FATİH UNIVERSITY
Institute of Social Sciences
MAGICAL REALISM AS A SOCIOPOLITICAL WEAPON:
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND BEN OKRI
A dissertation submitted
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Comparative Literature
by
Hatice Elif DİLER
Supervisor
PROF. DR. MOHAMED BAKARI
Istanbul – 2014
© 2014 Hatice Elif DİLER
All Rights Reserved, 2014
ii
To My Mother and Father
iii
APPROVAL
Student:
Institute:
Department:
Thesis Subject:
Thesis Date:
Hatice Elif DİLER
Institute of Social Sciences
Comparative Literature
Magical Realism as a Sociopolitical Weapon: Gabriel García
Márquez and Ben Okri
January 2014
I certify that this dissertation satisfies all the requirements as a dissertation for the
degree of doctor of philosophy.
……………………………
Prof. Dr. Mohamed BAKARI
Head of Program
This is to certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation submitted for the degree of doctor of
philosophy.
……………………………
Prof. Dr. Mohamed BAKARI
Supervisor
Examining Committee Members
Prof. Dr. Mohamed BAKARI
………………….
Assist. Prof. Dr. Agnes E. BRANDABUR
…………………..
Prof. Dr. Berdal ARAL
…………………..
Prof. Dr. Barry Charles THARAUD
…………………..
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Petru GOLBAN
…………………...
It is approved that this dissertation has been written in compliance with the
formatting rules laid down by the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mehmet KARAKUYU
Director
iv
ABSTRACT
Hatice Elif Diler
January 2014
MAGICAL REALISM AS A SOCIOPOLITICAL WEAPON:
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND BEN OKRI
From the 1960s onwards, magical realism has been one of the significant narrative
modes in postcolonial literature, the aim of which is to disrupt the literary and ideological
concepts imposed in the colonial texts in order to reconstruct them. Magical realism is
considered a powerful device to fight against colonialism and neocolonialism especially in
the developing countries, most of which still suffer from the destructive effects of
colonialism in the postcolonial world. As their hybrid and multicultural nature emboldens
resistance to all types of unilateral political, social, and cultural structures, magical realist
texts are usually subversive and reformist against socially, culturally, and politically
prevailing forces.
The aim of this dissertation is to scrutinize the subversive power of magical realism as
a sociopolitical weapon by comparing two salient examples of magical realist fiction. The
literary texts to be compared in terms of magical realism are One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927- ) and The Famished Road
(1991) by the Nigerian author Ben Okri (1959- ).
Chapter 1 of the dissertation contains detailed historical and theoretical knowledge on
magical realism as a mode of fiction. Chapter 2 attempts to handle García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude under the light of historical and theoretical knowledge presented
in the first chapter. It investigates how magical realism of the novel serves as a sociopolitical
weapon. Chapter 3 tries to analyze Ben Okri’s The Famished Road by comparing it with
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Finally, the conclusion part of the study
v
attempts to summarize the similarities and differences between One Hundred Years of
Solitude and The Famished Road with regards to the characteristics of magical realism as a
weapon for social, cultural and political subversion.
Key Words: Magical Realism, Latin American Literature, West African Literature,
One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Famished Road, Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri,
colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, hybridity, history, politics.
vi
ÖZET
Hatice Elif Diler
Ocak 2014
SOSYOPOLİTİK BİR SİLAH OLARAK BÜYÜLÜ GERÇEKÇİLİK:
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ VE BEN OKRI
1960’lı yıllardan bu yana, büyülü gerçekçilik, amacı sömürgecilik dönemi eserlerinde
empoze edilmiş olan edebi ve ideolojik kavramları yıkmak ve yeniden yapılandırmak olan
sömürgecilik sonrası edebiyatın önemli anlatım şekillerinden biri olmuştur. Büyülü
gerçekçilik, özellikle, halen pek çoğunun sömürgecilik döneminin yıkıcı etkilerini taşıdığı
“Üçüncü Dünya ülkeleri” diye adlandırılan ülkelerin edebiyatında, sömürgecilik ve yeni
sömürgeciliğe karşı savaşta önemli bir araç olarak kabul edilmektedir. Melez ve çokkültürlü
tabiatları gereği her tür tek yönlü politik, sosyal ve kültürel yapıya direniş gösterdiklerinden,
büyülü gerçekçi metinler, sosyal, politik ve kültürel güçler karşısında daima yıkıcı ve
yenilikçi olmuşlardır.
Bu tezin amacı, iki önemli büyülü gerçekçi eseri kıyaslamaya tabi tutarak,
sosyopolitik bir silah olarak büyülü gerçekçiliğin yıkıcı gücünü araştırmaya çalışmaktır.
Büyülü gerçekçilik anlatım şekli açısından kıyaslanacak edebi metinler, Kolombiyalı yazar
Gabriel García Márquez’ın Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık (1967) isimli eseri ile Nijeryalı yazar Ben
Okri’nin Aç Yol (1991) isimli eseridir.
Tezin birinci bölümü, bir anlatım şekli olan büyülü gerçekçilik hakkında tarihsel ve
teorik bilgileri kapsamaktadır. İkinci bölüm, ilk bölümde verilen bilgiler ışığında, Gabriel
García Márquez’ın Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık isimli eserini ele almaktadır. Bu bölüm, söz konusu
eserde büyülü gerçekçiliğin sosyopolitik bir silah olarak ne şekilde kullanıldığını saptamaya
çalışmaktadır. Üçüncü bölüm, Ben Okri’nin Aç Yol isimli eserini García Márquez’ın
Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık isimli eseriyle kıyaslama yaparak inceler. Söz konusu iki eserin büyülü
vii
gerçekçiliği sosyopolitik bir silah olarak kullanmalarındaki benzerlikler ve farklılıklar,
çalışmanın sonuç bölümünde özetlenmektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Büyülü Gerçekçilik, Latin Amerika Edebiyatı, Batı Afrika
Edebiyatı, Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık, Aç Yol, Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri, sömürgecilik, yeni
sömürgecilik, sömürgecilik sonrası edebiyat, melezlik, tarih, politika.
viii
CONTENTS
Approval Page………………………………………………………………………………iv
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………v
Özet………………………………………………………………………………………….vii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………...ix
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………..…….…….x
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….1
CHAPTER 1. MAGICAL REALISM AS A MODE OF FICTION
Historical Background of Magical Realism……………………………………….9
Magical Realism versus Other Literary Traditions……………………………..30
Characteristics and Techniques of Magical Realism………………………...….54
Types of Magical Realism…………………………………………………………70
Postmodernist and Postcolonial Magical Realism………………………83
Postmodernist Magical Realism…………………………….…...86
Postcolonial Magical Realism…………………………….……...92
CHAPTER 2. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
The Latin American Boom……………………………………………….……...102
Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude…………….…..109
One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Magical Realist Text …………....123
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Politics, History, and Society………..159
CHAPTER 3. THE FAMISHED ROAD
Nigerian Literature in English in the Last Fifty Years………………………...209
Ben Okri and The Famished Road………………………………………………237
The Famished Road as a Magical Realist Text………………………....257
The Famished Road: Politics, History, and Society……………………286
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….…...338
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….…350
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On my road to preparing and writing this dissertation I have received a great deal of
help from my teachers, family, and friends. All of these people have sharpened my
understanding and reading in their various ways. First and foremost, I am very much obliged
to my supervisor Dr. Mohamed Bakari and my co-supervisor Dr. Clare Brandabur. Without
their help, support, guidance, encouragement, and illumination this dissertation would never
have materalized. Whenever I asked for favors, both of my advisors were always ready to
respond with their extraordinary generosity, goodwill, and erudition. It is a great honor for
me to follow in their footsteps.
For their crucial and judicious assistance and guidance, I must express my special
thanks to my teachers, including Dr. Barry Charles Tharaud, Dr. Kimberly Anne BrooksLewis, Dr. Carl Jeffrey Boon, Dr. Özlem Özen, and Dr. Sezai Coşkun. All of them have
contributed much during my doctoral studies. I will always be grateful to them.
I am indebted very much to my parents for their extraordinary patience, generosity,
affection, and support. Last but not least, I would like to thank my dear friends Derya Emir,
Emin Emir, Dr. Petru Golban, and Dr. Tatiana Golban for their help, support and lifelong
friendship. They have always been a great source of motivation for me during my studies. In
short, this dissertation is not solely my product. It has come into existence as a result of
collective endeavor. However, I alone am responsible for the views in this dissertation. The
shortcomings of the dissertation are all my own.
x
INTRODUCTION
All over the world, remarkable changes and developments have occured in so-called high
culture, such as literature, music, painting, and architecture since the 1950s. In the field of
literature in the post-World War II period, the world has witnessed the emergence and
development of two widely-known movements: postmodernism and postcolonialism. Magic
(or magical) realism, which is “a historical product of the discourses of modernism and
colonialism,”1 has been a significant narrative mode existing in the center of both
postmodernism and postcolonialism. As the meeting-ground of the two literary movements
that strictly deal with cultural and identity politics, magical realism has been a hybrid and
multicultural mode of fiction in its very nature. The narrative mode blends magical, mystic,
mythic, and fantastic elements with realistic ones in a realistic atmosphere and thus brings
together seeming contradictions such as real and fantasy, mind and body, spirit and matter,
and life and death. Keeping the ontological status of these binary oppositions equal in a
realistic environment, magical realism aims to attain a profound understanding of reality.
While trying to get an understanding of reality, it has to demolish, transpose, and surpass all
the boundaries existing between these contradictions by taking advantage of its hybrid and
transcultural nature.
