IT IS inevitable that a tribute to Gabriel García Márquez would come under pressure to achieve a beautiful opening line, and having thus sidestepped the expectation, it would immediately mention one of the most famous opening lines in the history of literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
That is how his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins. The line merges three periods of time in a single brief sentence. The narrator talks to us from the present, conveys that he will be executed in a distant future (he is not), and sets up the distant past of his father, where the novel properly begins. If I were an intellectual I could have fooled myself into believing that this is why the sentence is memorable. Or, because a little boy’s discovery of ice is a beautiful surprise in such a grave sentence. But I believe the line has become famous because that’s how far many people have gone with the book. More or less. No doubt, an unknowable multitude have read it fully in many languages, but it is also one of those books that more people revere than have actually read.
Now that Netflix has adapted it as a series that is faithful to its source material, about 100 million people can get to know the classic, including some film critics perhaps. And, even though they may like most of what they see, they may also wonder what the fuss over the novel was all about.
Like some classics, One Hundred Years of Solitude is actually a very good novel. Other aspects of its greatness come from the lottery of extraordinary fame. Why some good novels are known more than other good novels is a part of the absurd magic of luck. Hype is how good things come to us. And for that reason, the collective subconscious of people tolerates hype and those who have a monopoly over creating it. Novels like this have let the Western literary establishment, which tells us what to read, survive. Yet, it is a novel that intellectuals have often got completely wrong.
The novel is framed as something called “magic realism,” which is a nonsensical term that takes itself too seriously, as though it has more gravitas than fantasy. Outside fairy tales, all magic in stories is magic realism, including the Bible and Hindu epics. But that is not my quarrel. My quarrel is that the magic in the novel is not about fantasy at all. The very people who are supposed to interpret the novel for the others have created a misconception.
Strange things do happen in this family saga that covers a century in a fictitious place named Macondo. There are ghosts, and a person’s blood sets out to go somewhere. What Garcia Marquez was trying to do was narrate how ancient people used to tell a story—by converting metaphors into descriptions and through mistaken views of natural phenomena as supernatural events. When you narrate your grandmom’s stories of what she saw and heard, without the condescension of interpretation, they may seem like magic.
Arthur Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is true of ancient history, too. A historical account by a person in olden times will seem like magic. And this is what Garcia Marquez achieved as a story-telling technique.
A few years ago, it rained red all over Kerala. A vast region appeared to be soaked in blood. Science ruined the magic; it said a meteor had exploded over the region. If this had happened in another time, people would have said that it rained blood one day, they would have told that story in a way that would appear be a page from “One Hundred Years…” That is one of the unspoken playful strands in the book. In fact, this is what it is largely about.
There is a moment in the novel when Macondo is struck by an insomnia plague, which causes inhabitants to forget the names of simple objects. A few years after its publication in 1975, neurologists formally recognized a form of dementia called semantic dementia, which is remarkably similar to Garcia Marquez’s portrayal. Such a disease must have afflicted a Colombian village long ago and Garcia Marquez must have heard of its tales.
Compared to our distant future, I think, our distant past could be more astounding as magic. There is a lot that has vanished and we have no idea of the sort of things that used to exist. It is not just species that become extinct, but whole ways of human life. Some of that survives in our fables. Surely, Garcia Marquez was not the first to use fables to tell history, because no one is ever the first in anything. Surely, it is overstated that he derived the technique from his Colombian heritage, for which civilization did not tell history through fantasies, exaggerations and metaphors presented as reality? Even the history of the West is not without a bit of that.
Fantasy that never happened, there is something lame about it. It is very dull from an intellectual point of view. But magic that may have happened, now that is something. The power of Garcia Marquez, even when we do not know why we feel it, comes from plausibility.
Surely, he did make up some of the fantasy, and not everything in his book was an exaggeration of metaphors and natural phenomena; even so, to call the book by a foolish term for fantasy is to deny people the actual fun of his work. And the novel is a lot of fun, even though it is not shy about its denseness.
Garcia Marquez is probably the most imitated writer. The opening line of ‘One Hundred Years…’ is one of the most infectious lines in literature and as inspiration does, it has nudged numerous writers, including many seasoned writers, to achieve a mediocre version of the idea. Take this moment in Salman Rushdie’s memoir: ‘Afterwards, when the world was exploding around him…he felt annoyed with himself for forgetting the name of the BBC reporter…’
But the more harmful effect of the fame of Garcia Marquez is in the erroneous view of “One Hundred Years…” – as a work of fantasy. Generations of writers have ruined themselves trying to imitate this book thinking it is about inserting absurd magical things in the middle of a rational plot.
A few years ago I found myself in a room where the English translators of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk were having a chat. (Murakami’s translator said that the Japanese novelist was not really a Japanese writer but a western writer who wrote in Japanese. We will come to that some other day.) The (British) translator of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk once described his prose as a “trance,” evidently deriving this compliment from the swirling dervishes of Istanbul’s tourist lanes. I asked her, if an Anglo-Saxon writer from London employed an identical style of narration as Pamuk, would she still have called it a “trance”? She said with a chuckle that it would then be “probably purple prose.”
Garcia Marquez was similarly rewarded by the West – for hailing from an alien land, and for being strange enough to be exotic but not so strange that he was incomprehensible (that’s also how NASA and Hollywood like their aliens.)
Garcia Marquez himself was not very pleased with the classification of his genre as “magical realism”. There is a beautiful line very early in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when he says that the world was so recent that things didn’t have names and you had to point. And that was what happened with his own works. It was so new to the West at the time that the literary establishment had to invent a name. They would have been more articulate if they had just pointed.
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