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"ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE" (GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ) & "MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN" (SALMAN RUSHDIE).

Compares magical realist novels of life in Latin Amer. & India. Structure, narration, characters, cultures, politics.

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Magic realism is a literary genre originally developed in Latin America, and still associated particularly with Latin American literature. The genre has, however, spread beyond its region of origin; one of its leading contemporary practitioners, Salman Rushdie, has his roots half a world away from Latin America. Rushdie, however, has one important characteristic in common with Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez; he is a product of the modern Third World.
Magic realism, indeed, is a genre distinctly associated with the Third World. It has not, so far, taken root to any substantial degree among writers in the United States or other Western countries. The reason, we may suggest, is that magic realism is at least in part a fictional response to the political conditions of disruption and alienation that prevail in the Third

It is surely asking too little of Marquez or Rushdie to suppose thateither one of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight's Children isintended simply as political allegory. Macondo and its surroundings, thoughimaginary, are quite unlike the imaginary lands of American fantasy. Here the fantasy is not the massacre, which savefor its scale is all too real for the Latin America of recent decades, butthe unnatural train that carries away the bodies. Thus, when three thousand striking workers and their families aremachine-gunned in the town square by government troops, the bodies areloaded aboard a train, "the longest one he had ever seen, with almost twohundred freight cars and a locomotive at either end and another one in themiddle" (Marquez 312). But as Saleem reflects, In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents--the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. The underlying structural assumptions of magic realism are verynearly opposite to those of fantasy of this sort. Magic realism, like pornography, is difficult to define, but readilyrecognizable when one encounters it. Ofthese, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark"(Rushdie 35). Yet they occur, andthe Third World has seen a good many in recent years. Here the setting is indeed imaginary; thevillage of Macondo, somewhere in a world only loosely based upon the actualLatin America. We have attempted to give some hint of the flavor of magic realism,and in the process of doing so we have been drawn almost inevitably to thepolitical, though parallel events in the two novels. It may take place inexotic settings--in the case of fantasy, often vaguely medieval settingssuggestive of those of fairy tales--and be peopled in part by fantasticbeings such as dragons or elves, possessing magical powers. Effectfollows cause, though it may do so through mechanisms different from thoseacknowledged by contemporary science. It is thus natural, perhaps, that writers in bothLatin America and in India should find in magic realism a genre suited tothe expression of this uncertainty. After our examination of the works inquestion, we may then return to ask again whether magic realism, asexpressed in these works, can indeed be considered a statement about ThirdWorld political existence. It became the practice of rightistLatin American governments to avoid the open executions of an earlier day,and instead to cause enemies (real or reputed) to simply vanish from sight,perhaps at the hands of death squads which themselves had no formalconnection with the government, and which could thus be disavowed or evendenied to exist. Politics intrudes upon the village of Macondo from the day that DonApolinar first appears, declaring that he has been appointed magistrate.He is told that the village has done quite well without the assistance ofany government, and is firmly invited to leave. The nose appears to be symbolic. They are too expansive inscope to be regarded as mere "message" books. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and its host of imitators. Magic realism is set in a reality that resolutelyrefuses to make sense. One Hundred Years ofSolitude and Midnight's Children, indeed, have much in common besides theirmembership in the genre of magic realism an the coincidence of aneyewitness survivor's account of a massacre in each book. once upon a time.No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born inDoctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947" (Rushdie 3). It is a country periodically subject to "thedisease of optimism;" a country that is "itself a sort of dream." Saleem'seffort to find himself and explain himself to Padna is thus reflective,perhaps, of India's ongoing effort to find itself and explain itself toitself. The mysterious power which Saleem is continually hinted to have