We usually nominate a few books and do a poll for the book club selections, but a number of people have already expressed an interest in discussing this novel by Gabriel García Márquez (or Gabo, as he's more affectionately known). I haven't seen anyone clamoring for something else, so unless there are objections we'll talk about this next.

My department at work is sponsoring a database marketing symposium here in a few weeks, so I expect I'll be making pretty slow progress myself until that's out of the way.

I was kind of hoping we could discuss one of the Shopaholic books that I've been hearing so much about... but, you know, whatever. just go ahead and take over the book discussion there Keith. I guess we'll just all follow along like ignorant sheep. (I swear, you and Ana have some kind of egomaniacal obsession with controlling the book discussions around here...)

So is this an objection Brook, or merely an observation?

FWIW, this particular book is far from my personal first choice, but a couple of other people also wanted to talk about it.

Well, how about we talk about Shopaholics books first then...
I'll start:
I think they suck.
ok, now you...

Are we really starting this important, literary thread with talk about such triviality? I expected our discussion to begin with Gabo's Nobel Peace Prize speech!

Thanks for starting it up, Keith!

Hmm. Feeling a bit egocentric, are we? THAT'S a surprise.

I'm pretty sure Brook was joking in that uniquely acerbic way of his. But regardless, how about if we have something to say to each other that's not germane to this book or its author, that we take it to the Hijacks thread?

Thanks.

I think I have a copy of this floating around somewhere that I've never gotten around to reading. I'll see if I can find it and start reading it. I'm currently reading Maupin's The Night Whisperer, but I'm used to reading a couple at a time.

Cher

I can't say I enjoyed the beginning of this book much more than I did the first time through. I find most of the author's fanciful contrivances annoying, albeit imaginative. What is the point of gypsies who return from death because they're lonely, children who eat earth and whitewash, a contagious form of insomnia that progresses to a loss of memory requiring everyday objects to bear signs? Not that everything has to have a point, but if there's symbolism or humor here they're eluding me, and personally I just find most of García Márquez's flights of fancy distracting. I do like most of the characters and their stubborn idiosyncrasies, however, despite what I said earlier. It's the story that's often fanciful, not so much the characters, who feel like real people to me (except for their sometimes unnaturally abrupt changes in character). The author's renderings of the passions and vicissitudes of young love are wonderful and hilarious.

The story started getting really interesting for me when politics and war arrived in Macondo, and I've just reached the demise of village founder José Arcadio Buendía in the narrative. I've found the last 50 pages or so much more rewarding than the first hundred, and at this point I'm enjoying the book thoroughly.

Not to discourage you there, Keith, but I found the story really kicked up a notch around page 300!

As far as Gabo's flights of fancy, his storytelling reminds me of the film Big Fish, in which gross exaggerations are made. As the story progresses, the characters interact more and re-enter at different places.

Nice, Brook.

"Some call it obsession,
I call it committment."

Of course, I don't know how committed I'll be able to be to this thread...but I'm sure I can pipe up to espouse my adoration of the Shopaholic books now and then*.









* For the record, I wouldn't touch those things with a 100 ft. pole...

Ok, so here were Keith's thoughts on Gabo's Nobel speech:


I hope to come back to this at some point later today...but I just wanted to repost it as a reference...and motivation for rolling up my sleeves...

Ok, this sort of thing is going to have me spending more time here...if I can. No. Big Fish is a good movie...but no.

Maybe we should begin by doing a bit of reading about "magical realism"?

There's this fantastic site at The Modern Word about García Márquez. Wandering around there for a little while might help.

We never doubted for a minute that you would! There was no clarification necessary. You did give me my morning giggle- so thanks!

I just love it when Ana Maria rolls up her sleeves!

I am not very inclined, however, to read about magical realism. From what I understand, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a prime example of the genre written by its inventer, so I assume I am now actually reading the thing itself. I don't think I need anyone to explain to me what García Márquez is doing with his exaggerated and fanciful narrative, and I will grant that it's distinctive and original -- I just find it bothersome, and don't understand why it's necessary to convey that life is full of mysteries and surprises (in fact, the deliberate abandonment of plausibility strikes me as literary laziness).

I am certainly not opposed to fantasy in general btw, but it needs some element of plausibility (on its face, at least) to work for me. And while I concede our experience of reality is inseparably bound up with our emotions and beliefs, I also think there are things that simply cannot happen (regardless of whether we believe them to happen or not) and that there is a genuine demarcation between reality and our dreams, even if it's occasionally not apparent. If Ana Maria asserts the author's style is in fact uniquely relective of the peculiarities of life in South America, then I am inclined to believe her, and people who are also presumably smarter than I am awarded the book a Nobel Prize. But I still don't like the style! Most likely none of this will come as much of a surprise to those of you who know me for the unapologetic rationalist I am.

This is not meant to criticize the book's characters or most of the story (which I'm finding very engaging), just the absurd things that pop up in the narrative and obviously could never happen in real life.