Although the term “magical realism” was first used by European critics and men of
letters, and many instances of the mode can easily be found in the fiction of some European
authors such as E.T.A. Hoffman, Franz Kafka, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Italo
Calvino, Roland Firbank, Michal Ajvaz, Joanne Harris, Yaşar Kemal, Günter Grass, and
Edward Upward, magical realism is associated with and attributed to Latin America, “where
1
Dean J. Irvine, “Fables of the Plague Years: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Magic Realism in
Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude],” ARIEL 29.4 (October 1998), accessed 29
September 2010, GALE| H1420031435.
1
true accounts are as bizarre as fiction.”2 As a “nonmimetic, non-western”3 narrative mode, it
has been regarded as “a revitalizing force that comes often from the ‘periphery’ regions of
Western culture”4 such as the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. It
has attempted to write back to the center and to carry the “periphery” into the “center.” As a
reaction of the periphery to dominant powers and discourses, magical realism has effectively
served the politics of postcolonial literature. As commonly known, postcolonial literature
tries to subvert the imperial privilege of the “center” so as to give a chance for silenced
people in the periphery to express themselves to those exploiters who have been considered
superior for unwarranted reasons for centuries. In postcolonial literature the aim is to disrupt
the literary and philosophical concepts imposed through colonial texts and to deconstruct and
reconstruct them. Magical realism has been one of the most effective devices to provide
political, social, and cultural subversion: “Magical realist texts are subversive: their inbetweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural
structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to writers in postcolonial
cultures.”5 As indicated in the quotation, magical realism provides cultural, social, and
political criticism. It has been a useful device to criticize society, especially the élite.
Magical realist texts are usually disruptive and reformist against socially, culturally, and
politically prevailing forces. Because of its power of subversion, magical realism can be
considered an “arme miraculeuse” [miraculous weapon]6 for most of the authors to represent
2
Carole Hamilton, “Overview of One Hundred Years of Solitude,” In Literature of Developing
Nations for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literature of Developing
Nations, ed. Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L. LaBlanc, and Ira Mark Milne, Vol. 2 (Detroit: Gale
Group, 2000), accessed 6 October 2010, GALE| H1420031434.
3
Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” Cultural Critique 7 (Autumn 1987): 157.
4
Wendy B. Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC
and London: Duke UP, 1995), 165.
5
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,”
introduction to Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC
and London: Duke UP,1995), 6.
6
Lydie Moudileno, “Magical realism: ‘arme miraculeuse’ for the African novel?” Research in African
Literatures 37.1 (2006), accessed 3 February 2011, GALE| A143009637.
2
the social, cultural, and political realities of their postcolonial countries. According to Homi
Bhabha, magical realism has been “the literary language of the emergent postcolonial
world.”7
This dissertation attempts to analyze the ways in which magical realism serves as a
reaction to colonial and neocolonial discourses and the ways in which magical realism fights
against political, social, socio-economic, and cultural corruptions and rottenness in
postcolonial countries and becomes a useful device of subversion for postcolonial literature.
Accordingly, the objective of the dissertation is to scrutinize the subversive power of
magical realism as a sociopolitical weapon by comparing two salient examples of magical
realist fiction by two well-known authors from two different continents. The literary texts to
be compared in terms of magical realism are One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the
Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and The Famished Road (1991) by the Nigerian
author Ben Okri.
Latin American literature is often associated merely with magical realism. It is
possible to consider Latin American magical realism “the first contemporary literary mode to
break the hegemony of the center by forcing the center to imitate the periphery.”8 Being the
first contemporary literary mode to fight against the Western discourses, to give voice to the
silenced periphery, to retell history from the eyes of that periphery, and to overcome social,
political, and economic injustice, magical realism has been especially concerned with social
and political issues by intertwining Western consciousness with Latin American
consciousness. Moreover, as suggested by Aizenberg, Latin American magical realism has
also allowed a vivacious, innovative intertextuality of the margins – especially between Latin
America and Africa.
7
Homi Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation,” introduction to Nation and Narration, by Homi Bhabha, ed.
(London: Routledge, 2000), 7.
8
Edna Aizenberg, “The Famished Road: Magical Realism and the Search for Social Equity,”
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 43 (1995), accessed 3 February 2011, GALE|
H1100072520.
3
The most renowned exponent of magical realism from Latin America is Gabriel
García Márquez, the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature. García Márquez’s magnum
opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was originally published as Cien años de
soledad in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1967, is generally considered the masterpiece of
magical realism. In his novel, through the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy and the
combination of many mythical, historical, political, and social approaches, García Márquez
captures the essence of not only native Colombian or Latin American man, but also universal
man. According to Aizenberg, in One Hundred Years of Solitude,
García Márquez manipulates the discourse of the marvelous in order
to reproduce, puncture, and overcome the unreality imposed by the
colonialist enterprise. This enterprise first read the New World
through the distorted glass of a European imperialism fed by a
medieval worldview, and it went on doing so, even though it was the
persistence of the “fabulous” stereotypes and the ongoing madness of
a colonialist history that kept Latin America “magical.”9
As indicated in the quotation above, to achieve his postcolonial aims, Gabriel García
Márquez uses the sociopolitical power of magical realism in his novel. His way of using
magical realism’s postcolonial facet has been a substantial example for not only Latin
American authors but also many postcolonial authors from all over the world. As a Nigerian
man of letters, Ben Okri is one of the authors on whom the effects of Latin American
magical realism are clear: “Latin Americans helped Okri to release energies already present
in Africa and African literature, to move traditions of contemporary African literature
ahead.”10
9
Aizenberg, “The Famished Road,” GALE| H1100072520.
Aizenberg, “The Famished Road,” GALE| H1100072520.
10
4
As is the case in Latin America, in Africa likewise, “postcolonial literature (from
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Okri) has attempted to challenge and debunk the legitimizing
narrative archetypes of Western culture and its dominant ideology.”11 Ben Okri is one of the
leading figures in contemporary African literature. It is not surprising that Okri has been
influenced by Latin American magical realism to express the social, economic, political, and
cultural realities of his country, Nigeria, because Latin America and Africa have similar
colonial histories. His well-known novel, The Famished Road (1991), was awarded the
Booker Prize in 1991. In The Famished Road, Ben Okri uses the techniques of magical
realism as a device of sociopolitical and literary revolt. As in the true fashion of Latin
American magical realism, Okri syncretizes African and Western cultures in his writing to
tell untold stories, to underline the corruption in postmodern Nigerian politics, and to
criticize the realities of neocolonial political struggles. Although Okri has been greatly
inspired by the politics of Latin American magical realism, he creates his own type of
magical realism that takes a different direction from García Márquez’s style. In his distinct
type of magical realism, Okri enriches magical realism’s capacity to criticize foreign
colonialism and domestic neocolonialism.
Although Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Okri are from different continents, both of
them have chosen magical realism in their fiction. The main concern of these two authors
has been social, economic, and political injustice and corruption in their postcolonial
countries. Focusing on the dysfunctionality of their postcolonial societies, One Hundred
Years of Solitude and The Famished Road demonstrate that it is not easy for the colonized to
recover abruptly from the destructive effects of a bygone colonialism.
This dissertation explores the ways in which magical realism in the fiction of Gabriel
García Márquez and Ben Okri resists the violent agitation of the colonial past and
11
Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, “Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road,” Research in African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 41.
5
neocolonialism in Colombia (by extension in Latin America) and Nigeria (by extension in
Africa) as two examples of the so-called Third World countries, most of which still suffer
from the destructive effects of colonialism and neocolonialism in the postcolonial world. It
uses postcolonial theory to investigate the political, social, and cultural strength of magical
realism as a literary mode. As the dissertation will be based on comparative analysis, it
mostly takes advantage of comparative literary theory. All concepts, terms, and ideas are
first discussed and then analyzed through similarities and differences.
Chapter 1 of the dissertation contains detailed theoretical knowledge on magical
realism as a mode of fiction. After recounting the historical background of the mode and its
development until the 21st century, it attempts to compile many different definitions of the
term magical realism, together with its variations such as “magic realism,” “marvelous real,”
and “marvelous realism,” made by various theorists, contrasting it with other literary
traditions and arguing what it is or is not. Then, the chapter attempts to list the general
characteristics and techniques of the mode that will be taken a basis in my analysis of García
Márquez’s and Okri’s novels. It also projects explanations about the miscellaneous forms of
the mode developed in various countries of the world. As well as the different types of
magical realism such as “mythical,” “metaphysical,” “scholarly,” “anthropological,”
“ontological,” and “epistemological,” the variants of the mode, such as marvelous realism,
magic realism, and grotesque realism, are also investigated in the chapter. The analysis of
postmodernist and postcolonial magical realism constitutes the subject of the last subchapter, which scrutinizes the importance of magical realism as a postcolonial and
postmodern literary mode. The sub-chapter tries to determine how magical realism serves the
aims of postcolonial literature, becomes subversive, and fights against political, social, and
cultural corruptions.
Chapter 2 of the dissertation examines García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude under the light of historical and theoretical knowledge presented in Chapter I of the
6
study. The chapter starts with an explanation about the phenomenon of the Latin American
Boom in the 1960s. After determining the place of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the
Boom, the chapter investigates the novel as a magical realist text defining each characteristic
of it. Then, through references to the socio-political history of Colombia, One Hundred
Years of Solitude is examined to reveal the characteristic features of Gabriel García Márquez
in his use of magical realism as a sociopolitical weapon. Consequently, the aim of the
chapter is to discover how magical realism functions in García Márquez’s masterpiece and
how the author creates a counter-colonialist, counter-neocolonialist, and counter-imperialist
narrative discourse. The chapter also scrutinizes the effect of the concept of history in One
Hundred Years of Solitude.