byconsequence of the time of his birth is perhaps, at bottom, the power ofmemory. This imaginary action by a historical person is, presumably,Riohacha's chief claim to fame. (In fact, we are left indoubt whether the massacre ever happened, an issue we will return tobelow.) A massacre takes place in Midnight's Children as well, and like theone in One Hundred Years of Solitude, our survivor's eyewitness account ofit is laced with the surreal. Hence magic realism,the attempt to render an account of the incomprehensible, when theincomprehensible is a looming fact of life. When the narrator's grandfather, who survived, returns home,his wife thinks he has spilled Mercuracrome on himself; on being informedthat it is in fact blood, she faints. Thenceforth, Macondo cannot escape politics, though it is a politicsthat seems remarkably devoid of purpose. At various times in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the tale follows anumber of different members of a family (a genealogical table is providedat the beginning of the book). In Latin America, the region where the dependencytheory of economics originated, the uncertainty is perceived as having anexternal origin. The government has reportedthere was no massacre, and this version is universally assented to. She is at the time only nine years old,but she abruptly reaches puberty in time for the planned marriage. (Rushdie 137) Whatever his physical ancestry, Saleem is in fact marked out for thefamily that raised him by a bizarre distinguishing feature, a monstrouslylarge nose. Magic realism is a literary genre originally developed in LatinAmerica, and still associated particularly with Latin American literature.The genre has, however, spread beyond its region of origin; one of itsleading contemporary practitioners, Salman Rushdie, has his roots half aworld away from Latin America. What characterizes magic realism, then, is not the exoticism of itssettings (which are not necessarily truly exotic at all) but the fact thatevents do not obey a consistant set of laws, either those of our naturalworld or some other set. The political environment of the India of Midnight's Children isquite different. It intrudes on the orderedworld of Macondo for no particular reason, but once it has intruded, it isinescapable. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. Midnight's Children is more completely focused on a single narrator,Saleem Sinai, a middle-class Indian Muslim, who is telling the tale of hisfamily to his lover, Padna, whom eventually (and evidently to their mutualsurprise) he agrees to marry. Thenarrator wants to begin in fairy-tale fashion, "once upon a time," but thenhas to admit that in fact it was a specific and historical time. It is the profound arbitrariness of modern Latin Americanpolitical reality that is powerfully reflected throughout One Hundred Yearsof Solitude. Magic realism, indeed, is a genre distinctly associated with theThird World. Only when we are a third of the way throughthe book do we make an astonishing discovery: the family that Saleem hasbeen telling Padna about is not his biological family, but an Anglo-Indian,a sort of changeling. It is impossible not to see in this a reflection of Latin Americanpolitical developments in the 196 s and 197 s, and particularly thephenomenon of "disappeared" persons. But more generally, the noseis the organ of smell, and smell is the most emotionally evocative of thesenses. We are informed that they fired precisely"one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. We may first, perhaps, distinguish itfrom and contrast it to the sort of popular fantasy writing that has becomepopular in the United States in recent decades, and which is typified by J.R. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women, and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached theage of thirty-five. The Liberals and Conservativesare fighting one another for control of the unnamed republic in whichMacondo lies. When Aurelio Buendias' nephew, Aurelio Segundo, tells of themassacre he survived, no one believes him. New York: Harper, 197 .Rushdie, Salman. Because of its sheer size, and perhaps its greaterdistance from the dominant economic power of the West, India has not beensubject to arbitrary forces to the degree that Latin America has been.India's great problem, mirrored by Saleem in Midnight's Children, isdefining its identity. At the very beginning of the novel we are fixed ina real setting: "I was born in the city of Bombay ... (Marquez 1 6)Aurelio Buendia is embued with magical powers, of a sort; he determinesthat he will marry Remedios, the youngest daughter of his enemy, themagistrate Don Apolinar Moscote. It has not, so far, taken root to any substantial degreeamong writers in the United States or other Western countries. Salmon Rushdie'sMidnight's Children, for example, does not take place in some imaginarykingdom, but in India. Onthe one hand, what might be called the framework of everyday life there islived much as it might be in an actual Latin American village. He knew that to the east there lay animpenetrable mountain chain