I'm gonna post this here for easier referrence (great link Ana)


The way my grandmother used to tell stories

Magical Realism
Like many Latin American writers, Gabriel García Márquez has been inextricably linked to a style of literature known as "magical realism." Literature of this type is usually characterized by elements of the fantastic woven into the story with a deadpan sense of presentation. The term is not without a lot of controversy, however, and has come under attack for numerous reasons. Some claim that it is a postcolonial hangover, a category used by "whites" to marginalize the fiction of the "other." Others claim that it is a passé literary trend, or just a way to cash in on the Latin American "boom." Still others feel the term is simply too limiting, and acts to remove the fiction in question from the world of serious literature.
I myself feel that the term is a bit limiting, and I try to avoid overusing it on the pages of Macondo. Nevertheless, it seems to be here to stay, and it's more or less unavoidable that it will emerge in any discussion of García Márquez and his fiction. For this reason, I present this page, a joint collaboration between Macondo and Margin, an online magazine devoted to exploring magical realism. The purpose of this page is simply to point interested readers in the direction of resources dealing with magical realism.
For those who truly want to explore the subject, I suggest you click the Margin banner at the bottom of this page. Margin is a wonderful resource, containing information on magical realism, the authors that write in the vein, and links to many online 'Zines that feature new MR fiction.

Description
The following is an adaptation from M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1993) as cited by Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University.

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. Robert Scholes has popularized metafiction as an overall term for the large and growing class of novels which depart drastically from the traditional categories either of realism or romance, and also the term fabulation for the current mode of free-wheeling narrative invention. These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic




(I'm tacking on the following so that I don't lose it, and also because I just saw Rushdie a few months ago)


Magic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnight's Children
'The formal technique of "magic realism,"' Linda Hutcheon writes, '(with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post-modernism and post-colonialism' (131). Her tracing the origins of magic realism as a literary style to Latin America and Third World countries is accompanied by a definition of a post-modern text as signifying a change from 'modernism's ahistorical burden of the past': it is a text that 'self-consciously reconstruct[s] its relationship to what came before' (131). The post-modern is linked by magic realism to 'post-colonial literatures [which] are also negotiating....the same tyrannical weight of colonial history in conjunction with the past' (131).

Before discussing magic realism in Midnight's Children, a brief definition of the term "post-colonialism"as I intend to use it in this essay will aid the clarification of the links made between Hutcheon's theory and the following analysis of Rushdie's text. Ania Loomba argues that post-colonialism is a loose term. She notes that

the prefix "post"....implies an "aftermath" in two senses - temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have found contestable: if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependant) at the same time. (7)

Loomba's post-colonialism is a malleable definition which can be applied to Rushdie's text. In the 'temporal' sense,Midnight's Childrenis post-colonial as the main body of the narrative occurs after India becomes independent. However, as will be discussed, Rushdie's use of the cinema in relation to magic realism raises interesting questions in relation to Loomba's 'ideological' sense: India's culture is moulded by indigenous fictions and those of the West.

The narrative framework of Midnight's Childrenconsists of an tale -- comprising his life story -- which Saleem Sinai recounts orally to his wife-to-be Padma. This self-referential narrative (within a single paragraph Saleem refers to himself in the first person: 'And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan....'; ' "I tell you," Saleem cried, "it is true...."') recalls indigenous Indian culture, particularly the similarly orally recounted Arabian Nights. The events in Rushdie's text also parallel the magical nature of the narratives recounted in the Arabian Nights (consider the attempt to electrocute Saleem at the latrine (353), or his journey in the 'basket of invisibility' (383)).

In Midnight's Children, the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history. 'Once upon a time,' Saleem muses, 'there were Radna and Krisna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not affected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn' (259). At this point Hutcheon's post-modern perspective can be discerned: characters from Indian cultural history are chronologically intertwined with characters from Western culture, and the devices that they signify -- Indian culture, religion and storytelling, Western drama and cinema -- are presented in Rushdie's text with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence. It is in this sense, which blends with Loomba's theory as quoted above, that Midnight's Childrenis a post-colonial text, via its presentation and examination of the temporal and cultural status of India as an independent nation. This, as Edward W. Said writes, has been initiated in the text to portray the 'conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories....[This] is of particular interest in Rushdie's work' (260).

Magic realism can therefore be seen -- as Hutcheon has above been noted to write of the style in general -- as, in the particular context of Midnight's Children, a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface. Rushdie's principle use of magic realism in the text involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947 (the date of Indian independance), abilities that enable them to communicate with each other and in Saleem's case, to read the minds of those around him.

Stephen Slemon writes that 'in the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creation of a fictional world from the other' (11). If we take this to be the world of fantasy and the world of reality, both factors can be seen to be present and competing for the reader's attention. The fantastic is easily discerned in Midnight's Children. Through it, the realistic makes its voice heard. The thousand and one children point not only towards the fantasy of the similarly numbered Arabian Nights, but also to Rushdie's calculations of the Indian birth rate. He estimated that 'a thousand and one children an hour is roughly accurate' (Durix 18). Furthermore, Rushdie's comments enable the gift of telepathy to be perceived as a magical signifier of the objective reality of contemporary Indian society which makes its impression on the individual psyche.'In a country like India,' Rushdie continues, 'you are basically never alone. The idea of solitude is a luxury which only rich people enjoy....it seemed to me that people lived intermingled with each other in a way that perhaps they don't any more in the West....it was idiotic to try and consider one's life as being discrete from all other lives' (Durix 23). As 'All India Radio,' Saleem's '[t]elepathy' becomes a simultaneously magical and realistic device to signify the 'polyglot frenzy' consisting of 'the inner monologues of all the teeming millions' (Rushdie 168). As Slemon notes, 'the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text's language of narration, in the post-colonial magic realist work' (12).