Chapter 3, as the last chapter of the study, attempts to analyze Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road by comparing it with García Márquez’s novel. Following the structure of
Chapter 2, this chapter starts with a short review of Nigerian literature written in the English
language in the last fifty years. In this way, it tries to determine the place of The Famished
Road and its author both in Nigerian and West African literature. While examining the novel
as a magical realist text, the chapter also reveals the influences of Latin American magical
realism and the effects of García Márquez’s novel on Ben Okri, and it explains the way in
which The Famished Road reflects these influences. Working on similarities and differences
between the two novels, the last chapter observes the way in which Okri’s type of magical
realism is used as a reaction to colonialism and neocolonialism, the way in which it becomes
subversive, and the way in which it provides decolonization in The Famished Road. Finally,
the conclusion of the study summarizes the ideas and concepts discussed throughout the
dissertation. It explains the similarities and differences between One Hundred Years of
Solitude and The Famished Road in terms of magical realism as a weapon for social,
cultural, and political subversion.
7
Finally, I would like to indicate that I have chosen to study this subject because it is
new and no researchers have compared the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Okri.
The comparison of Latin American and West African magical realism in terms of the sociopolitical power of magical realism will be useful not only for literature but also for other
disciplines such as politics and sociology. I hope my dissertation will help those who
research Latin American and African magical realism.
8
CHAPTER 1
MAGICAL REALISM AS A MODE OF FICTION
Historical Background of Magical Realism
Magical realism, which is sometimes defined as a mode or form of narrative fiction,
an aesthetic style, a trend, and even as a movement, has been one of the most frequently used
terms both in art and in literature since the 1960s. Since its golden age in the 1980s, the
opinions of critics about the genealogy of the term magical realism have been divided
because the term is one of the most slippery terms in literature.
While searching for the origins of the terms magical realism, magic realism, and
marvellous realism, Maggie Ann Bowers, the author of Magic(al) Realism,, regards Europe
as the birthplace of the term and traces its origins to the beginning of the twentieth century.
She scrutinizes the history of the term and determines three fundamental turning points in
history, with representative figures for each period:
The history of magic(al) realism […] is a complicated story spanning
eight decades with three principal turning points and many characters.
The first period is set in Germany in the 1920s, the second period in
Central America in the 1940s and the third period, beginning in 1955
in Latin America, continues internationally to this day. All these
periods are linked by literary and artistic figures whose works spread
the influence of magic(al) realism around Europe, from Europe to
Latin America, and from Latin America to the rest of the world. The
key figures in the development of the term are the German art critic
Franz Roh best known for his work in the 1920s, the mid-twentiethcentury Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, the Italian writer Massimo
Bontempelli from the 1920s and 1930s, the mid-twentieth-century
9
Latin American literary critic Angel Flores and the late twentiethcentury Latin American novelist Gabriel García Márquez. 12
As suggested by Bowers, when the genealogy of the term “magic/ magical realism”
is searched for, it is possible to encounter in many sources the name of the German art critic
and influential theorist and critic of avant-garde film and photography, Franz Roh (18901965), as the creator of the term. During the Weimar Republic in Germany, the term magical
realism was first used by Franz Roh to refer to post-expressionist visual art. In his 1925
article entitled Nach-expressionismus, magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten
europäischer Malerei [After Expressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of the Newest
European Painting], he used the term to explain the characteristics of the work of German
Post-Expressionist artists of the period – although the German museum director Gustav
Hartlaub used the term Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] to refer to the same work. 13 In
the 1925 article, which was translated into Spanish in 1927 and published in the magazine
Revista de Occidente, which was founded by the Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist,
Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Franz Roh employs the term magic realism to refer to the
return to realism in Post-Expressionist painting:
The premise behind Roh’s analytical and theoretical work on magic
realism, with which he attempted to define the predominant art
movement in the Weimar Republic, was the need to identify one
characteristic different from those of the influential movements of
expressionism, such as the painting of Vincent Van Gogh, and
surrealism, such as the painting of Salvador Dalí. 14
12
Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 7.
Irene Guenther, “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic,” in
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London:
Duke UP, 1995), 33.
14
Bowers, 10.
13
10
Roh explains “the ways in which the Post-Expressionist painting of the 1920s returns
to a renewed delight in real objects even as it integrates the formal innovations and spiritual
thrust of Expressionism, which had shown an exaggerated preference for fantastic,
extraterrestrial, remote objects.”15 Roh notes that he prefers the term Magic Realism to the
terms Ideal Realism, Verism, or Neoclassicism to refer to the characteristics of recent
painting and to the return to realism from fantasy (although the new style is not completely
realistic). He adds that with the word magic, he means “the mystery does not descend to the
represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it.”16 For Roh, in this art movement,
“humanity seems destined to oscillate forever between devotion to the world of dreams and
adherence to the world of reality.”17 While describing this new art movement that was
contemporary with surrealism, Roh’s aim was to “encourage the artist to take the
psychoanalytical influences of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung from surrealism and to
combine them with an endeavour to represent the object clearly with all its ‘wondrous
meaning.’”18
According to Irene Guenther, “the concept of ‘magischer Idealismus’ (magical
idealism) in German philosophy is an old one,”19 and the terms magical realist and magical
idealist were first used by the Romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis (1772-1801) at the
end of the eighteenth century. Guenther’s ideas are strengthened by Christopher Warnes in
Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. According to
Warnes, Franz Roh was not the first but the second person to use the term magical realism.
In his attempt to retrace the roots and history of magical realism, Warnes indicates that “the
first person to write of a magical realist was not, as is commonly thought, the German art
15
Zamora and Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC and London:
Duke UP, 1995), 15.
16
Franz Roh, “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism,” trans. Faris, in Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 16.
17
Roh, 17.
18
Bowers, 11.
19
Guenther, 34.
11
historian, Franz Roh in 1925, but Novalis around 1798.”20 Warnes argues that Friedrich
Freiherr von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pen-name of Novalis, was the first to use the
term magical realist “to describe an idealized philosophical protagonist capable of
integrating ordinary phenomena and magical meanings” 21 although he did not develop a
complete theory of the mode. Warnes attempts to explain the meaning and genealogy of the
term magical realism as follows:
In 1798 Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, the German Romantic
poet and philosopher better known by his pen-name of Novalis,
envisaged in his notebooks two kinds of prophet who might live
outside the boundaries of enlightened discourse without losing touch
with the real. He suggested that such prophets should be called a
“magischer Idealist” and a “magischer Realist” – a magical idealist
and a magical realist. He never developed the idea of magical realism,
preferring the related concept, magical idealism. In the 1920’s the
term magical realism re-appeared in Germany in the art-historical
criticism of Franz Roh, and in the political philosophy of Ernst Jünger,
and also in Italy in the work of the critic and writer, Massimo
Bontempelli. And from the 1940s it came to designate a mode of
narrative fiction, originally Latin American but now global, in which
magical and realist elements co-exist with equal ontological status.22
As seen in the quotation above, the term magical realism, after having been used by
Novalis for the first time in 1798, was first used in art criticism by Franz Roh in 1925, in
20
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence
(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19.
21
Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis
Borges and Gabriel García Márquez,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Stephen M. Hart and
Wen-chin Ouyang (Woodridge: Tamesis, 2005), 28.
22
Warnes, 20.
12
political philosophy by the German author Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), and in literature by the
Italian author and critic Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960). These ideas are strengthened by
Bowers, who explains that Roh’s term magic realism became influential first in Italy with the
work of Bontempelli, and then in Latin America. Massimo Bontempelli, who established a
periodical called 900. Novecento in 1926 and who was very much influenced by fascism,
attempted to use magic realist writing so as to motivate the Italian nation and to bring an
international outlook to Italian culture. Furthermore, magic realism was used as a device for
creating a common consciousness because, for Bontempelli, it particularly provided “the
prime function of a properly modern literature […] on the collective consciousness by
opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality.”23 Thus, Bontempelli was
regarded as the first magical realist writer in the West while his writing was closer to the
surreal and the fantastic than to magical realism. Bontempelli influenced two famous Latin
American magical realist authors, Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) and Miguel Angel Asturias
(1906-2001), who were both highly exposed to European avant-garde movements –
especially to Surrealism – when they were living in Europe. It is true that, especially with the
translation of Roh’s Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus into Spanish in 1927 and
its publication in Madrid by Revista de Occidente, Roh’s magic realism became popular
among Latin American authors such as Miguel Angel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges (18991986), who were reading the publications of this magazine.
The above explanations about the genealogy of the term magical realism show that the
term was first used in Continental Europe by European philosophers, men of letters, critics,
and art-historians, and it grew in the light of the European avant-garde, which targets
exploration, innovation, and invention in art and literature: “magic realism is the progeny of
the continental European avant-garde (post-expressionism, surrealism).”24 However, magical
23
24
Robert Dombroski, quoted in Bowers, 58.
Theo D’haen, quoted in Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
13
realism as a mode of fiction originated not in Europe but in Latin America, where it has a
close connection with postcoloniality. Although the term was used to refer to some European
fiction until the 1980s, afterward it has been used to refer specifically to Latin American
literary works. As the birthplace of this mode of narrative fiction, today Latin American
literature is often associated merely with this style. Postcolonial Latin American literature
has established its own identity with the help of magical realism.
