Marquez and Roh: Gods of Magical Realism

This was a research paper I wrote for Dr. Spencer's class. It was pretty bad but somehow I got an A on it. I think I got an A. Maybe it was a B. I studied my ass off for this damned paper. When I finished writing the paper I changed the font to Times New Roman and printed it. I looked at the paper and thought that the font looked way too fat but when I looked at the document it didn't show that it was bold, so I thought I'd just forgotten what the font looked like. After she graded my paper there was a pretty annoyed note on it that said something to the effect of "NEVER CHOOSE A BOLD FONT!" and that's when I remembered I'd manually downloaded a ton of fonts since my questionable copy of MS Word installed without any fonts.


Garbiel Garcia Marquez is obviously noted for his use of a style of writing called “Magical Realism”. The simplicity of the term, however, is incredibly elusive and has led to a hefty amount of criticism due to its lack of a concrete definition in literature. Despite the difficulties in pinning down an adequate definition of Marquez’ writing style, it is peculiar that its namesake is derived from a German art critic’s term for Post-Expressionist art. Furthermore, Marquez’ repeated use of a theme I have termed “the eternal interim” suggests that the term “magical realism” does not differ as greatly as it seems from the artistic medium to the literary.
It was Franz Roh who first attributed the term to the visual artistic medium as an attempt to break away from the uninspiring term “Post-Expressionism” which, “only indicates ancestry and chronological relationship” (Roh 16). And although his statement that “with the word ‘magic’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (Roh 16), initially seems to be opposite to Marquez’ use of magical realism, there is an undeniable similarity in Marquez’ intentions and Roh’s somewhat enigmatic definition.
Roh’s magical realism is one which seems more realistic than magical as is evident in Christian Schad’s “Sonja.” In the painting, a woman sits at a table with a cigarette in her hand; there is no emotion expressed on her face and the image is presented without context, yet the dark circles under her heavy eyes reliably demonstrate ugliness inherent in the subject rather than the artist’s interpretation. This dreary expression which hides behind a lack of expression suggests fatigue, stress, and near collapse which seems to serve as a commentary on the state of the German nation (and the rest of the world) after World War I.
Marquez, in his Nobel lecture after receiving the Nobel Prize, echoes that same idea of destruction as that of his artistic predecessors when he cites, among other things, that “Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities” (The Nobel Foundation). For Marquez, the magic which Roh suggested “palpitates behind [reality]” (Roh 16), is on more equal footing with reality as is evinced in his example of “General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, [who] held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War” (The Nobel Foundation). As such, Marquez’ magical realism becomes almost an exact reiteration of Roh’s definition.
The major difference between the two is that Marquez is able to openly express the magical aspect without compromising the realist. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, after Jose Arcadio Buendia has taken the men of the village on an exploratory mission to get in contact with the rest of the world, we are told that “for more than ten days, they did not see the sun” (11) and then that “the world became eternally sad” (11) in such an assertive manner that it is almost as if a reporter were relating purely objective facts. Arcadio’s response to the madness, “it’s all right [. . .] The main thing is not to lose our bearings” (Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 12) is highly characteristic of Marquez’ faithfulness to reality and is eerily reminiscent of a point that Roh makes of Post-Expressionist art: “One could say that once again a profound calm and thoughtfulness prevails, a calm that is perhaps a prelude to a new flight, launched with more mature knowledge and earthly substance” (Roh 17).
Like the post-expressionist artists, Marquez experienced all of the atrocities of destabilization being perpetrated not only in his home country, but throughout all of Latin America; Anderson says in an article in The New Yorker, “The country has been engulfed in a complicated civil war for more than half a century, and most of the victims of the violence have been civilians” (Anderson). As Marquez suggests in his Nobel lecture, The Solitude of Latin America, it is both the combination of apathy on the part of first-world developed nations and the viciousness of the atrocities committed in Latin America that contribute to the dominating sense of solitude which permeates through all of Marquez’ works (The Nobel Foundation). Although that comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Marquez, there exists also in his Nobel lecture the invocation of a more silent theme which shows up almost as frequently as that of solitude when he suggests that “it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of [. . .] A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, [. . .] and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.” (The Nobel Foundation). This silent theme which rears its head repeatedly through Marquez’ work is what I like to call “the eternal interim.”