The cinema: Rushdie's post-colonial cultural interface
'Magic realist texts,' Slemon continues, 'tend to display a preoccupation with images of borders and centres, and to work towards destabilizing their fixity' (13). Rushdie's attempts to achieve this take place within the borders of the cinematic and the cinema screen, a field in which he perceptively examines the effect of the subtle fantasy at play within perceptions of reality moulded by both Hollywood and the Indian film industry. Scattered references to the cinema continually inform the narrative of Midnight's Children. Rashid the rickshaw boy, leaving the cinema, contemplates a film he has just watched, which Rushdie ironically terms 'an Eastern Western' (49). This production is not only a curious hybrid of Hollywood cowboy film and Hindu culture, but also a signifier of the presence of interconnected Western and Indian influences within the post-colonial Indian sphere. The cinematic rendering of the post-colonial presents a benevolent view of the "Bollywood" productions of India: they are representative of a popular Indian medium after independence has been gained, but one which is intertwined with Western "Hollywood" culture. Once again, Loomba's 'ideological' (7) post-colonial sense can be discerned. Mishra notes the rapid growth of the Indian film industy: in 1983, it produced 742 feature films (122).His comments reflect that the status of the cinema in Midnight's Childrenis that of an industry which 'began as a colonial business, and has....never been able to shed its colonial origins' (Mishra 121).

The hybridity of the cinema moulds the individuals who are transfixed by its magical resonance. Saleem's perception of himself in his memory and within his fantastic narrative is shaped by the cinema. Regional events are measured against a medium that exerts a persuasive Western as well as Indian cultural influence. Consider Saleem's comparing events in his life with Hollywood productions: 'would this....young father have behaved like, or unlike, Montgomery Clift in I Confess? (Watching it some years ago at the New Empire Cinema, I couldn't decide.)' (105); 'I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon....'(306). The cinema becomes a further device for Rushdie's magic realism. Films transform the perception of others and their perception of themselves. Consider Inspector Vakeel, who 'leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne' (147).Once more the magical signifies the composite nature of contemporary Indian culture and society.

After independence has been attained, the Indian film industry becomes a window for the possibility of new investigations and constructions of Indian cultural identity. Said has written that Midnight's Childrenis a 'work based on the liberating imagination of independence itself, with all its anomalies and contradictions working themselves out' (260). Before independence, the regional events of nationalist Indian protest are firmly yoked within a frame that perceives itself as central: Indians appear in a film directed and conceived by the coloniser. The massacre of the Sikhs by Brigadier Dyer's men in 1919 is rendered as if on a cinema screen. 'No close-up,' Rushdie writes, as he "films" the massacre in long-shot, 'is necessary' (35). At the point of independence, the Indian cinematic productions provide a springboard for cultural self-assertion, but this is muted by the presence of Western culture. The two Indian lovers on the cinema screen, forbidden to touch by local culture, transfix the audience who compare them to the Hollywood counterpart.

Rushdie presents the cinematic influence on Indian culture in a joyous manner: there is, however, a simultaneous undercurrent of doubt in his text that criticises the adherence to magical, fantastic fictions -- whether cinematic, oral, Indian, Western, past or present -- and by doing so postulates that there is an objective world of historical events moulding history. Post-colonial culture, with its mixture of the Western and the Indian masks the harsh nature of political and historical events, and by so doing places obstacles in the way of and questions the attainability of a "complete" Indian identity, free both in time, space and culture from outside influences. The irony in the simple song Mary Pereira sings is explicit: 'Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what all you want' (Rushdie 127). In simple childlike fantasy, identities can be constructed easily (as in Saleem's case): Midnight's Children presents a nation -- India -- in its infancy, which, like Saleem, enjoys a fantastic tale and sees the magical as omnipresent. Rushdie breaks the magic resonance, in the case of the audience transfixed by the lovers, by the sudden announcement in the cinema of Ghandi's assassination (142 - 3).

This desire for fantasy to comfort an infant nation and culture is perhaps best illustrated in the case of Saleem's uncle, who sits 'pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film....' (241). This is because, in the words of Saleem's aunt Pia, ' "he must write about ordinary people and social problems!" ' (242). The inference is that, whilst this realist style of film making, as typified by Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy(Panther Panchali(1956),Aparajito(1957) and The World of Apu(1959)) (Monaco 444) is critically lauded both in India and internationally, there is no mass demand for realism in a culture whose desire for fantasy marks the nature of its post-colonial identity.

