Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Real
Magic in Service of Truth
Gabo
lives. The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel García Márquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers
everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive.
Somewhere a dictatorial “patriarch” is still having his rival cooked and served
up to his dinner guests on a great dish; an old colonel is waiting for a letter
that never comes; a beautiful young girl is being prostituted by her heartless
grandmother; and a kindlier patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, one of the
founders of the new settlement of Macondo, a man interested in science and
alchemy, is declaring to his horrified wife that “the earth is round, like an
orange.”
We live
in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s
Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of “The Hunger Games,” the places where
vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of
the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional
microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha, R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García
Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.
“One
Hundred Years of Solitude” is 47 years old now, and despite its colossal and
enduring popularity, its style — magic realism — has largely given way, in
Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the
sheer size of García Márquez’s achievement. The most highly regarded writer of
the next generation, Roberto Bolaño, notoriously declared that magic realism “stinks,”
and jeered at García Márquez’s fame, calling him “a man terribly pleased to
have hobnobbed with so many presidents and archbishops.” It was a childish
outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence of
the great colossus in their midst was more than a little burdensome. (“I have
the feeling,” Carlos Fuentes once said to me, “that writers in Latin America
can’t use the word ‘solitude’ any more, because they worry that people will
think it’s a reference to Gabo. And I’m afraid,” he added, mischievously, “that
soon we will not be able to use the phrase ‘100 years’ either.”) No writer in
the world has had a comparable impact in the last half-century. Ian McEwan has
accurately compared his pre-eminence to that of Charles Dickens. No writer
since Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel García
Márquez.
The great
man’s passing may put an end to Latin American writers’ anxiety at his
influence, and allow his work to be noncompetitively appreciated. Fuentes,
acknowledging García Márquez’s debt to Faulkner, called Macondo his
Yoknapatawpha County, and that may be a better point of entry into the oeuvre.
These are stories about real people, not fairy tales. Macondo exists; that is
its magic.
The
trouble with the term “magic realism,” el realismo mágico, is that when
people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it,
“magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.” But if magic
realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing
in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the
magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the
real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works.
Consider this famous passage from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:
“As soon
as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed
through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the
living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across
the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the
Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made
a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed
through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs . . . and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula
was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.
“ ‘Holy
Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”
Something
utterly fantastic is happening here. A dead man’s blood acquires a purpose,
almost a life of its own, and moves methodically through the streets of Macondo
until it comes to rest at his mother’s feet. The blood’s behavior is
“impossible,” yet the passage reads as truthful, the journey of the blood like
the journey of the news of his death from the room where he shot himself to his
mother’s kitchen, and its arrival at the feet of the matriarch Úrsula Iguarán
reads as high tragedy: A mother learns that her son is dead. José Arcadio’s
lifeblood can and must go on living until it can bring Úrsula the sad news. The
real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional
force. It becomes more real, not less.
Magic
realism was not García Márquez’s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the
Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. García
Márquez studied Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo” closely, and likened its
impact on him to that of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (In the novel’s ghost town of
Comala it’s easy to see the birthplace of García Márquez’s Macondo.) But the
magic-realist sensibility is not limited to Latin America. It crops up in all
of the world’s literatures from time to time, and García Márquez was famously
well read.
Dickens’s
unending court case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in “Bleak House,” finds a relative in
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the unending railway train that passes by
Macondo for a week. Dickens and García Márquez are both masters of comic
hyperbole. Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, a government department that exists
to do nothing, inhabits the same fictional reality as all the indolent,
corrupt, authoritarian governors and tyrants in García Márquez’s work.
Kafka’s
Gregor Samsa, metamorphosed into a large insect, would not feel out of place in
Macondo, where metamorphoses are treated as commonplace. Gogol’s Kovalyov,
whose nose detaches itself from his face and wanders around St. Petersburg,
would also feel at home. The French Surrealists and the American fabulists are
also of this literary company, inspired by the idea of the fictionality of
fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines
of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps
more interesting, routes. García Márquez knew very well that he belonged to a
far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying, “In Mexico,
surrealism runs through the streets.” And then: “The Latin American reality is
totally Rabelaisian.”
But, to
say it again: The flights of fancy need real ground beneath them. When I first
read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country.
Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India
and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and
the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor,
powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong
colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance and God is
alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.
I knew
García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani
counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars.
His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love
with it — not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous
“wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism. My
world was more urban than his, however. It is the village sensibility that
gives García Márquez’s realism its particular flavor, the village in which
technology is frightening but a devout girl rising up to heaven is perfectly
credible; in which, as in Indian villages, the miraculous is everywhere
believed to coexist with the quotidian.
He was a
journalist who never lost sight of the facts. He was a dreamer who believed in
the truth of dreams. He was also a writer capable of moments of delirious, and
often comic, beauty. At the beginning of “Love in the Time of Cholera”: “The
scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” At
the heart of “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” after the dictator sells the
Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador’s nautical engineers
“carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the
blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside
general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our
demented dragons.” The first railway train arrives in Macondo and a woman goes
mad with fear. “It’s coming,” she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen
dragging a village behind it.” And of course, unforgettably:
“Colonel
Aureliano Buendía organized 32 armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17
male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the
other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He
survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes and a firing squad. He lived
through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.”
For such
magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of
us all.
Salman
Rushdie is the author of 11 novels and, most recently, the autobiographical
memoir “Joseph Anton.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/books/review/gabriel-garcia-marquezs-work
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário