Who put the Magic in Realism?
Quoting this from the NYRB’s review of the current Garcia Marquez bio:
García Márquez popularized the style, but he was not its inventor, and One Hundred Years of Solitude would not have been possible without his hav- ing studied, at Carlos Fuentes’s urging, the works of an older generation of Spanish-American writers who were magic realism’s pioneers, among them Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias.[3] It is remarkable that so little influence on his writing is credited to his Latin American precursors. This is partly because García Márquez himself has been reluctant to give them their due. At times he seems to enjoy casting himself as the magician who created a new Spanish-American literature out of thin air.
Scott Esposito encourages us to read Alejo Carpentier.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:57 PM
Why do these things never mention Jorge Luis Borges? He pretty much invented the stuff, in Latin America, long before Marquez and the rest. And it would good to mention Cortazar, for that matter.
The comment is quite correct that Marquez has never yet given his precursors their due. For me, that undermines his claims.
Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet and critic, had a theory that Surrealism reached its full flowering in Latin America, rather than amongst its French origins. He had much evidence to support the theory, and I agree with it. It was that Surrealism found good soil in Latin America in which to root itself: a substrate of otherworldly awareness in literature that also is the root of magic realism.