Magic realism, universalism and difference
The cinema screen becomes a field in which an examination of the two polarities, 'universalism,' the 'notion of a unitary and homogeneous human nature which marginalises and excludes the distinctive characteristics, the difference, of post-colonial societies,' and difference, which finds 'universalism....disappearing into an endless network of provisional and specific determinations in which even the most apparently "essential" features of human life become provisional and contingent,' (Ashcroft et al. 55) takes place. This is directly implied when Rushdie writes 'Reality[emphasis added] is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible' (165). Events viewed from a distance are vague generalisations, but as they occur contingently, they can be seen to be made up of complex particles. Describing himself moving closer and closer to a cinema screen, from the back of seats to the front, Saleem considers that '[g]radually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality....' (166).

Writing that 'the illusion itself is reality,' and thereby acknowledging the hypnotic grip of the magic emitted by the cinema, Rushdie both questions and acknowledges the power of the medium as a component of a hybrid post-colonial Indian culture. As Linda Hutcheon writes, 'In granting value to (what the centre calls) the margin or Other, the post-modern challenges any hegemonic force that presumes centrality, even as it acknowledges that it cannot privilege the margin without acknowledging the power of the centre' (132). She concludes by noting that '[t]he regionalism of magic realism and the local and particular focus of post-modern art are both ways of contesting not just this centrality, but also claims of universality' (132).

Conclusion
The midnight children are a magic realist device emphasising the continued struggle to come to terms with identity within the polarities of the post-colonial. They are, by virtue of their midnight birth, 'children of the times,' as Rushdie has asserted, as much as magical creations (Pattanayak 21). Rushdie, through Saleem, writes that the children can be seen as 'the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden nation [myth perhaps referring to the more negative influence of Western as well as Indian fictions]....or as the true hope of freedom....' (Rushdie 200). This freedom, at the end of the text, is described as being 'now forever extinguished,' and there is a sour irony inherent in Saleem's thoughts that the children 'must not become....the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind' (200). Rushdie implies that Saleem's generation has failed to consolidate the possibilities inherent in independence. The possibility exists in each passing generation of midnight children, who are the children of each successive era. Each generation, as Saleem muses, will erase the presence of a previous generation that has not yet learnt to define a stable and solid sense identity: 'Yes, they will trample me underfoot....they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who is not his....'(463). The individual voice is swamped by the creeping progression of time and history: nevertheless, the text's conclusion is open ended. There may be no such thing as a single national identity in the contemporary world, where media and communication link cultures and countries: there is perhaps an interchange of cultures, to varying degrees, between all countries. This delicate ambiguity is emphasised in the final sentence of the text, which links magic with realism, the individual with history, the individual and regional identity and self-assertion with the magnet of the universal: '....it is the privilege of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and be unable to live or die in peace' (463). Rushdie weaves a text that fuses tradition and current cultural influences to create an open-ended post-colonial discourse.

Thanks for that, Brook.

I guess I don't understand where the "realism" is in this "magic". Listening to your grandmother tell stories as a child is very is different from reading a book as an adult. Regardless of Gabo's brick-faced delivery of the fantastical interludes in OHYOS, I certainly do not feel persuaded they could actually happen. Contrast this with (as an example) the absurd and usually oppressive events that transpire in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which were created by the author as commentary on the behavior of men in wartime. While it's very clear Heller was using exaggeration and caricature to make his points, the events he describes are at least conceivable. And no one in real life really acts like the characters in Doestoevsky's novels, but he nonetheless managed to bring their normally veiled emotions and dreams into the storyline without challenging the reader's credulity. OHYOS does not have that kind of realism IMO, nor does its fantasies seem to me to have the deep psychological resonance of good poetry or classic mythology (although from Ana Maria's past comments I gather this is emphatically not the case for those who live in the author's part of the world).

I can't say anything about the Rushdie commentary since I haven't read any of his work.

Anyway, I really don't mean to be a nattering nabob of negativism here -- I promise to have some positive commentary on the book soon because there is really much I admire in it (and I suspect I'll be taught to appreciate at least some of what eludes me now). Hopefully I can make some more progress with it this weekend, and as usual I'm looking forward to hearing what others here have to say.

I am about sixty pages into our book and find it easy to get lost into the world of Macondo. The characters are delightful and I am fascinated with their unique character traits. I am reading several books right now and this is by far the easiest to fall in love with. It is difficult for to put it down and I just started it last night.

At the beginning, I found myself referring back to the family tree placed at the beginning of the book as I grew acquainted with the characters. (At first I thought Jose Arcadio Buendia went out to have an affair and sleep with Pilar Ternera. ) I suppose I was reading too carelessly, and a quick look back corrected my misconception.

As far as the magical realism aspect of the story; I love it. Reading books that take a person out of their world and places them in another one is one of the largest joys of literature for me. It transports me to another time, a place with other rules, but the world is familiar enough to my own to relate.

I am so delighted that we are reading and discussing this together!

This clarification is clear as mud for me. The New York Times itself labeled Big Fish as cinematic magical realism. For those of us not living in South America, it behooves to have some frame of reference, even if the film and this book are nowhere near the same level. Fanciful storytelling is still fanciful stroytelling, no?

Perhaps if you could spend a bit more time here and explain things in your own words, linking our cultures together, that I would find helpful. Reading yet another essay did not clarify much for me.

