia that afflicts it at one point, with amnesia as a side effect, the furious rainstorms that sweep it, the unexpected descent of millions of butterflies, and so on. Even the daily noon arrival of a yellow train into town seems strange.
Just like the strange events in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, these happenings are presented as nothing out of the ordinary. They may be abrupt, macabre, and magical to the unaccustomed reader, who may view them as childlike, primitive, ritualistic, and the stuff of myth, but to the people of Macondo they are perfectly normal. Therein lies García Márquez’s true contribution. One Hundred Years of Solitude is written in a matter-of-fact way. The omniscient, third-person narrator isn’t surprised by the plot. The plot unfolds like stories in the Bible: in a direct, noninterpretative, straightforward fashion. In Carpentier’s words, magic realism was a different attitude toward reality: it portrayed its reality as normal.
Although it’s clear that critics had known about the concept of magic realism for some time, setting the stage for the reception of García Márquez’s masterpiece, it is important to point out that he did not write his novel with that in mind. There is no record of him having read any of the essays I’ve discussed in this chapter. He wasn’t a member of the obsessed literati (and never would be), who anxiously followed intellectual debates in literary supplements. There’s a strong anti-intellectual quality to García Márquez’s way of thinking, and he certainly did not write to satisfy other people’s aesthetic needs. The mythical world of Macondo is authentic precisely because it is representative of his vision of the world.
One can argue that García Márquez himself had trained his readers. An example is In Evil Hour, which served as a preview of his future capabilities, although its provocative plot isn’t successfully executed. It reads like a failed attempt at building the infrastructure of the large, ambitious theater of possibilities—and impossibilities—that Macondo would become approximately a decade later. Set in a small Colombian town, the narrative explores the
reaction, both private and public, to the sudden appearance of mysterious lampoons posted everywhere that articulate in images and words the rumors about the political authorities and important events. There’s a Freudian undercurrent in the novel: the posters serve as an outlet for the collective thoughts, both secret and unconscious, of the population.
Like other pieces in García Márquez’s opera prima, there are references in In Evil Hour to places and characters in the author’s later magnum opus, such as a passing comment about Colonel Aureliano Buendía visiting the fictional town. It reads, “on his way to Macondo to draw up the terms of surrender in the last civil war, [Colonel Buendía] had slept on the balcony one night during a time when there weren’t any towns for many leagues around.”16 Gregory Rabassa had an immediate, instinctual reaction to In Evil Hour. He thought it was a little gem, although he didn’t see it as a foreshadowing of García Márquez’s masterpiece. “There are those who say that the town resembles Macondo,” Rabassa later wrote, “but I doubt that García Márquez fostered any such feelings for his magical creation. It may be that he was showing us the dark side of paradise in more strident terms.”17
Chapter 6
The Silver Screen
In early June 1961, García Márquez, Mercedes, and their almost-two-year-old Rodrigo arrived in Mexico City. He was in his mid-thirties, with just $100 in his pocket, the remnants of a sum Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza had wired to him. To support the family, García Márquez started working for a couple of advertising agencies, among them J. Walter Thompson. In the words of a journalist who met him at the time, he was “stocky, but light on his feet, with a bristling mustache, a cauliflower nose, and many fillings in his teeth. He wears an open sport shirt, faded blue jeans, and a bulky jacket flung over his shoulders.”1
People were impressed by his unpretentiousness. In an interview, he was described thus: “he talks fast, snatching thoughts as they cross his mind, winding and unwinding them like paper streamers, following them in one end and out the other, only to lose them before he can pin them down. A casual tone with a deep undertow suggests he is making a strategy of negligence. He has a way of eavesdropping on himself, as if he were trying to overhear bits of a conversation in the next room. What matters is what is left unsaid.”2
El De Efe, as the city was known (after its acronym for Distrito Federal), was an exciting cultural capital. With a population of approximately four million people, it was brewing with all types of business deals. Barely two decades after the end of the campensino revolution—the first of its kind in the twentieth century, prior even to its Bolshevik counterpart in Russia—the populist president Lázaro Cárdenas, who had promised to give Mexicans what “rightfully belonged to them,” nationalized the oil industry and formed a state-run company called PEMEX.
That was in 1938, and the uproar that ensued pushed the nation’s markets to an impasse. But Cárdenas’s decision resulted in the so-called el milagro mexicano, the Mexican Miracle, a period of economic bonanza that lasted four decades, from 1940 to 1980. A single party was in power, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, known as P.R.I. Although it ruled with an iron fist, a democratic atmosphere prevailed (freedom of expression, openness to foreign investment, a thriving print, radio, and television media, and a multi-party system). However, the presidential election, which came up every six years, was always won by the handpicked P.R.I. candidate.