and that on the other side of the mountainsthere was the ancient city of Riohacha" (Marquez 1 ) Real names sometimesintrude, in an oblique way; for example, we are told of Riohacha that SirFrancis Drake once "had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that herepaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth"(Marquez 1 ). On theother hand, when fantastic things happen, they are not in obedience to someset of consistant laws, but are truly fantastic, like something like adream--which is why we can speak only of a framework of everyday life,since life is prone to be interrupted in bizarre ways. Both novels are primarily storiesabout individuals and families, and both are filled with numerouscharacters and incidents who have no obvious political overtones, but arenone the less integral to the works as novels. Political life, then, is in One HundredYears of Solitude an arbitrary source of chaos. A nurse at the hospital switched two babies shortlyafter birth. In the following essay, this response to ThirdWorld political realities and magic will be examined through a comparativestudy of two major works in the genre, Marquez' One Hundred Years ofSolitude--the work which, perhaps more than any other, served to establishand define the genre--and Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The situation in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years ofSolitude is somewhat different. It can happen. He returns with half adozen soldiers, but is received this second time not because of the troops,but because this time he brought his wife and daughters (Remedios amongthem), and it would be rude to turn them away (Marquez 59). Thecondition of his nose mirrors the condition of the world; during the 1962war between India and China, "the disease of optimism, in those days, onceagain attained epidemic proportions; I meanwhile, was afflicted by aninflammation of the sinuses" (Rushdie 358). Later we learn that he Organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. Works CitedMarquez, Gabriel Garcia. Midnight's Children. However exoticthe details of these settings, however, an underlying presupposition ofsuch fictional worlds is that they operate in an orderly way. One Hundred Years of Solitude. A central fact of public, political and cultural life in the ThirdWorld--and perhaps a central fact of private life as well--is a pervasivesense of uncertainty. In thefirst sentence of the narrative we learn that he will eventually face afiring squad--which, as it turns out, he survives. Before proceeding with this comparative examination, it may be usefulto attempt to define magic realism, and to offer a tentative suggestion ofwhy this genre should have emerged as a response to the politicalconditions of the Third World. New York: Penguin, 198 .----------------------- 1 When it isexplained (with a thoroughly Conservative slant), he none the less"sympathized with the Liberal attitude with respect to the rights ofnatural children, but in any case, he could not understand how peoplearrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touchedwith the hand" (Marquez 99). Fantasy ofthat sort has much in common with science fiction. Each book mightbe loosely characterized as a multigeneration family saga, though focusedin both cases on a single principal character. In spite of his indifference to ideology, Aureliano finds himselfswept up in political warfare, leading, as noted earlier, thirty-twouprisings, all of which fail. In India, it is perceived as having an internal origin.But in either case, the world is experienced as a place that fails tofollow orderly rules, a place where the boundaries of reality itself arenot clearly delineated. The most nearly pivotal character, however,is Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the son of the founder of Macondo. None the less, it is truethat political circumstances--of very different types--are closely wrappedup with both tales. The reason,we may suggest, is that magic realism is at least in part a fictionalresponse to the political conditions of disruption and alienation thatprevail in the Third World. Surreal, yes--but would the account of any actual massacre survivorbe any less surreal? GregoryRabassa, trans. "Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about thedifference between Conservatives and Liberals" (Marquez 98). R. It harkens in one sequenceto Cyrano de Bergerac, when Saleem falls for an expatriate Americanschoolgirl, Evie Lilith Burns (whose name combines the Biblical Eve withthe apocryphal Lilith), and asks a friend to woo her (Rushdie 221). Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. "Jose Arcadio Buendia was completely ignorant of thegeography of the region. It is, on sober reflection, perhaps impossible foranyone who has not experienced one to imagine how such a thing as massslaughter can occur, or what a massacre can be like. Rushdie, however, has one importantcharacteristic in common with Latin American writers such as Gabriel GarciaMarquez; he is a product of the modern Third World.

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