Right. This was the danger I saw in even saying one word in this thread--I literally have no time, which is why I didn't want to open this can of worms. You're correct--I haven't explained anything. I'm still trying to put together a response to Keith re. the speech (!). But thanks to his most recent post, I have a much clearer idea of where he's coming from and have thoughts for that too...

It's early Sunday morning. I'm going to try to spend some time in articulating my ideas. Thanks for your patience. That said, "magical realism" is MUCH more than "fanciful storytelling" (the latter is a phrase that applies to Big Fish). But the sense I've gotten from writers here is that the term "magical realism" is so abused by contemporary reviewers that it should just be laid to rest.

More soon. (I promise.)

And many thanks to Brook for posting that info. Rushdie adores García Márquez and, yes, Midnight's Children (an amazing novel!) is an example of magic realism. You get the history of modern India...and are able to understand it in a way that's impossible from just reading the straight facts in a history book (this is veering into a response to you, Keith).

Ok... I'm off to write another response.

Because we don't know that "life is full of mysteries and surprises." We lose our sense of wonder as children and unless intentional action is taken, we never get it back. But the heartbreak, tragedy, and joy of everyday life is full of mystery. (What was that quote of Karin's, "Perfection is overrated; mystery is underrated"?) We make assumptions about our lives based on experience, logic, sense, order, pattern. And we need to. But at the same time, it is easy to take so much for granted if we don't prick ourselves awake every now and then to the reality that escapes us...the reality that lies behind the daily things we see. And I'm not talking about a "spiritual" reality necessarily, but the way things really work. Just because we can explain them doesn't mean we know the whys and wherefores of how it all happens. Physicists are still trying to discover the structure and function of the universe...there is so much that is still unknown. Anyway, I believe that art is what bridges the gap between reality and our individual understanding of it.

You will. Gabo documents facts from the history of this country in these pages. Wars, massacres, very specific, very real events.Thanks for saying all this because now I understand where you're coming from. Your comments re. Heller and Dostoevsky are accurate. But I think to compare this writing to theirs is missing the point (and you're exactly right when you say, "OHYOS does not have that kind of realism"). You're not supposed to literally believe that the events of Cien años happened or could happen. There is a deeper type of understanding that should occur...more than mere "believability."

Maybe it would be helpful if I compared Gabo's style with the function of metaphor. As you already know, a metaphor is a literal lie that conveys truth in a manner that sometimes surpasses literal fact (such as, "My heart is ice"). Walker Percy has this fantastic essay called "Metaphor as Mistake" where he says, "Metaphor has scandalized philosophers, including both scholastics and semioticists, because it seems to be wrong: It asserts an identity between two different things. And it is wrongest when it is most beautiful. It is those very figures of Shakespeare which eighteenth-century critics undertook to 'correct' because they had so obviously gotten off the track logically and were sometimes even contradictory--it is just those figures which we now treasure most. [...]

"There is a danger at this point in my being misunderstood as trying to strike a blow for the poetic against the technical, feeling against science, and on the usual aesthetic grounds. But my intention is quite the reverse. I mean to call attention to the rather remarkable fact that in conceiving [something] under the 'wrong' symbol [...], we somehow know it better, conceive it in a more plenary fashion, have more immediate access to it, than under its descriptive title. The sooner we get rid of the old quarrel of artistic versus prosaic as constituting the grounds of our preference, the sooner we shall be able to understand what is going on. Given these old alternatives, I'll take the prosaic any day--but what is going on here is of far greater moment."

Reread these passages and pretend he's talking about magical realism. This is what I'm trying to get at. (He says it all much better than I ever could! This essay is quite detailed and a really fascinating read. You can find it in his essay collection, The Message in the Bottle.)

Keith goes on to say...Ok, now thems fightin' words! I will acknowledge that you are free to dislike this style...that is a matter of personal taste. I will still be your friend if you end the book and are still annoyed. But thank you for giving it a chance. I do think that cultural predispositions are factors here. It's harder to "get" it because images, names, style are not immediately familiar or accessible. But again, this is why books are so important--he's giving the world a glimpse into the heart of another country. And maybe you will understand Colombia a little better than you did before you read it. It will give you something that all the news on the "drug war," the "civil conflict," and "Plan Colombia" will never give you. That's my hope, at any rate.

As an aside, the translator, Gregory Rabassa, has a wonderful little memoir that discusses his time in translating this novel (plus other works by Gabo). It's a satisfying read. (Plus, fun annecdotes!)

And just as endorsement, Gregory Rabassa is "the best Latin American writer in the English language." ~ Gabriel García Márquez

You're not going to find me quibbling with that!

Also, before I forget, here's the latest related news:

Aracataca will not be changed to Macondo. Not enough people went out to vote.

I hope to make it down there someday--it's barely an hour's drive south of here.

(In other trivia, I am currently living in the town where his parents met and which is described beautifully in Love in the Time of Cholera.)

I think, for the time being, I'm just going to stick with finishing the novel. I will gladly read some of these essays afterwards. Otherwise, this is distracting me away from the book.

I will say I have a hard time keeping track of all the characters. Too many similar names and there are characters weaving in and out. That family tree Carrie mentioned does help.

Thank you Ana Maria for taking the time to share your thoughts. As always I am grateful for your well-informed perspective, especially in view of the current constraints on your time.