From the outset of most of Marquez’ works we are introduced to a sense of “the eternal interim”; in Strange Pilgrims, we are greeted in “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” by the opening lines: “He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his can, and thinking about death” (3) and we are told shortly thereafter that “the years of glory and power had been left behind forever, and now only the years of his death remained” (4). As we see the deposed president hand the few possessions he has over to Lazara in order to pay for his surgery (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 26-27), we see in him the desperation he has to return to normalcy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t discover as we do that the real tragedy is not that he has been overthrown or that he lives impoverished or even that his pain will never be alleviated, but, as Lazara shouts at the end, that “nothing can kill that man” (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 34). In fact, as we read through the story, it becomes apparent that the only time that the deposed president actually was at peace was during nonexistence, since every recollection of his life is filled with pain and turmoil. Life, therefore, in the case of the deposed president, is his eternal interim between the two stages of nonexistence.
This idea sees its parallel in Roh’s writing when he says of Magical Realist art: “Here, perhaps, the background is the last frontier, absolute nothingness, absolute death, from which something emerges and vibrates with energetic intensity” (20). “The eternal interim” exists much more concretely in Magical Realist art, for the evidence of its interim exists between the borders of the background; the image in that space is forever between absolute nothingness. The fact that Magical Realist artists tended to focus on people in their works only increases the similarities between the Magical Realism in Marquez’ literature and that of Roh’s essay. In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” from Strange Pilgrims, that something which crystallizes from the void is the life of the deposed president, for Schad, it is the unknown “Sonja”.
In the case of Marquez’ home country, this makes perfect sense. Before colonialization, Latin America can almost be seen, as Marquez writes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a “world so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (1), which is obviously very reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; without any need for argument, it is apparent that this reference connotes an inherent peace in that world. The Latin American, in the current sense of the term, didn’t exist until after colonialization, and for Colombians, as well as many others, colonialization meant severe oppression. And although Colombia eventually threw off Spain’s oppressive reins in 1810 (Ruch), peace still has yet to be realized as civil wars and feuds between guerillas and drug cartels ravage the country and its populace (Anderson).
With this under consideration, we may deduce that, whether intentionally or not, “the eternal interim” in Marquez’ “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” serves as a sad sense of hopelessness extending to the state of Latin America which screams that the only time peace can be attained is through nonexistence. Yet this is not the limit to the theme of “the eternal interim.” In the short story, “The Saint” from Strange Pilgrims, we are introduced to Margarito Duarte of whom the narrator says, “was the character in search of an author that we novelists wait for all our lives, and if I never allowed him to find me it was because the end of his story seemed unimaginable” (37). Duarte carries around a cello case in which lies the rose-scented, weightless, and pristine corpse of his daughter, who is referred to throughout the story as “the Saint,” for at least twenty-two years in the hopes that he might finally have his daughter declared a saint by the pope. The theme of “the eternal interim” in “The Saint” serves as a compliment to its use in the previous story in Strange Pilgrims in that whereas “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” suggested that peace was a nearly inconceivable notion for Latin Americans, Latin America’s interim leads to a sort of saintliness to all of Latin America’s people; at the end of the story, the narrator says of Duarte, “then I had no doubt, if I ever had any at all, that the Saint was Margarito. Without realizing it, by means of his daughter’s incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization” (53).
Perhaps the idea of expressing the spiritual magnificence of the human being is something Roh too saw in the productions of art exhibited by the Post-Expressionists when he says that “the invention and re-establishment of the object can reveal us to the idea of creation” (Roh 24). As the sad and solitary aspects of Duarte lead to the narrator’s perception of him as a saint, Roh says of the use of tragic and harsh elements of realism that “the Expressionist ideal has not been realized because of the tragic fact that creating the best always means a compromise with what really exists” (24). This suggests that Roh senses, as Marquez does, that the use of Magical Realism in its most uncompromising sense of the term is the best way to capture the essence of the human spirit in all of its mundane glory.
The importance of acknowledging a similarity between Marquez’ Magical Realism and that set out by Franz Roh is absolutely necessary to dispelling any ideas that Magical Realism as a term is equal to fantasy or fiction as some might believe. Expressing the similarities between the two usages of Magical Realism via what I’ve termed “the eternal interim” is perhaps not the best method, but if we are to consider that “many authors, including Borges and Garcia Marquez, begin to wonder whether they themselves might not be the figments of someone else’s dreams” (Damrosch 546), perhaps the period between sleep and wake of the dreamer is just as important to Marquez’ use of Magical Realism to define a continent as it is for Roh’s desire to define an artistic movement beyond simply comparing it to its predecessor.