For Christopher Warnes, magical realism is postcolonial romance. Warnes attempts to
relate the genre to the European romance tradition. He claims that “emphasizing magical
realism’s engagement with European literary models does not automatically undermine the
distinctive postcolonial possibilities of the mode.”25 On the contrary, for Warnes, regarding
magical realism as postcolonial romance attracts our attention to the history of imperialism
and colonialism and proves that magical realism “originates as a postcolonial response.” 26
According to Warnes, as magical realism has its root in the romance tradition, these two
genres share a lot in common: both magical realism and romance “presume textual
equivalence between the domains of natural and supernatural.” Magical realism and romance
(especially historical romance) both reflect “nostalgic longing for and an imaginary return to
a world that is past or passing away.” Mentioning the capacity of magical realism for
“subverting or providing alternatives to an emergent world order,”27 Warnes indicates that
for the margins, magical realism is a tool to fight against the center in postcolonial literature.
Thus, both magical realism and romance provide resistance to modernization and to the
victory of modernity. Magical realism, as a postcolonial device, is in the habit of writing
back to “a perceived historical alliance between reason, realism, and colonialism.” 28
25
Warnes, 39.
Warnes, 36.
27
Warnes, 30-32.
28
Warnes, 19-20.
26
14
Similarly, romance tradition is opposed to realism. Actually, the decline of medieval
romance gave way to the rise of narrative realism.
After tracing its origins back to the romance tradition in Europe, Warnes emphasizes
that Latin America has always been the unavoidable starting point for magical realism, and
in the key texts of Miquel Ángel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier, magical
realism is present. It is true that all three authors are the cornerstones of modern Latin
American literature, and their works are closely related to magical realism. However,
magical realism was born in Latin America long before these authors engaged with magical
realism:
Contemporary writing in Latin America begins by being, if not
postmodernist, then at least para-modernist, for it has never
accommodated, feature for feature, the hegemonic Western modernist
episteme from its inception in the early seventeenth century to its high
modernist swan song of the first three decades of the twentieth
century.29
As understood from the quotation above, Latin American literature has never been
attuned to Western culture and literature and has always protested against Western
hegemony since the beginning of the seventeenth century. With the Age of Discovery, which
started early in the fifteenth century, America became the continent where European
colonialism first took place. As soon as the European colonizers started to invade the
Americas, resistance by the indigenous peoples of both North and South America began. As
suggested by Richard Gott, resistance by the indigenous peoples “had occurred at intervals
since the arrival of white settlers at the end of the sixteenth century.”30 When it is considered
29
Doris Sommer and George Yudice, “Latin American Literature from the ‘Boom’ on,” in Theory of
the Novel. A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP,
2000), 881.
30
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (New York: Verso, 2011), 16.
15
that “post-colonialism […] begins from the very first moment of colonial contact” and it is
“the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being,”31 it is possible to
claim that postcolonial attitudes against colonization started first in Latin American
countries, as South America was the first place to be colonized by the Spanish and
Portuguese colonizers. To save Latin American identity, culture, mythology, and literature,
and to resist European hegemony and colonization, since the mid-sixteenth century, Latin
American men of letters and intellectuals consciously and deliberately deviated from
European models imposed on them. By doing so, they could derive their own expression,
which carved out the origins of magical realism as a mode of fiction. When the explanations
above are taken into consideration, we see that The Popol Vuh and The Codex Chimalpopoca
were both examples of a powerful postcolonial resistance centuries before the term
postcolonialism was invented. When these texts are regarded as the origins of magical
realism, it may also be proved, as offered by Shannin Schroeder, “magical realism existed
before it existed, that is, before we know what to call it.”32
The Native American peoples such as the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Aymara, who
preceded the Incas, were “those who were living in Central and South America when the
Spanish invaded and conquered them in the 1500s.”33 As far as Latin America is concerned,
when the Spaniards invaded Central and South America and started to conquer the Native
American peoples living in these parts of the New World, they burned all the important cities
and libraries of the natives whom they considered “pagans.” The Spaniards destroyed all
libraries because they thought the pagan materials would be harmful for Christians. The
Native American peoples were converted to Christianity by Spanish missionaries and taught
to write using the Latin alphabet. The Mayans inhabited what are now Guatemala and the
31
32
Bill Ashcroft, et al., eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 117.
Shannin Schroeder, Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004),
4.
33
Donna Rosenberg, World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics, 3rd edition
(Illinois: NTC/ Contemporary Publishing, 1999), 568.
16
Yucatan Peninsula, and were one of the most important Mesoamerican civilizations. The
Maya were extremely good at mathematics, art, architecture, and astronomy, and they had a
written hieroglyphic language that was used in writing books. When the Maya were
conquered by the Spaniards in A.D. 1524, they faced the danger of losing their cultural
traditions. To keep alive their cultural traditions, including their mythology, systems of
belief, and worldview, they produced The Popol Vuh, the most famous and greatest
surviving Mayan document. The Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya people of
Guatemala, was anonymously written in the Mayan language using the Latin phonetic
alphabet between 1554 and 1558. This ancient epic was written in the Latin alphabet to save
it from the Spaniards, who were destroying all the documents written in the Mayan
hieroglyphic language. Thus, telling the Mayan creation myths, The Popol Vuh can be
regarded as one of the first examples of magical realist texts providing postcolonial
resistance.
The first part of The Popol Vuh is a creation myth and seems to be influenced by
Christianity. Although at the very beginning of the text it openly states that “this account we
shall now write under the law of God and Christianity,”34 it actually describes the
polytheistic Mayan religion rather than Christianity. As opposed to the patriarchal Christian
God, in Mayan religion the God has an androgynous nature as easily seen in the following
lines taken from The Popol Vuh:
This is the beginning of the ancient traditions of this place called
Quiché. […] Here we shall gather the manifestation, the declaration,
the account of the sowing and the dawning by the Framer and the
Shaper, She Who Has Borne Children and He Who Has Begotten
Sons, as they are called; along with Hunaphu Possum and Hunaphu
34
Allan J. Christenson, trans., Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya People, electronic version
of original 2003 publication (Mesoweb, 2007), 55.
17
Coyote, Great White Peccary and Coati, Sovereign and Quetzal
Serpent, Heart of Lake and Heart of Sea, Creator of the Green Earth
and Creator of the Blue Sky, as they are called. These collectively are
evoked and given expression as the Midwife and the Patriarch, whose
names are Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, the Protector and the Shelterer,
Twice Midwife and Twice Patriarch, as they are called in Quiché
traditions. 35
In the quotation above, the names of the “Midwife” and the “Patriarch” are given in
reverse order: Xmucane is the name of the “Midwife” and Xpiyacoc is the name of the
“Patriarch.” The quotation proves that the Maya deities have an androgynous nature and the
Maya religion is polytheistic. Describing the belief systems of their own under the guise of
Christianity, the Maya nation cleverly resisted all systems of belief and ways of life imposed
by the Europeans. In the case of The Popol Vuh it is obvious that the mythology of the Maya
people becomes the best tool to fight against colonialism.
Another example of Native American ancient epics that resisted colonialism in the
sixteenth century was the Nahuatl manuscript, The Codex Chimalpopoca, which is the
mythology and history of the Aztecs, who inhabited central Mexico from the 14th to the 16th
centuries. Before the Aztecs, the Toltec people lived in the northern part of Central America
from A.D. 900 to 1200. The language spoken by the Toltec people was Nahuatl. The Aztecs
themselves did not create myths, but followed the myths of the Toltec people in the Nahuatl
language. In the wake of the Spanish Conquest of 1521, as was done with the Maya people,
the Spaniards burned all the documents of the Aztecs that might impare the work of
conversion. The Spanish missionaries tried to teach the more educated Aztecs to write using
the Roman alphabet. Thus, the Aztecs attempted to record their myths and legends using
their own language but writing in the Latin alphabet, as did the Maya people.
35
Christenson, 50-51.
18
The Nahuatl manuscript, The Codex Chimalpopoca includes two different anonymous
texts written by different authors: Annals of Cuauhtitlan, dated 1570, and Legend of the
Suns, dated 1558. The postcolonial feature of The Codex Chimalpopoca is akin to that of The
Popol Vuh. Like The Popol Vuh, The Codex Chimalpopoca also acts as a parody of the
Bible. In Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the old Aztec gods are commonly described as devils and
sorcerers while Quetzalcoalt, the major Toltec deity, is depicted as “the somewhat Christlike
deity.”36
Both The Codex Chimalpopoca, the mythology of the Aztecs, and The Popol Vuh, the
mythology of the Maya, are the first examples of postcolonial resistance that took place as
early as the sixteenth century. The influence of these mythologies is clear in the magical
realist works of contemporary Latin American authors. For example, in the works of Miguel
Angel Asturias (1899-1974), a Guatemalan author and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize
for literature, “the influence of the Popol Vuh […] is a constant. All great mythologies, the
great cosmogonies of the new continent, inspire the images in his prose.”37 According to
Schroeder, Asturias proved to be “the first to define his own Latin American writing as
magical realism.”38
The claim that magical realism originated from Latin America is also strengthened by
Gabriel García Márquez, a skillful master of magical realism. For García Márquez, the first
masterpiece of magical realism was the Diary of Christopher Columbus:
[I consider the diary as such] because in it one reads of fabulous
plants, of mythical animals, and of beings with supernatural powers
which could not possibly have existed. Columbus, probably was a con
36
John Bierhorst, trans., History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1992), 1.
37
Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois
Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham,
NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 107.
38
Schroeder, 2.
19
man above all else, for everything he said was intended to excite the
King and Queen so that they would continue to finance his
expeditions of discovery. In any case, however, this text is the first
work of the literature of the Caribbean. 39
García Márquez extends his ideas in his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance lecture. García
Márquez notes that the account of the southern lands of America written by Antonio
Pigafetta, an Italian explorer who served Ferdinand Magellan on his first voyage around the
world, was far from being fantastic; conversely, it was “strictly accurate.” According to
García Márquez, the roots of magical realism can be found in the account written by Antonio
Pigafetta: “This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our
present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age.