I am now a little more than halfway through the book, at the point where Aureliano Triste rides the railroad into Macondo. I am for the most part very taken with it, and I fear you may have misunderstood or overgeneralized my specific objections to the author's narrative. I have no quarrel whatsoever with your observations on the value of metaphor, and even supernatural plot devices like The Weird Sisters and the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare pose no problems for me whatsoever (in fact to characterize them as mere "plot devices" is unfair). They serve clear and important functions in the theatrical works of which they are a part. And while I may have more a scientific than an aesthetic temperament, I nonetheless need no encouragement to appreciate the value of fiction and poetry for enhancing our appreciation of everyday life, nor of their ability to improve our understanding of historical events -- certainly Michael Schaara's The Killer Angels did more for my understanding of the U.S. Civil War in one stroke than all the strictly historical accounts I had ever read before my happy encounter with that novel. Nor do many of the implausible aspects of Gabo's story bother me -- Úrsula maintaining her vitality past the age of 100 is unlikely, for example, but I think the longevity of her involvement in the Buendía household provides an important counterpoint to the parade of her husband's male descendants through the story. In many other instances, the author achieves delightful comic effects with his exaggerated portrayal of events.

It is strictly the clearly miraculous and impossible occurrences that strike me as unnecessary and distracting, to repeat:

To me, such things are annoying and meaningless -- the word that most often comes to my mind is "silly." The latest example is the dead Melquíades reappearing to Aureliano Segundo in the form of his youth, I really don't understand what point it serves.


I enjoy this aspect of literature myself, but I often find myself thinking there are no rules in this story, and that García Márquez is just being arbirary. The sort of internal logical consistency found in many other imaginary worlds (some examples: A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Lord of the Rings, even The Martian Chronicles) sometimes feels absent to me here. Perhaps the author is somehow enhancing his caricature of the historical events and culture of Colombia with such fantastical occurrences (perhaps a deliberate reflection of superstitiousness and its impact on behavior?), but it's certainly not apparent to me as an outsider.

But enough about my personal qualms with this particular element of the author's style -- to hold forth on them at such length is really to do One Hundred Years Of Solitude a disservice, and it's absurd for Ana Maria to thank me for giving it a second chance -- I'm very happy the people here gave me an incentive to get past the first hundred pages, and I'm sure we'll continue to have some very worthwhile discussion. I think the characters themselves are marvelous, and certainly the virile and sometimes reckless passion of many of Macondo's males are reminiscent of South American men I've known in my own life (I've worked with many Colombians and my stepmother is from Perú, in fact I was engaged to a peruana myself for six months when I was young). I do have some understanding of Latin American culture and the differences in how they look at life vs. North Americans, and the characters in this novel certainly feel very South American to me. But of course I cannot have the same familiar perspective on this work as someone who has grown up in this precarious world.

I also think García Márquez's account of how the bucolic egalitarianism of Macondo is shattered by the encroaching tides of politics and war is just wonderful. In particular, the story of Aureliano's metamorphosis from a withdrawn silversmith who avenges the arrival of injustice in his village to a monster whose soul has been eviscerated by the demands of military and political leadership is vivid and amazing. I certainly do feel I'm gaining a much better understanding of Colombia by virtue of this book, although it's not always possible for me to distinguish events intended as satirical reflections of the country's history from those that are more idiosyncratic products of Gabo's imagination.

Notice for those who haven't already read the book -- SPOILERS BELOW!







I really loved the imaginative account of Remedios the Beauty's fatally irresistable attraction for men and her idiot-savant character, at least until she literally ascended into heaven.

The resort encampment with the electrified chicken wire the gringos put up to segregate themselves from the natives when the banana business arrived in Macondo is hilarious (in a very sad way), and probably not too far from the truth.

I am still mulling over appropriate responses to Keith and John... They might take a while, but I am very interested in learning how to articulate and clarify a good working definition of magical realism. So it might take a while, but rest assured that I will get there.

Thanks for explaining all of this, Keith. I will take it as a given that these are minor quibbles in an appreciated work. I am still a bit aghast at the thought of this novel *without* the elements you mentioned above...again, I'm still thinking about how to describe their necessity to the work (because to me, these things are integral parts of the alternate world he's created). I will say, though that "children who eat earth and whitewash" is literal fact--nothing magical about it. This is pure realism. Vitamin deficiencies would cause certain people to literally eat dirt...and the whitewash had plenty of calcium. (The purgative that Ursula administers to Rebecca is true as well.) Even more unbelievable--my boyfriend knew a girl who had a habit of sucking on rusted nails...

and I think this is a thread I will continue coming back to, even after we've moved on to a different book. I am continually discovering things about this country and the particular facts he's weaving together. My love of this book grows the longer I'm here and the more I understand about what really is going on in these pages. So I think we can consider understanding of this book as a work in progress.

Fun story: Remedios the Beauty's departure from this earthly plane is a combination of two things. In Gabo's town, the daughter of a certain woman became pregnant outside of wedlock. She was sent away to have the child...and the mother told her neighbors that she had ascended up to heaven. Then one day, he witnessed a woman hanging sheets out on the line...and a breeze came by and whipped the sheets up into the sky. He combined the two events and created the infamous exit of Remedios (one of my favorite parts of the book).