The city was defined by its cosmopolitanism. In the thirties El De Efe was a safe haven for refugees and exiles from the Spanish Civil War, who flocked to Mexico in hordes. Their presence redefined education, media, and publishing. During the early years of World War II, Mexico, although it was neutral, deployed a small battalion to fight in the European front, the Escuadrón 201 (201st Air Fighter Squadron). It was attached to the U.S. Army Air Forces, which was engaged in the liberation of the Philippine island of Luzon in 1945. Rivalries and disillusionment in Russia and elsewhere brought Leon Trotsky and photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tina Modotti, to Mexico. Some joined the communist circle of artists including Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their relationships highlighted the intersection of politics and culture, which defined the age. In 1945 the city welcomed other types of émigrés, from Jews who had survived the concentration camps to Russian, French, Italian, and German activists and intellectuals seeking a better environment.
Some time after García Márquez arrived in the Mexican capital, he received the news that one of his literary role models, Ernest Hemingway, had committed suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. It was July 2, 1961, and Hemingway had been about to turn sixty-two.
What García Márquez most admired in Hemingway was his succinct, almost telegraphic narrative style, which had been inspired by popular crime fiction dime novels. He appreciated the way the American writer explored the crossroads of literature and history, his passion for reporting (Hemingway had started his career as a journalist), his readiness to use his war experience in his fiction, and his exploration of violence, overt and tacit, in human relationships. García Márquez had not only imitated Hemingway’s style, he had closely followed his career. Upon hearing the news of his death, he wrote the essay “A Man Has Died a Natural Death,” published in México en la Cultura, the literary supplement of the newspaper Novedades, in which he argued that those who perceived Hemingway as a pulp author of the type linked to B-movies would be proven wrong by time, for Hemingway would eclipse so-called “major” writers.
García Márquez’s reference to B-movies wasn’t arbitrary. The cinema was one of his favorite pastimes and an artistic form that became an essential outlet for his talent. What had attracted him to El De Efe was an opportunity to fulfill his dream of writing for the screen. García Márquez had seen numerous Mexican comedies as well as high-brow art house releases. The city was the epicenter of a magnificent movie industry whose productions were enthusiastically received in Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and even the United States. Hollywood stars, directors, and cameramen came to visit. The city was a magnet for European exiles, particularly from Spain.
Êpoca de oro, the golden age of Mexican cinema, spanned from 1935 to 1960. World War II had crippled the film industries in Europe and the United States. Looking to take advantage of a market hungry for entertainment but incapable of satisfying the demand, the Mexican cinematic boom embarked on an effort to produce quality dramas that would not only attract audiences in the Spanish-speaking world but around the globe. Production costs were relatively inexpensive. The country had stellar actors and directors, as well as entrepreneurial producers eager to invest their money while exploring different horizons. Plus, modernity was fundamentally changing the way Mexican society behaved, a transformation that resulted in a plethora of stories about the struggle to accommodate to the new mores.
One of the oldest movie studios, Estudios Churubusco, which opened in 1945, was located in El De Efe. Its black-and-white films were produced at astonishing speed but with artistic integrity. The subject matter ranged from ranchero life, the cruelty and confusion of urban life, Catholic fervor in the countryside (During the Cristero uprising, a war was fought at the end of the twenties as a side effect of the campesino revolution. For some it was an anti-revolution, a response to the anticlerical articles of the Constitution of 1917.), to military recruitment during the Mexican Revolution and immigration to the United States. Fernando de Fuentes directed Allá en el rancho grande and Vámonos con Pancho Villa. Actors such as Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Dolores del Río, and María Félix were courted by numerous production companies.
The Êpoca de oro established a new aesthetic. Mexico was portrayed as a land of contrasts, a nation where modernity coexisted with poverty, pre-Columbian traditions, and raw emotions. Actors depicted the poor in an unapologetic, even melodramatic fashion, exploring the labyrinthine paths of the nation’s collective identity. Gorgeous mestizo faces and an exu
berant natural environment were showcased on the silver screen, mesmerizing audiences. This aesthetic was created, to a large extent, by cinematographers such as Gabriel Figueroa, who used the camera to depict the country in unique ways.
Equally significant was the emergence of carperos and other street comedians of astonishing magnetic power, such as Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, and Germán Valdés, the Pachuco clown Tin Tan, whose blockbuster comedies used humor to explore political, social, ethnic, and religious tensions. (Pachuco is a term used to refer to Mexican American youths from the thirties to the fifties, known for their idiosyncratic attire, use of slang—which would later evolve into Spanglish—and rebellious spirit against the oppressive white establishment in the United States.) These actors ridiculed urban characters like el peladito, the charming hoodlum who entertains everyone with his verbal pyrotechnics but is incapable of holding a steady job, or the urban dweller who decides to cross the border and live in Los Angeles, where there was a growing population of Mexicans.