The Chroniclers of the Indies left us countless others. […] Our independence from Spanish
domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness.”40 As indicated by García Márquez
in his own ironic style, fantasy and exoticism, which are embedded in magical realism, have
always been core features of Latin America. These features, which are ironically called
“madness” by García Márquez in the quotation above, existed in Latin America before,
during, and after Western colonization. The fact remains that Latin America has never
existed without these core features.
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (1904-1980), a Cuban “musicologist, journalist, critic,
leader in the Afro-Cuban and vanguardia [avant-garde] movements in Cuba in the 1920s,
39
Gabriel García Márquez, quoted in Michael Palencia-Roth, “Intertextualities: Three Metamorphoses
of Myth in The Autumn of the Patriarch,” in Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, ed.
Julio Ortega (Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1988), 42.
40
García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” Nobel Lecture 1982, trans. Marina Castañeda, in
Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, ed. Ortega (Texas: The University of Texas Press,
1988), 87-88.
20
associate of the surrealists in Paris in the 1930s,”41 was the person who described the term
“lo real maravilloso americano” [the American marvelous real(ity)] as something inherent in
Latin American culture. In 1949, Carpentier became important in the history of magical
realism with his coinage of the term lo real maravilloso americano “as a concept that gives
access to a deeper, more authentic understanding of Latin American reality.”42 He first
considered this idea in the Venezuelan magazine El Nacional and then developed his theory
in the preface to the first edition of his book El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This
World].43 As indicated by Luis Leal, today it is accepted that “the existence of the marvelous
real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American
literature.”44 Edwidge Danticat claims that “the real marvelous, which we have come to
know as magical realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as it does in this
novel. It is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken
and the unspoken.”45
Being referred to as a “marvelous realist” novel by its author, The Kingdom of This
World was written by Carpentier in 1949, transforming him into a well-known Latin
American author. The novel is an epic story that merges myth with detailed facts in “a
sympathetic fictional history of the Haitian Revolution.”46 The events take place before,
during, and after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), told from the viewpoint of the
41
Regina Janes, “Alejo Carpentier: Overview,” in Reference Guide to World Literature, ed. Lesley
Henderson, 2nd edition (New York: St. James Press, 1995), accessed 31 January 2012, GALE|
H1420001424.
42
Susan Isabel Stein, “The Kingdom of This World: Overview,” in Reference Guide to World
Literature, ed. Lesley Henderson, 2nd edition (New York: St. James Press, 1995), accessed 31 January
2012, GALE| H1420001425.
43
See Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006).
44
Luis Leal, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” trans. Faris, in Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 122.
45
Edwidge Danticat, introduction to The Kingdom of This World, by Carpentier, trans. Harriet de Onís
(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), ix.
46
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re-reading of
Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World,” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (Summer
2004), accessed 31 January 2012, GALE| H1420082930.
21
protagonist Ti Noël, who is introduced as a slave. The Kingdom of This World examines the
themes of racism, colonialism, hybridization, voodoo, ethnicity, violence, revolution,
sexuality, and history, and was produced as a result of Carpentier’s ambition to retrace the
roots of Latin America.
In “On the Marvelous Real in America,” which served as the preface to The Kingdom
of This World, Carpentier attempts to make a comparison between European Surrealism and
Latin American Marvelous Realism. Considering European magic realism artificial and
“tiresome pretension,”47 Carpentier indicates what he calls lo real maravilloso americano is
“a uniquely American form of magical realism.”48 Carpentier explains what he means by the
term “the marvelous real” as follows:
This seemed particularly obvious to me during my stay in Haiti, where
I found myself in daily contact with something that could be defined
as the marvelous real. […] I found the marvelous real at every turn.
Furthermore, I thought, the presence and vitality of this marvelous real
was not the unique privilege of Haiti but the heritage of all of
America, where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of
our cosmogonies. The marvelous real is found at every stage in the
lives of men who inscribed dates in the history of the continent and
who left the names that we still carry.49
As easily absorbed from the quotation above, seeing “the unique aspects of Latin
America in its racial and cultural mixture rather than in the flora and fauna,”50 Carpentier
describes the “marvelous real” as something in the very essence of Latin America. He says
47
Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” trans. Tanya Huntington and L.P. Zamora, in
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris, (Durham, NC and London:
Duke UP, 1995), 84.
48
Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 75.
49
Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real,” 86-87.
50
Bowers, 13.
22
that he is using the term to refer to “certain things that have occurred in America, certain
characteristics of its landscape, certain elements that have nourished my work.”51 Therefore,
he concludes with a rhetorical question: “what is the entire history of America if not a
chronicle of the marvelous real?”52 meaning that “in the social reality of Latin America,
‘realism’ is already necessarily a ‘magic realism.’”53
Alejo Carpentier, in “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” which was given as a
lecture in 1975 and then published in 1981, tries to expand his theory on “lo real maravilloso
americano.” He attempts to combine the concept of the baroque, as an art form, with the
concept of marvelous realism in this article. By doing so, he mostly refers to the hybridity of
Latin America. Carpentier starts with miscellaneous definitions of the term “baroque” such
as “synonym of Churrigueresque, Gallic in its extravagance,” “style of ornamentation
characterized by the profusion of volutes, scrolls, and other adornments in which the curved
line predominates,” and “overladen, mannerist, Gongorist, euphemistic, conceptualist.”54
According to Carpentier, the baroque is “an art in motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves
outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders.”55 By
considering the baroque spirit energetic, innovative, and subversive, Carpentier combines it
with the marvellous, which is described as “everything strange, everything amazing,
everything that eludes established norms.”56 He explains that as “a human constant,”57
baroque is never a decadent art because it has periodically flourished in all ages. As “the
baroque arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation,” Carpentier
emphasizes that “America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has
always been baroque: […] everything that refers to American cosmogony corresponds to the
51
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 102.
Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real,” 88.
53
Fredric Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 (Winter, 1986): 311.
54
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 89-90.
55
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 90.
56
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 101.
57
Eugenio D’Ors, quoted in Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 91.
52
23
baroque.”58 In this respect, Carpentier claims that Aztec sculpture, The Popol Vuh and
Nahuatl poetry are regarded as the monuments of the baroque in Latin America. The only art
that reached Latin America was “the plateresque” as a type of baroque. The plateresque,
which was the main architectural style in Spain during the late 15 th and the early 16th
centuries, was brought to Latin America by the Spaniards. However, Carpentier shows, when
the Spaniards brought the plateresque to the New World, they found out that the Indians had
already known and used the baroque style. By combining the Spanish plateresque and the
New World baroque, the American baroque was produced. Carpentier explains the reason
why Latin America became one of the most important territories of baroque as follows:
Why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque? Because all
symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the baroque. The American
baroque develops along with criollo culture, with the meaning of
criollo, with the self-awareness of the American man, be he the son of
a white European, the son of a black African or an Indian born on the
continent: […] the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being
symbiotic, of being a criollo; and the criollo spirit is itself a baroque
spirit.59
In this quotation, Carpentier directly refers to the hybrid nature of Latin America with
the Spanish terms mestizaje, which means “a mixed cultural or racial heritage which includes
indigenous American cultural influences” and criollo, meaning, in English, “creole,”
referring to “Caribbean people of mixed race and culture, particularly those of mixed African
and Spanish heritage.”60 He indicates that it is the hybrid culture of the criollos that created
the American baroque. Carpentier shows that Latin America has always had a hybrid nature
with its blacks, browns, whites, people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, mulattos, and
58
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 98.
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 100.
60
Bowers, 125.
59
24
black Indians, and claims that such variety is an important part of what he called “the
marvelous real.” Apart from the idea that Latin America itself is marvelous,61 Carpentier also
considers the contemporary Latin American novel, which is called the “boom,” as being
written in an entirely baroque fashion and thus in marvelous realist fashion.
After the definition of marvelous realism by Alejo Carpentier, the new definition of
magical realism made by Angel Flores in the 1950s became a turning point in the history of
magical realism in that this new term combines the features of “magic realism” introduced
by Roh and “marvellous realism” by Carpentier. In his paper “Magical Realism in Spanish
America,” which was presented in New York in 1954, Flores regards magical realism as “an
authentic expression”62 of Latin America. Flores proposes that magical realism provides “the
amalgamation of realism and fantasy” and “each of these, separately and by devious ways,
made its appearance in Latin America: realism, since the Colonial Period but especially
during the 1880s; the magical, writ large from the earliest – in the letters of Columbus, in the
chroniclers, in the sagas of Cabeza de Vaca – entered the literary mainstream during
Modernism.”
As seen in the quotation above, Flores stretches the history of magical realism back to
the sixteenth century indicating that the roots of magical realism was in the romantic realist
tradition of Europe. In his account, magical realism has its origins in the sixteenth-century
works of Spanish literature such as Miguel de Saavedra Cervantes’s famous novel Don
Quixote. According to Flores, during the First World War period, there was a return to
symbolism and magical realism by many important European authors such as Marcel Proust
(1871-1922) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) because they saw realism as “a blind alley.” 63
61
Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, “The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: SelfAffirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 133.
62
Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 116.
63
Flores, 111-12.
25
Kafka is singled out for his style that is considered magical realist by Flores. In his work,
Kafka accomplished an unusual fusion of dream and reality mingling dreary reality with his
nightmares. Kafka influenced the Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Flores
proposes that magical realism was reborn in Latin America in 1935 with the publication of
Borges’s book Historia universal de la infamia [A Universal History of Infamy], a collection
of short stories. This book appeared in Latin America after Borges had translated Kafka’s
short stories from German into Spanish. After having been rediscovered in Latin America in
1935, magical realism was highly applied by many Latin American authors. As suggested by
Flores, the decade 1940-50 was the most productive period for magical realism in Latin
America because the use of magical realism spread all over the continent: it was applied by
Novás Calvo and Ramón Ferreira in Cuba; Juan Rulfo and Francisco Tario in Mexico; Vera
and Adalberto Ortiz in Ecuador; Amorim and Onetti in Uruguay; Chela Reyes and Mariyán
in Chile; Alberto Girri, Estela Canto, and Julio Cortazár in Argentina.