As to the electrified chicken wire--this also is literal fact. I think it's important to mention that García Márquez worked as a journalist for many years both before he began writing fiction and during... He has a journalist's eye for fact and detail--most of these "magical" elements are based in fact. (And then, of course, are the things that *are* literal fact.)

Whenever you guys have the time, here is a fantastic interview with Gabo from 1977. This is where I got some of the things I mentioned above.

Eating dirt may indeed occur in extreme cases of mineral deprivation, but over any length of time it would make anyone quite ill (which is why dirt tastes so bad).

Interesting that in the interview (which was most enlightening and enjoyable, thank you ), Gabo cites Kafka's The Metamorphosis as the initial liberating stimulus for developing his own style. I was completely floored by that story when I was 15 and still consider it a masterpiece of imagination. Like some of the other examples I excited, for me it maintains an internal logic that makes Gregor Samsa's obviously impossible experience very real, like it's happening to me. While there is much I admire in OHYOS, I very seldom have that feeling reading it, and feel it least during the most fantastic episodes.

To cite a paragraph in the interview you referenced regarding Remedios the Beauty's ascent:

I remember perfectly when I was in Mexico, writing, describing Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to heaven. It was one of those paragraphs. I was aware, first, that without poetry she couldn’t rise. I’d say: she’s got to rise to poetry—and yet, with poetry and all she wouldn’t rise either. I was getting desperate because it was a reality within the book. I couldn’t dispense with it because it was a reality within the guidelines I’d imposed on myself. Because arbitrariness has rigid laws. And once I impose them on myself I can’t break them. I can’t say the rook moves this way and then, when it suits me, make it move another way. If I established how the rook and the knight move, I was screwed! . . . Because whatever I may do they’ve got to continue that way. Otherwise, it all turns into a holy mess. Within the reality of the book, Remedios the Beauty rose to heaven, but she wouldn’t rise even with poetry. I remember being desperate one day, ‘cause I was all caught up and stuck in it. I went out to the patio, where there was a big and beautiful black woman who did the housework, who was trying to hang the sheets with one of those clothes pins . . . And there was wind . . . And so if she hung the sheet this side, the wind blew it off that side . . . And she was completely crazy with those sheets . . . until she couldn’t take it any more and Aaaaahhhh! Aaaahhhh! . . . She cried out desperately! . . . Wrapped up in the sheets! . . . And up she went . . . And that’s how it was with everything.

(emphasis mine)

So here we have Gabo admitting to a sort of arbitrariness, one he claims has laws, i.e., an internal consistency. For him, and for you, Remedios the Beauty's ascent to heaven is a defining moment of the book. While I acknowledge the novelty of the image (and I laughed outright at Fernanda's resentment over losing her sheets ), to me it really epitomizes what I dislike about the novel. I do not "feel" the rules behind the author's arbitrariness, and from your comments (and his own in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) I can only assume he is channeling via exaggeration an abruptly changing and sometimes unbelievable experiential reality that is all too familiar to South Americans but foreign to me. Or maybe I'm just too prosaic and hard-headed, even for a norteamericano. I'm interested to hear what the other gringos here think about the more magical events in the story.

Okay, bedtime.

I am pretty far behind everyone else. I have only read about 100 pages due to being my first week of school with students. I will hopefully read larger chunks over the weekend. I am enjoying the discussion and finally succumbed to even reading the spoiler.

I finished the book. I didn't like the ending, but despite my usual annoyance at some of the more fantastical events, I found much to love in the last third of the story. Out of respect for Carrie's insatiable curiosity I won't post any more spoilers now, but I will say I'm looking forward to discussing the themes of solitude and nostalgia when everyone's had a chance to get through the entire novel.

I've also re-read the first 60 pages or so for the third time, and I'm enjoying it more now that I'm familiar with the characters and their lineage, and don't have to stop and think about which Buendía is being referred to and whose offspring he/she was.

Awwww...thanks. Just couldn't help myself!

I think that is what is taking me so long. I keep re-reading large chunks of it to keep the characters straight!

I finished the book as well. It is tempting to re-read this book, but I have so many others waiting.

Hopefully we can chat about this one soon.

I'm on pg. 269. My open house is done and I have settled into the new teaching year, so I am reading voraciously once again. Ahhhh....

I think I'm the last one to be finishing up so I will quote this b/c I really liked this part.

"Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
"Shit!" she shouted."

I loved that. I laughed outloud, but there was also some solemnity to that passage as well and I found myself thinking about it long after I read it.

I think I have felt that way before as well.

I am enjoying Ursula's observations as to what she has learned over the years- "for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing." She is finally realizing some things about her family and it is wonderful to have a little looking back instead of the constant stream of forward action generation to generation.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has quite a sense of humor. I have laughed out loud quite a bit in this book.
I finally got to the part Keith talked about with Remedios going up to heaven and Fernadas being upset about her sheets. Oh my goodness, that was great fun!

