Robert Lowell’s
sonnet “History” begins as such:
History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to
fumbling all we had –
it is so dull and
gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never
finishes.
Magic realism
is a drowning man with a sand-parched tongue. Or better, it is a stylistic
coping device. The heartbreak of that story is never in the telling, only in
the tragedy and trauma it gilds. Like a world-weary man cataloguing his woes, One Hundred Years of Solitude (as a
transcript) belongs to the oral folklore tradition. While the defining fanciful
images of Disney’s postwar hallmark films, e.g., pumpkin-cum-carriage in Cinderella and the sorceress-cum-dragon
of Sleeping Beauty, heighten the paramours’
romantic stakes, making love as atypical as it is splendored, Solitude’s five-year downpour, litter of
yellow butterflies, and apotheosis of sage-like Remedios the Beauty make the
utter humanity of the tale bearable.
Reading magic realism
as any sort of naturalism is self-deception; Márquez’s narrator believes his
own myth, believing the act of manipulation to not only support the truth, but
to comfort us in stomaching it. Agony is in the details, and having the
Fernanda’s white sheets described with as much tenderness as ancestral Remedios’
awful bleeding out deals a softened blow, but a blow nonetheless.
When Rebeca
howls, “It’s not right for them to come to me with that memory right now” as (unbeknownst
to her) nephew Aureliano Triste combs through her derelict house, that is the
sound of a life that has lost its trickeries; her skeletal frame and balding
head have shed the necessary fat and locks of vitality (235). Márquez’s Buendías
greet history as an native yet unwelcome poltergeist whose existence is
independent of the ticking years and wars and Macondo even, only “[living] with
what was here.”
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