In his article “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature” originally published
in 1967, Leal does not agree with Flores. Leal claims that Flores’s definition of magical
realism is not correct because Flores includes many authors who cannot be considered
magical realist. For example, for Leal, Kafka is not a magical realist author and Kafka’s
work is not, as claimed by Flores, the source of magical realism but a work of fantastic
literature. He also indicates that it was not Borges but Roh who started magical realism. Leal
proposes that Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906-2001), a Venezuelan intellectual, author, lawyer,
journalist, and politician, used the term for the first time in Hispanic America in 1948, and a
year later Alejo Carpentier became interested in this phenomenon:
In Hispanic America, it seems to have been Arturo Uslar Pietri who
first used the term in his book Letras y hombres de Venezuela [The
Literature and Men of Venezuela] (1948), where he says: “What
became prominent in the short story and left an indelible mark there
26
was the consideration of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic
facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of
another name could be called a magical realism.” After Uslar Pietri,
Alejo Carpentier has paid this phenomenon the most attention. 64
As seen in the quotation, as well as Carpentier, during the 1930s and 1940s, another
influential Latin American author in the history of magical realism was Arturo Uslar Pietri.
Uslar Pietri’s ideas were close to Roh’s ideas of magic realism.
Crediting both Alejo Carpentier and Arturo Uslar Pietri as the writers who brought
Roh’s “magic realism” to Latin America, Bowers makes a comparison between the two
authors: Uslar-Pietri’s writing “emphasized the mystery of human living amongst the reality
of life rather than following Carpentier’s newly developing versions of marvellous American
reality. He considered magic realism to be a continuation of the ‘vanguardia’ modernist
experimental writings of Latin America.”65 Moreover, Carpentier became world-wide known
whereas Arturo Uslar Pietri was known especially in Latin America. Although Uslar Pietri’s
fame remained within the borders of Latin America, his influence was clear on Gabriel
García Márquez in the second half of the twentieth century.
To sum up the information given until this point, when it is attempted to retrace the
roots and the history of magical realism, chronologically the German poet Friedrich Freiherr
von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pseudonym of Novalis, seems to be the first to use the
term magischer Realist around 1789. Novalis, as indicated by Warnes, did not develop a
complete theory of magical realism but he used the term magischer Realist in connection
with German Idealism. However, today it is commonly thought by the majority of the critics
and men of letters that the term magischer realismus [magic realism] was first used by Franz
Roh in art criticism in 1925. Thus, as a term, “magical realism” was first used in Europe by
64
65
Leal, 120.
Bowers, 14.
27
European critics and men of letters. In 1927, after having been used for the first time in
literature by another European man – the Italian author and critic Massimo Bontempelli, the
term was adopted and used by Latin American authors to refer to “truly American literature”
after the 1940s. In Hispanic America, the Venezuelan author Arturo Uslar Pietri is
considered to be the first to use the term magical realism in his book Letras y hombres de
Venezuela [The Literature and Men of Venezuela] (1948). In 1949, the term lo real
maravilloso americano is introduced by Carpentier to refer to “the idea of the unique and
extraordinary reality of Latin America.”66 Although the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges
is credited by Flores to be the creator of magical realism with A Universal History of Infamy
in 1935, Luis Leal, in his 1967 paper, rejects Flores’s idea, indicating that Borges’s style is
closer to fantastic literature than to magical realism.
In this dissertation, it is proposed that, although the term “magical realism” was
coined by the European critics and men of letters, the influences of the early-twentiethcentury European modernist art and literary movements are undeniable in the evolution of
magical realism, and many instances of this narrative mode can easily be found in the fiction
of European authors such as “Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffman, Prosper Merimee,
Alain-Fournier, Franz Kafka, Roland Firbank and Edward Upward,”67 magical realism, as a
mode of narrative fiction, has its origins in Latin America. Since the mid-sixteenth century,
Latin American literature has always acted as a reaction against Western colonization and
hegemony. In this respect, The Codex Chimalpopoca, the mythology of the Aztecs, and The
Popol Vuh, the mythology of the Maya, can be regarded as the first examples of magical
realist fiction because these texts provided postcolonial resistance against the hegemony of
the West in the sixteenth century. As shown above, The Popol Vuh and The Codex
Chimalpopoca clearly influenced modern Latin American authors such as Miquel Ángel
66
Bowers, 13.
John A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edition
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 488.
67
28
Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier, who admired the changes and dynamism
that these great mythological texts reflect as general characteristics of Latin America. As
stated by Carpentier in the preface to The Kingdom of This World, “lo real maravilloso,”
which is now known as magical realism, is inherent in Latin America, the birth-place of this
mode of narrative fiction.
Magical realism, “being part of a larger cultural development in the mid-twentieth
century among a group of Latin-American writers in the Caribbean, South America, and
Mexico who contributed to the creation of an innovative approach to writing called ‘the new
novel,’”68 became famous especially after the Latin American Boom movement in the 1960s.
Although the contributions of Latin-American Boom authors such as the Argentine Jorge
Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), and the Argentine Julio
Cortázar (1914-1984) are undeniable in the growth of magical realism, it was not until the
publication of the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967) in English (1970) that the mode became well recognized. Gabriel García
Márquez, a celebrated exponent of magical realism from Latin America, was subsequently
followed by women writers such as the Chilean Isabel Allende (1942- ) and the Mexican
Laura Esquivel (1950- ), whose emphasis was on feminist issues and perceptions of reality.
With the help of these aforementioned Latin American authors, magical realism turned out to
be a Latin American and literary phenomenon since the 1980s. Although magical realism,
“as the sole property of Latin America,”69 provides authentic understanding of Latin
American reality, it is impossible to confine magical realism only to Latin America. Today,
magical realism, originally Latin American, proves to be a universal code challenging all
limitations. As “a significant contemporary international mode,”70 magical realism’s
68
David Galens, ed., Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on
Literary Movements (Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2002), 160.
69
Schroeder, 4.
70
Zamora and Faris, “Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s”, 4.
29
influence has spread all over the world adding many famous authors such as the British
Indian Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (1947- ) and the Afro-American Toni Morrison (1931- )
into its canon as they successfully use magical elements in real-life historical settings.
Magical Realism versus Other Literary Traditions
“Magical realism,” together with its variations such as “magic realism,” “marvelous
real,” and “marvelous realism,” has been a popular term in literary studies for the last few
decades. The term itself has an oxymoronic nature combining two opposite terms: “magic”
and “reality.” As an oxymoronic term, “a crucial feature of the term lies in its duality.” 71
Referring to this feature of the term, Schroeder notes that “words like ‘juxtaposition’ and
‘antinomy’ fight for space beside several variations on the phrase itself: ‘lo real maravilloso,’
‘realismo mágico,’ ‘magic’ or ‘magical realism,’ ‘marvelous realism,’ or ‘marvelous real.’” 72
Warnes supports this idea:
[…] both magical and realism are terms fraught with a complex
history of contradictory usage. […] central to critical discourse’s
problems with magical realism is that the term is an oxymoron: magic
is thought of as that which lies outside of the realm of the real; realism
excludes the magical. Magical realism, in its very name, flouts
philosophical conventions of non-contradiction.73
Thus, in its simplest definition, magical realism is a term used to refer to a mode of
narrative fiction, an aesthetic style, or even a movement that combines magical, mystic, and
fantastic elements with realistic ones in a realistic atmosphere. As magical realism is “a now
widely available elixir,”74 for the last few decades, in World literature, there has been a
tendency to brand anything supernatural or unreal in literature as “magical realism.” For this
71
David Young and Keith Holloman, eds., introduction to Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology
(New York: Longman, 1984), 2.
72
Schroeder, 5.
73
Warnes, 2.
74
John Updike, quoted in Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 163.
30
reason, magical realism has been one of the slippery terms in literature and it has proved to
be difficult to describe.
Shannin Schroeder indicates that “a popular method for defining magical realism is by
contrasting it with other traditions, that is, by arguing what it is not.”75 Following
Schroeder’s ideas, this part of the study will focus on the comparison and contrast between
magical realism and other literary traditions such as the fantastic literature, science fiction,
allegory, and surrealism. Thus, it will attempt to scrutinize the definition and meaning of
magical realism as it is “an international literature that oversteps national boundaries and
languages, with roots deep in many literary traditions.”76 Before comparing magical realism
with other literary and artistic traditions, it is better to explain the difference between the
terms “magic realism,” “magical realism,” and “marvellous realism.”
Anne C. Hegerfeldt, in Lies That Tell the Truth (2005), proposes that magic realism
and magical realism are synonymous terms, and she prefers the former because “it can be
read as a double noun phrase and thus better reflects the relationship of equality between
magic and realism that is fundamental aspect of the mode.”77 However, Bowers proposes
that although “magic realism,” “magical realism,” and “marvellous realism” are the related
terms, they are different, and they have been mistakenly used by critics in the place of each
other since the 1980s. To explain the differences, Bowers starts with tracing the origin of
these terms:
The terms originated from the German Magischer Realismus which
travelled and was translated into the Dutch magisch-realisme, the
English “magic realism” and eventually the Spanish realismo mágico.
After its introduction, the term lo real maravilloso was translated from
75
Schroeder, 7.