Having reached the... umm, "backside" of my time on this earth, I really appreciated what Gabo had to say about the changing perspective of his characters as they aged, the mixture of nostalgia and regret they experienced, and how their subjective sense of life and time differed from that of their younger selves. More on this later.

I agree there is an abundance of wonderful humor in this book, much of it the bittersweet kind that comes with recognizing our own irrationality and ultimate powerlessness in the jaws of fate.

I finished. Feel free to start discussing; discussion would be good. The ending was a bit disturbing...the picture of it is in my head now.

Yesterday I was able to pick up a copy of El olor de la guayaba (you can find it translated into English as The Fragrance of Guava) at our one (tiny!) local bookstore. It's a marvelous little collection of conversations between Plinio Apuley Mendoza and Gabriel García Márquez (with photos). Here are a few passages from the section on Cien años de soledad that I thought you might find interesting*:


Also,



* These very rough translations are my own.

That is indeed very interesting Ana Maria, although there goes our discussion on the meaning of solitude in the book . I would certainly have thought the author's intent in writing the book was more historical (in the broader sense) than personal.

Thanks!

that's an interesting (read: strange) way to define solitude. I think Thomas Merton would hold the opposite to be true.

But obviously, authorial intent is not the be-all, end-all of interpretation (as much as I sympathize with his disdain for the critics). I think you should go ahead with everyany thought you had on the subject.

Let me quote a bit more for you...

This latter point reminds me of that speech of his (which I have yet to fully respond to). It is literature that keeps these important things alive.


Brook, perhaps we could think of this in terms of isolation vs. community?

Just reading the little bit that Ana left of the conversation about the book helps. Now that I am thinking about the themes of the book and sorting the whirlwind of it out in my mind, I am enjoying the book more and more. I know a re-read would be good, but it probably will not happen right away.

I am looking forward to going back now and reading the Nobel Peace Prize Speech and the interviews Ana left as well.

I just remembered something. There is no distinction between "solitude" and "loneliness" in Spanish. I automatically translated soledad as "solitude," following Rabassa's lead...but I probably should've typed "loneliness" instead. (In If This Be Treason, Gregory Rabassa explains his dilemma in translating the title of the novel--I think he made the right choice.)

So perhaps it should actually read,


(This is why I was prompted to make that statement about regarding it as a question of isolation vs. community.)

That's interesting to me, given that solitude and loneliness have such distinct meanings in English (i.e., being alone vs. feeling alone). I'm wondering now if the word translated by Rabassa as "nostalgia" also means something different than what I would normally associate with it (a longing for the past).

I'm going to look into this more...I've always been curious about it, but have never asked.

As to the latter, nostalgia, it's exactly the same. It's even spelled the same.

Hey there folks.

I've been away from the Orchard for a long time, and I regret that I missed the bulk of this thread, maybe it will last a bit longer.

GGM is one of my all time favorite writers. Every time I'm at a book store, I go down the contemporary aisle and look in the Gs for something I don't have. And although I do love his work, I love his short story more than his novel catalog. I think this goes back to 1) my short attention span, and 2) short story is how I first discovered him. Garcia Marquez is a gifted, gifted man. He has the power to elicit raw emotion. One of the things I was first drawn to in his prose, is his ability to evoke vivid imagery though colors, smells, and tastes, without actually bringing any of these senses to the conscious front.

As far as Magical Realism goes, I have to say I have no qualms with the style (big surprise, something Keith and I disagree on!), in fact, I find it very pleasing to read. In many ways, it embodies some of the same feelings I get when I hear Over the Rhine. It is magically gorgeous, brilliant, melancholy, and invigorating all at the same time for me. I actually get chills when I read his work. I think I partly owe this euphoric feeling though to his heritage and his command of his native tongue. There really is no more beautiful language than those derived from the Roman. And albeit I comprehend only small amounts of spanish, I have to believe that GGM's orignial cadences and rhythms are largely conveyed in the translations--particulary by Rabassa (who I much prefer to other translators).

Anyway, I read this book a long time ago, and as I stated, I wish I would have discovered this thread earlier so I could have re-read it along with you all. Oh well. Please feel free to discuss anyway--maybe it will jog my memory on some things.

I'm not sure which aspects of his writing are attributable to his own style, or to that of magical realism--if they are extricable, since I have never read another MR text by any other author, however, one extremely pleasing device that is not exclusive to MR is the "Flash forward" plot device. It is found here (I just randomly leafed through the book to find an instance--there are better examples, but this one leapt out first): "Years later, when Colonel Aureliano Buendia examined the titles to property, he found registered in his brother's name all the land between the hill..." I love the way Marquez cheats time and gives us glimpses of the future through the narrative. I have to suspect this is his way of imparting to us, the reader, the clarivoyance of his grandmother that he bore witness to as a child and the impact this must have had on him. Through this plot device, we get to instantly learn deathbed confessions, lifelong secrets, and other remarkable tidbits that otherwise, only the slow trudging of time would reveal. Lovely!

Thanks for indulging me on this. Hopefully I've added to the conversation.

Hey Mark! Good to see you posting again. I don't believe this thread is dying, but it's good to have more voices chiming in.

I don't know why I said that--maybe I' should retract it!

Thanks for the welcome BTW!