Ponderous But Vulnerable
I
There is that vignette in Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch where the protagonist looks idly out of the window at the bay below and seems to see an array of ships lined there, not all the same but their make and model spanning the centuries gone by.
“Magical Realism” everybody said. Including the best and brightest of teachers in the universities of the world. All except the author himself.
Same was the pedagogic fate that befell the opening fare of A Hundred Years of Solitude—two Latino rampagers visiting an Indian village (Indian as in South America), and beguiling the natives with the mysteries of a magnet and a compass. “Magical Realism” yet again.
Till Marquez in an elaborate interview confessed to doing or meaning nothing magical but being squarely within the realms of the mimetic/realist tradition of fiction-writing. But just how?
On the first count, the composite image of ships spanning the centuries meant to suggest how in Latin American history, accreted layers of colonial oppression were ever embedded in the political semi-consciousness of the average perceiver as one historical whole—the gone-by never quite gone-by.
And on the second count, how the colonizing metropolitan West took hegemony to the hinterlands through technologies (magnet/compass) by claiming magical powers of redress for them, whereas at bottom meant to be deployed as mere instruments of domination. Nostromo, Nostromo?
Most instructive both these contexts, methinks, for those of us who seek to unravel the qualities of change and the complex of perceptions accompanying them now here in India.
Peace and Justice Post 
Leave a comment