Michael Boccia, “Magical Realism: The Multicultural Literature,” Popular Culture Review 5.2
(1994): 21.
77
Anne C. Hegerfeldt, Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary Fiction
from Britain (New York NY: Rodopi B.V, 2005), 1.
76
31
Spanish into both the terms “marvellous realism” and “marvellous
reality.” Later again, the Spanish term realismo mágico was translated
also to “magical realism” and occasionally “magico realism.”78
With each translation, Bowers indicates, the terms “magic realism,” “magical
realism,” and “marvellous realism” have been more and more confused. She shows that in
the history of magical realism – magic(al) realism in her usage – there have been three major
turning points. Quoting from Zamora and Faris in the end, Bowers continues her
explanations with the historical background of the terms:
The first of the terms “Magischer Realismus”or magic realism, was
coined in Germany in the 1920’s in relation to the painting of the
Weimar Republic that tried to capture the mystery of life behind the
surface reality. The second of the terms, lo real maravilloso or
marvellous realism, was introduced in Latin America during the 1940s
as an expression of the mixture of realist and magical views of life in
the context of the differing cultures of Latin America expressed
through its art and literature. The third term, realismo mágico or
magical realism was introduced in the 1950s in relation to Latin
American fiction, but has since been adopted as the main term used to
refer to all narrative fiction that includes magical happenings in a
realist matter-of-fact narrative, whereby, “the supernatural is not a
simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, and everyday
occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality
and materiality of literary realism.”79
78
79
Bowers, 2.
Bowers, 2.
32
Bowers prefers to follow Roh’s definition to refer to “magic realism” and Salman
Rushdie’s definition to refer to “magical realism.” She distinguishes between “magic
realism” “as the concept of the ‘mystery [that] does not descend to the represented world, but
rather hides and palpitates behind it’ (Roh) and ‘magical realism’ that is understood, in
Salman Rushdie’s words, as the ‘commingling of the improbable and the mundane.’” But,
wherever magic realism and magical realism have common features, she uses the catch-all
term of “magic(al) realism.” As understood from these explanations, it seems that Bowers
uses the term “magical realism” in relation to narrative fiction and “magic realism” to art.
“Magic realism,” as a term used in art criticism, then, does not refer to a combination of the
real and the fantasy. She explains that the term “magic” as well is used in different meanings
in each variants of magical realism:
In fact, each of the versions of magic(al) realism have differing
meanings for the term “magic,” in magic realism “magic” refers to the
mystery of life: in marvelous and magical realism “magic” refers to
any extraordinary occurrence and particularly to anything spiritual or
unaccountable by rational science. The variety of magical occurrences
in magic(al) realist writing includes ghosts, disappearances, miracles,
extraordinary talents and strange atmospheres but does not include the
magic as it is found in a magic show. Conjuring “magic” is brought
about by tricks that give the illusion that something extraordinary has
happened, whereas in magic(al) realism it is assumed that something
extraordinary really has happened. 80
Bowers explains the difference between “magical realism” and “marvellous
realism”:
80
Bowers, 19.
33
The distinguishing feature of “marvellous realism” […] is that its
fiction brings together the seemingly opposed perspectives of a
pragmatic, practical and tangible approach to reality and an
acceptance of magic and superstition into the context of the same
novel. “Magical realism,” which of all the terms has had the most
critical consideration, relies most of all upon the matter-of-fact, realist
tone of its narrative when presenting magical happenings.81
Bowers’ distinction between magic realism and magical realism seems to be correct
when Carpentier’s thoughts in “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” are examined.
Carpentier’s strategic reformulation of the term magical realism through the term lo real
maravilloso created “not a realism to be transfigured by the ‘supplement’ of a magical
perspective, […] but a reality which is already in and of itself magical or fantastic.”82
While expanding his ideas on “lo real maravilloso” in his article, Carpentier tries to
describe the differences between the terms “magical realism” (referring to the term derived
by Roh), “marvelous realism,” and Surrealism. Carpentier attempts to describe the term
“marvelous” indicating that it not only refers to “beautiful” and “lovely”: “Ugliness,
deformity, all that is terrible can also be marvelous” and thus “Everything strange,
everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous.”83 Franz Roh is
credited by Carpentier as the originator of the term magical realism. Carpentier indicates that
his concept of lo real maravilloso, which is now known as magical realism, is different from
Roh’s concept of magical realism. Roh used the term in art criticism while describing
Expressionist paintings, especially those with no concrete political agendas: “what [Roh]
called magical realism was simply painting where real forms are combined in a way that
81
Bowers, 3.
Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 311.
83
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 101-02.
82
34
does not conform to daily reality.”84 Thus, in Roh’s account, magical realism can be
described as “the synthesis of Impressionism and Expressionism.”85 On the contrary,
Carpentier uses the term lo real maravilloso americano solely for Latin America. His lo real
maravilloso is completely natural and does not have the artificial quality of the surrealist
search. It exists in American daily life quite normally: “The marvelous real that I defend and
that is our own marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all
that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace.”86
Although Carpentier-derived term lo real maravilloso and Roh-derived term magical
realism do not have the same meaning and are not interchangeable for Carpentier, marvelous
realism is “a variation of”87 magical realism for Jean-Pierre Durix. Today, marvelous realism
is known as magical realism. Like Durix, Schroeder also admits that the terms magic
realism, marvelous realism, and magical realism are synonyms and adds that “authors like
Colombian Gabriel García Márquez made ‘magic realism’ simultaneously a Latin American
and a literary phenomenon.”88 Regarding the marvelous real as an important feature of Latin
America, Leal indicates that “the existence of the marvelous real is what started magical
realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American literature.”89 Thus,
marvelous realism as a reality which is already in itself magical in Latin America became a
prolific source in the growth of magical realism all over the world. Today, the terms
marvelous realism and magical realism are interchangeable, with no essential difference in
their meaning, as marvelous realism is the historical variation of magical realism.
As indicated before, the term magical realism is used to refer to a narrative mode that
combines two different realms, the real and the magic, and attempts to resolve the antinomy
84
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 102.
Warnes, 24.
86
Carpentier, “The Baroque,”104.
87
Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism
(London: MacMillan, 1998), 102.
88
Schroeder, 2.
89
Leal, 122.
85
35
between them. Edwin Williamson defines magical realism as “a narrative style which
consistently blurs the traditional realist distinction between fantasy and reality.”90 Wendy B.
Faris, sharing Williamson’s ideas, indicates that “magical realism combines realism and the
fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality
portrayed.”91 In the definitions above, traditional Western realism is considered central to
magical realism because “it is a Western world-view, empirical and positivist, that
determines what is real and what is magic.”92 For this reason, magical realism is frequently
regarded as a variety of literary realism. As the amalgamation of fantasy and reality,
“magical realism and its avatars cannot be understood without a reference to realism” 93 and
fantastic literature.
Like the term “magical realism,” the term “realism” has also been a problematic term
in literary studies. Realism has its roots in the concept of mimesis introduced by the Greek
philosopher and polymath Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE), who in On the Art of Poetry states
that “imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower
animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by
imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.”94 Having been
introduced by Aristotle’s concept of mimesis and having achieved maturity during the
nineteenth century, realism is defined as “fidelity to actuality in its representation; a term
loosely synonymous with verisimilitude”:95
90
Edwin Williamson, “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude,”
in Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1987), 45.
91
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 163.
92
Eva Aldea, Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial
Literature (London: MPG Books, 2011), 15.
93
Durix, 79.
94
Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, trans. Ingram Bywater (Los Angeles: Indo-European Publishing,
2011), 21.
95
William Harmon and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996),
427.
36
Closely associated with this meaning are the two terms “mimesis” and
“verisimilitude” that often crop up in discussions of realism as an art
form. Mimesis is a term that derives from classical Greek drama
where it referred to the actors’ direct imitation of words and actions.
This is perhaps the most exact form of correspondence or fidelity
between representation and actuality. […] “Verisimilitude” is defined
as the appearance of being true or real; likeness or resemblance to
truth, reality or fact.96
Realists attempt to “espouse what is essentially a mimetic theory of art, concentrating
on the thing imitated and asking for something close to a one to one correspondence between
the representation and the object.”97 Realism cannot be interested in “idealization, with
rendering things as beautiful when they are not, or in any way presenting them in any guise
as they are not; nor, as a rule, is realism concerned with presenting the supranormal or
transcendental.”98
In literature, the definitions of realism like “fidelity of representation” or “rendering of
precise details” have been problematic because “they tend to be associated with notions of
truth as verifiability.”99 Durix indicates that “in any discussion of a literary work, reality has
no objective existence. It cannot be proven through scientific methods. What can be
considered as ‘realistic’ is what is believable.” For this reason, since the nineteenth century,
miscellaneous theories of realism have been produced especially in the genre of the novel. In
the nineteenth century, for example, “the notion of ‘realism’ implied faith in the materiality
of the world perceived by the senses. The role of art was then taken to be to imitate reality,
96
Pam Morris, Realism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 5.
Harmon and Holman, 427.
98
Cuddon, 729.
99
Morris, 5.
