::.. MA (Literary Studies) ·_·,.~t ... ' Mini-Thesis '. .... I I ,:,· n w o T . "' .. · e Title: p a C Garcia Marquez, Magic Realism and Language as Material f o ·Pyractice t i s r e v i n U '!' l l . I. Fatima Fiona Moolla 1994 t' n w The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No o T quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgeement of the source. p The thesis is to be used for private study or non- a C commercial research purposes only. f o Published by the Universit y of Cape Town (UCT) in terms y t of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. i s r e v i n U 2 ABSTRACT In this essay I examme the political implications of the shifts in definition of the term, "magic realism". Magic realism as it was originally employed in the Latin-American context signified a concept different to what it is currently held to suggest in metropolitan literary discourse. Magic realism in the first world has come to be regarded as a third world reflection of its own cultural dominant, postmodernism, without an acknowledgement of the alternative material realities which inform it. I investigate these ideas through an analysis of the work of two novelists, namely, the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the American, John Barth. In· a well-known essay titled "The Literature of Replenishment", Barth names Garcia Marquez as the foremost postmodem writer. This is deceptive, I argue, since although in the essay Barth presents postmodernist fiction as a political· advance on the earlier styles of realism and modernism, his own fictional practice contradicts his claim. While in the essay Barth presents postmodernism as politically significant by virtue of its "democratic impulse", his novel, Chimera, seeks to avoid the political through a flawed understanding of textuality. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude stands in stark contrast with Chimera since it underscores the political consideration central to discourse through stressing the text's material, historical context. This distinction between the two novels is brought to light particularly through the incremental differences in their use of the techniques of "narrative circularity" and repetition. I argue, furthermore, that Garcia Marquez's emphasis on language as a material practice is, at least in part, owing to the specifics of the style of magic realism. While postmodernist fiction, one of the cultural effects of an advanced capitalism, may slide ineluctably into notions of pure textuality, magic realism, constituted as it is at the interface of pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, compels an acknowledgement of the material world. 3 John Barth: Some Notes Toward Defining the Postmodern In a pair of essays titled "The Literature of Exhaustion"1 and "The Literature of Replenishment",2 John Barth examines what he considers to be the enervation of realist and modernist fictional modes, on the one hand, with the potential renewal represented by postmodernism on the other. Interestingly, in both these essays he refers to the fictional practice of Latin American writers, namely, the Argentinean, Jorge Luis Borges, and the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, respectively, to exemplify the new direction he considers literature ought to take. In the first essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion", Barth suggests the contemporary inadequacy of realism and modernism as a result of"the used-upness of [their] forms or exhaustion of [their] possibilities".3 For Barth, these forms towards the close of the twentieth-century no longer seem to have any currency. To illustrate his opinion, he suggests, for example, that: "Beethoven's Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing". 4 Barth laments the fact that many of his contemporaries persist in employing these outmoded possibilities but paradoxically lauds the Latin American, Jorge Luis Borges, for using what could be construed as the same technique. Like the writers Barth criticises, Borges in some of his work employs these outmoded forms. Unlike these writers, however, Borges represents the earlier fictional modes with startlingly different effect. In one aesthetic strategy, for example, represented by the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", Borges posits a contemporary author who "retrospectively" writes 4 From Barth's account of the specific nature of Borges's "artistic victory", one gets the impression that for him (Barth) the direction literature ought to take is one which leads to increasing textual self consciousness. Barth maintains, in fact, that the novelistic genre itself has its origin in textual self-reflexiveness with one text imitating another - "If this sort of thing sounds unpleasantly decadent, nevertheless it's about where the genre began, with Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes pretending to be the Cid Hamete Benengeli (and Alonso Quijano pretending to be Don Quixote), or Fielding parodying Richardson". 6 Imitation in all of its forms, including mimesis, repetition and so on is a significant consideration also in Barth's fiction as a number of critical opinions indicate. 7 While in the earlier essay Barth's focus falls on the importance of self-reflexiveness, in "The Literature of Replenishment" which explicitly attempts to define 5 postmodernisin, Barth foregrounds a different consideration in response to criticism of postmodernism' s trivialising narcissism. In the later essay Barth suggests that while Borges in some ways embodies the transition between the modernist moment and what replaces it, another Latin American Gabriel Garcia Marquez represents the apogee of postmodernism: "As Cervantes stands as an exemplar of premodernism and a great precursor of much ~o come, and Jorge Luis Borges as an example of dernier cri modernism and at the same time as a bridge between · the end of the nineteenth-century and the end of the twentieth, so Gabriel Garcia Marquez is in that enviable succession: an exemplary postmodernist and a master of the storyteller's art". 