Wonder and Exile in the New World

Chapter 5: Mysticism and the Marvelous in Latin American Literature

So, fast-forward a couple of centuries from the age of the Baroque to the twentieth century. The final piece of our story about wonder and exile in the New World concerns the emergence of a distinct style of literary representation in the twentieth century widely known as magical realism. As a child of the Baroque, magical realism carries on the fascination with the marvelous that it inherited from its parent. In magical realism, Baroque wonders assume the modern look of the novel, but the same wild and excessive desires are at play. We recognize magical realism when wonder appears so extravagantly that it has “broken its chains and gallops wild and feverish, permitting itself all excesses,” to borrow from Mario Vargas Llosa.1 Or it emerges, now with Angel Flores, when the “common and everyday” is magically transformed into the “awesome and unreal”; it is an “art of surprise.”2 We might say, then, that magical realism is the poetic version of alchemy: it takes what is base, ordinary, and predictable (what has been stripped of mystery)—love, sexuality, death, beauty, science, God—and transforms them into something golden, fantastic, astonishing. The prosaic and trivial planes of existence are interrupted by a revolution in perception and awareness. Suddenly, one is jolted out of the ordinary and you come before a new world, a world saturated with transcendence and charged with sublimity. Whatever else is meant by this term, then, magical realism five mysticism and the marvelous in latin american literature From my fourth-floor room overlooking infinity, in the visible intimacy of the falling evening, at the window before emerging stars, my dreams are journeys to unknown, imagined, or simply impossible countries. —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet is a map for the wildest sort of journeys, journeys to unknown, imagined, or simply impossible countries. It is about the discovery of remote and transcendent lands not miles away, but here and now, in front of us if not within us. For all the apparent fascination with magic, magical realism is most truly about these infinite journeys and dreams. For this reason, the New York Times Review of Books got it right when first reviewing One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel by Gabriel García Márquez, the reviewer wrote, “forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life.” More than any other piece of literature in Latin America, this book has been synonymous with the term “magical realism ,” a concept that is as mysterious as the realities and events that occur in the fictional town of Macondo. As the reader enters this fantastic world, we would do well to listen to the narrator describe how the patriarch of the novel, José Arcadio Buendía, intends to educate his children: “In the small separate room, where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them about the wonders of the world, not only where his learning had extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes” (OHYS, ). So much of the beauty and power of magical realism is described there— magical realism is a fabulous map of uncharted terrain. It stretches the imagination to new and impossible limits. It has the same feverish fascination with the “other side of things” that José Arcadio Buendía possesses in Baroque-like abundance (OHYS, ). Again, Mario Vargas Llosa explains it in this way: “In Macondo, as in the enchanted territories where Amadis and Tirant rode, the boundaries separating reality from unreality have gone to pieces. Everything can happen here: excess is a rule, beauty enriches life and it is as truthful as war and hunger.”3 No rules, boundaries, or borders are respected in Macondo, only the rule of extravagance. One Hundred Years transgresses the bounds of reality in order to get to the “other side,” and then it returns—like a man now acquainted with the secrets of the grave—to educate us in the very real and material fabric of our being, to make us feel down to the marrow of our bones the painful realities of hunger and war. So, in this sense, the motif of exile is as significant to magical realism as the prodigal displays of women. As much as magical realism elevates the soul and imagines marvelous journeys, the component of realism pulls us, like the gravity of suffering , like the...