One Hundred Years of Social Distancing: The Refuge of “Magical Realism” in Our Surreal World
These days, to say that the world has been turned upside down is an understatement. I would argue that we have out-grown understatement.
We stand in an unprecedented, scary time, with a future that feels, and is, uncertain. We are caught in a pandemic that has claimed more than 100,000 lives in the US alone; we are engaged in a resurgent and overdue call for justice in the face of the brutality that caused the senseless murder of George Floyd and too many others.
All the while, we as a nation are subject to a constant and deliberate barrage of collective gas-lighting, telling us that nothing is wrong! While the world burns, we are being told to deny the experience of our own eyes, bodies, and hearts.
This brings us to an important question: How are we supposed to respond? While many of us are still secluded in our homes, we seek escape and catharsis. Yet this desire for escape (even refuge) feels irresponsible, doesn’t it? In short, how can we find refuge while still speaking and holding truth?
In such times we turn to literature. Enter: Magical Realism, or el real maravilloso— the Marvelous Real. El real maravilloso is a literary style typified by fantastic and magical elements mixed with realistic, or modern, narratives. It rose to importance primarily in Latin America as a way to answer the question we ask: a way to escape and find liberation in narrative that engages with — and more importantly challenges — hegemonic and oppressive political and social trauma.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which chronicles the rise and fall of the secluded village of Macondo, itself inextricably linked with the destiny (destinies) of the Buendía family. We follow this family through seven generations, getting to know each of their fantastic exploits: visits from mystical gypsies, a four-year long rainstorm, golden fishes, psychic blindness, talking to the dead, civil wars, colonization, mass murder, a navigational blood flow, powerful love, and passionate sex (to name a few). (Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.)
It’s a lot, I know. I’ve admittedly failed to do it justice. But, hear me out: from the very first line — “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” — you will be sucked in and emerge, breathless. The story, improbable as it sounds, in many ways tells the history of Latin America in microcosm, relating it through concrete events and mythic fantasy.
These fantastic elements serve a vital function. For example, a passage near the beginning of the novel tells how the whole village is struck by a mysterious walking insomnia that causes amnesia. This is only solved at last by a magic potion. This is contrasted by an entirely different collective amnesia near the novel’s end, which more closely resembles reality, but is the more surreal one. In this later passage, the citizens gather in the plaza to protest the oppression of the American banana corporation that has colonized the city. They gather peacefully, but almost without warning the company-backed soldiers open fire and murder everyone in the square. The town then refuses to believe that anything happened, and the sole child witness grows up believed to be insane. (It’s a chilling scene on its own, but one that feels to poignant and familiar now. It is also worth remarking that this kind of event really happened in Latin America.)
The contrast of these two incidents of collective forgetting is, of course, intentional. It highlights the horror of the latter; the cold rationalism of institutions like the army and the banana company denies the worth of humanity for economic gain and in the end they again use this rationalism to state that it never happened. The first incident may be fantastical, even unbelievable, but we are left in little doubt which of the two is a lie.
[This is but one example. One Hundred Years of Solitude is only one novel that uses this style to tell powerful and poignant stories in this way — another which springs to mind is Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World, and even Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.]
Such is the power of el real maravilloso — it responds to a received or imposed “truth” with one that seeks to accurately reflect our own personal and collective truth. Within which, we can find both refuge and guidance.