8 While the essay which foregrounds Borges emphasises textuality, the essay which singles out Garcia Marquez defensively shifts the focus from textuality to a concern with postmodernism's democratic impulse. The essay as a whole represents Barth's response to the question: "What is postmodem fiction?" Barth addresses this question neither through avowal nor disavowal but rather through a series of inclusions with illustrates postmodernism' s avaricious incorporation of both what is like and unlike itself. Barth does not reject postmodem self-reflexiveness in this essay but attempts to mitigate postmodernism's representation through emphasising also its political significance. Barth takes issue, for example, with the impression created by the cultural analysts Thab Hassan, 9 Robert Alter and others, that "postmodernist fiction merely emphasises . '·.._, 6 the "performing" self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and anarchy". What this implies, furthermore, is that . ( postmodem fiction "is more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world".10 / Barth suggests: If the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naive illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral conventions are not the whole story, then from the perspective of these closing decades of our century we may appreciate that the contraries of these things are not the whole story either. Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy -these are not the whole story either. 11 What Barth proposes more forcefully in this essay as contrasted with the "Literarture ofExhaustion", is postmodernism's democratising effect through its relativisation of the belle lettres I popular culture opposition. Barth claims that in its transcension (not antithesis) of the options represented by realism and modernism, postmodernism simultaneously deconstructs the high- and low-brow culture opposition. Thus, while modernism embodies an "aristocratic cultural spirit", postmodernism has a more popular appeal: A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his [sic] 7 { twentieth-century modernist parents or his [sic] nineteenth-century \.premodernist grandparents... Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naivete, he [sic] nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than [the] late modernist marvels.12 This tension apparent in the juxtaposition of the two essays of a conception of the postmodem vascillating between notions of apolitical self-reflexive play and a politically significant democratisation ofliterature extends, as we shall see, also to the juxtaposition of the latter essay with Barth's fiction, in particular Chimera. John Barth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Postmodern Democratisation lf Barth maintains a degree of uncertainty in "The Literature of Replenishment" regarding a definition of postmodernism, an uncertainty which perhaps paradoxically is its distinguishing mark, he is unequivocal as to whom he regards as the arch- postmodem writer. John Barth unambiguously names Gabriel Garcia Marquez as "an exemplary postmodernist" and hails One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez's most popular success to date, as the most impressive novel "as has been written so far in the second half of our century and one of the splendid specimens of that splendid genre from any century". 13 One Hundred years of Solitude is singled out by Barth since, for him, it is a work of I postmodem fiction which dispels the assumption that self-reflexivity is the chief effect ~ofthe postmodem novel. One Hundred years of Solitude is lauded by Barth precisely 8 for features other than the text's self-consciousness. Garcia Marquez's novel represents for him "the synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion ·and non-political artistry, characterisation and caricature [and] humor and terror".14 For Barth, Garcia Marquez's example suggests the politically more significant effect of the postmodem than a narcissistic textuality. Barth asserts that in postmodernism's transcension ("A worthy program for postmodernist fiction... is the synthesis or transcension of [the] antitheses... [of] premodernist and modernist modes of writing.") of the literary precursors of realism and modernism, postmodernism simultaneously democratises reading practice. He suggests that while the postmodem writer cannot hope to "move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace [or the] mass-media illiterates, he [sic] should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art".15 Despite Barth's claim for postmodernism' s importance in its challenge to the high-and-low-culture opposition, this concern with the political is contradicted in his own fictional texts. Operating upon the assumption that the claims Barth makes for postmodem fiction theoretically would be illustrated in practice in his novels, one discovers, in fact, that claims of a democratisation of literature in postmodem fiction cannot be sustained. Despite the implicit allegiance Barth suggests between his work and that of Garcia Marquez, there remains between them a very important distinction. Although Barth claims in "The Literature of Replenishment", as indicated in the prior section, that postmodernism is not only "disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism 9 approaching moral entropy,"16 his own fiction suggests the need for a retrospective reassessment of these claims. Barth's suggestion of the political radicality of postmodem fiction, by subtle sleight of hand, is jettisoned in his novels, for example, Chimera. Similarly, postmodernism in many interpretations can be seen to replace the critique of bourgeois humanism with a new set of politically as deceptive universals. In this environment, Garcia Marquez's work, through being classified as postmodern, takes on the aspect of the dominant interpretations of postmodernity. More practically illustrated, since they both are represented as being encompassed by the term "postmodernism", Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Barth's Chimera should, therefore, operate upon similar: assumptions. Clearly, as we shall see, they do not. As was noted above, Barth mentions as one of the most significant features of postmodernity its deconstruction of the opposition of high-and low-brow culture. In this regard, Chimera and One Hundred Years of Solitude would appear to be similar. Structurally, Chimera is accessible to a reading audience wider than "the professional devotees of high art" because of its ingenious postmodem adaptation of some of the more elitist features of modernism. One does not need a "priestly industry of explicators, annotators [and] allusion-chasers... to mediate between the text and the reader", 17 since Chimera unlike Eliot's The Wasteland, for example, self-consciously exposes its intertextual sources. The novel, Chimera, consists in three parts "Dunyazadiad", "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad", each of which alludes to a literary precursor - the Thousand Nights and a Night and the myths of Perseus and Bellerophon respectively. Unlike the modernist text which indirectly indicates its •