97
37
not to recreate it.”100 For Bowers, during the nineteenth century, realist novels were expected
to “show” the reality. They did not have to interpret reality. In the twentieth century, on the
other hand, literary realism is much more interested in how reality is presented in a work of
art. Considering this concept of literary realism in the twentieth century very pertinent to
magical realism, Bowers proposes that
This approach to literary realism is the most relevant to magical
realism, as magical realism relies upon the presentation of real,
imagined or magical elements as if they were real. The key to
understanding how magical realism works is to understand the way in
which the narrative is constructed in order to provide a realistic
context for the magical events of the fiction. Magical realism therefore
relies upon realism but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as
real to its limits. It is therefore related to realism but is a narrative
mode distinct from it.101
Consequently, in its relation with literary realism, “instead of rejecting the realist
mode outright,” magical realism “follows a two-step pattern of appropriation and
transgression or […] of installing and subverting.”102 Strengthening this idea, Faris also
claims that magical realism uses realistic practices to challenge the assumptions of realistic
representation. To explain the relation between realism and magical realism, Faris provides a
postcolonial attribution to the character Caliban of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
(believed written in 1610-11):
[…] much of magical realism may resemble Caliban, now something
of an icon of new world, or postcolonial, writing, who learns the
master’s language, then uses it to curse. Magical realism has mastered
100
Durix, 45-46.
Bowers, 21.
102
Hegerfeldt, 72.
101
38
the European discourse of realism and now uses it not to curse,
exactly, but to undermine some of its master’s assumptions. Just as
Caliban’s swear words are not the combinations of sounds Prospero
intended for him to use, so magical realism’s use of realistic detail to
describe an impossible event, which moves us beyond everyday
reality, rather than anchoring us in it, was not realism’s original
program. 103
Zamora and Faris, while explaining the connection between literary realism and
magical realism, indicate that magical realism and realism spring from coherent sources. In
magical realist texts, the supernatural is “an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence –
admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism” so
that magic becomes “no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing.” The
crucial distinction between realism and magical realism is that “realism functions
ideologically and hegemonically. Magical realism also functions ideologically but […] less
hegemonically, for its program is not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for
interactions of diversity.”104 Thus, in magical realist texts neither the magical nor the realistic
elements have any superiority over each other. Both elements are presented equally.
Luis Leal regards magical realism as “an attitude towards reality” rather than a mode
of narrative fiction or a genre. In the following quotation, Leal examines the attitude of
magical realist authors toward reality: Magical realist author “doesn’t create imaginary
worlds in which we can hide from everyday reality. In magical realism the writer confronts
reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human
acts.”105 In the quotation below, Isabel Allende endorses Leal’s ideas:
103
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Tennessee:
Vanderbilt UP, 2004), 103.
104
Zamora and Faris, “Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 3.
105
Leal, 121.
39
Magic realism is a literary device or a way of seeing in which there is
space for the invisible forces that move the world: dreams, legends,
myths, emotion, passion, history. All these forces find a place in the
absurd, unexplainable aspects of magic realism. […] Magic realism is
all over the world. It is the capacity to see and to write about all the
dimensions of reality.106
As understood from the last two quotations above, magical realism neither imitates
nor recreates the surrounding reality. It deals with reality in order to solve and to get a deep
understanding of it. It provides to investigate all different levels of reality. Harmon and
Holman explains that in magical realist works “the frame or surface of the work may be
conventionally realistic, but contrasting elements – such as supernatural myth, dream,
fantasy – invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art.”107 Thus, magical realism
facilitates “the denaturalization of the real and the naturalization of the marvelous.”108 In this
way, magical realism changes the basis of literary realism and establishes its own kind of
relationship between fiction and reality. For this reason it can be accepted to be “more
realistic than literary realism,”109 especially to express the realities of Latin America. The
quotation below sums up the differences between realism and magical realism explained so
far:
[Magical realism’s] distinguishing feature from literary realism is that
it fuses the two opposing aspects of the oxymoron (the magical and
the realist) together to form one new perspective. Because it breaks
down the distinction between the usually opposing terms of the
106
Isabel Allende, “The Shaman and the Infidel,” interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, New
Perspectives Quarterly 8.1 (1991): 54.
107
Harmon and Holman, 304.
108
Irlemar Chiampi, quoted in Warnes, 3.
109
Scott Simpkins, “Sources of Magic Realism/ Supplements to Realism in Contemporary Latin
American Literature,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris
(Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 148.
40
magical and the realist, magical realism is often considered to be a
disruptive narrative mode. 110
Luis Leal, in “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” attempts to
distinguish between magical realism and other literary forms as follows:
[…] magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic
literature or with psychological literature, or with the surrealist or
hermetic literature […]. Unlike superrealism, magical realism does not
use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined
worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does
it emphasize psychological analysis of characters, since it doesn’t try
to find reasons for their actions or their inability to express
themselves. Magical realism is not an aesthetic movement either, as
was modernism, which was interested in creating works dominated by
a refined style; neither is it interested in the creation of complex
structures per se.111
As clearly seen in the above quotation, so far, magical realism has mostly been
identified with fantastic literature and surrealism because its closest European relatives seem
to be surrealism and the fantastic.
As a twentieth-century avant-garde movement both in art and in literature, surrealism
is sometimes considered the “earliest progenitor” 112 of magical realism although Carpentier
produced his term lo real maravilloso in opposition to European surrealism. Surrealism, as
“a reaction against the excessive emphasis on a rational outlook demanded by the Western
110
Bowers, 3.
Leal, 121.
112
Theo L. D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London:
Duke UP, 1995), 203.
111
41
traditions of empiricism and scientific positivism,”113 was developed from Dadaism, and it
flourished in France during the 1920s. Although it was Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918),
a French poet, playwright, short story writer, and novelist, who coined the term “superrealism,” surrealism became well-known after Manifeste du surréalisme, the manifesto of
surrealism by the French writer and poet André Breton (1896-1966) in 1924. Breton was
under the influence of the Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939). In the first manifesto of surrealism (there were two manifestos: 1924 and
1930), Breton proposed it was necessary to liberate the mind from logic and reason.
Surrealism emphasized “the expression of the imagination as realized in dreams and
presented without conscious control.”114 The characteristics of surrealism are as follows:
The surrealists attempted to express in art and literature the workings
of the unconscious mind and to synthesize these workings with the
conscious mind. The surrealist allows his work to develop nonlogically (rather than illogically) so that the results represent the
operations of the unconscious. […] The surrealists were particularly
interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations and
also in the interpretation of the sleeping and waking conditions on the
threshold of the conscious mind, that kind of limbo where strange
shapes materialize in the gulfs of the mind. 115
To represent the operations of the unconscious, and thus, to attain a new type of
knowledge, surrealism uses the fantastic and the marvelous, just as does magical realism.
Carpentier proposes that surrealism is also in the pursuit of the marvelous but it does not
look for it in reality. The marvelous is pursued through prefabricated objects. That is why, in
113
William Spindler, “Magic Realism: A Typology,” in Literary Movements for Students: Presenting
Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements, ed. David Galens (Detroit: Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2002), 167.
114
Harmon and Holman, 504.
115
Cuddon, 882.
42
surrealism, everything creates a sensation of strangeness, and there is always “a
manufactured mystery.”116 On the contrary, Capentier’s marvelous real exists quite naturally
in the very essence of American daily life.
While explaining the differences between magical realism and surrealism, Leal also
indicates that the magical realist texts do not “try to copy the surrounding reality (as the
realists did) or to wound it (as the Surrealists did) but to seize the mystery that breathes
behind things.”117 The distinction between surrealism and magical realism is in their attitude
toward reality: surrealism destroys or at least damages reality while it pursues the fantastic
and the marvelous whereas magical realism tries to capture the fantastic and the marvelous
in reality. Furthermore, magical realism is never interested in “the surrealistic technique of
psychic automatism and transcription of dreams” that is “supposed to reveal deeper realities
and inner marvels.”118 In magical realism key events never require any psychological or
logical explanation. Magical realism seems to have a dreamlike quality as it uses dreams and
hallucinatory scenes. Nevertheless, in magical realism, dreams and hallucinatory scenes and
events “free themselves from total immersion in individual psyches, often to manifest
themselves in the outer world” and they never “remain rooted in individuality and
interiority.”119 While magical realism draws on the “collective unconscious,” a concept
developed by the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), surrealism’s
main influence came from Freudian psychoanalysis:
In Latin America, […] the rational mentality that accompanies
modernity often coexists with popular forms of religion largely based
on the beliefs of ethno-cultural groups of non-Western origin such as
116
Carpentier, “The Baroque,” 104.
Leal, 123.
118
S.P. Ganguly, “Reality as Second Creation in the Latin American Novels: Marquez and His
Cosmovision,” in Garcia Marquez and Latin America, ed. Alok Bhalla (London: Oriental UP, 1987),
172.
119
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 104.
117
43
the Native and Afro-Americans. Instead of searching for a “separate
reality,” hidden just beneath the existing reality of everyday life, as
the Surrealists
intended,
“lo
real
maravilloso” signals
the
representation of a reality modified and transformed by myth and
legend. In this, it comes closer to the ideas of Jung, especially his
concept of the “collective unconscious” which relates to the
fabrication of myth, than to Freudian psychoanalysis with its emphasis
on the individual unconscious, neurosis and the erotic, which attracted
the Surrealists.120
In spite of their differences, magical realism and surrealism have some commonalities.
Both explore the non-realist features of human existence. Both are revolutionary and
disruptive “in their attitudes since surrealists attempted to write against realist literature that
reflected and reinforced what they considered to be bourgeois society’s idea of itself, and
magic(al) realism holds immense political possibilities in its disruption of categories.”121
The fantastic literature is “the other close cousin to magical realism.”122 It is often
confused with magical realism, and sometimes magical realism is mistakenly considered a
form of fantastic literature. Warnes indicates “Todorov’s identification in the 1970s of the
structure of the fantastic provided the impetus for formal definitions of magical realism to be
developed.”123 The term “fantastic” was originated by Tzvetan Todorov (1939- ), a FrancoBulgarian philosopher and structuralist theorist, in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a
Literary Genre (1970). Coming from the Greek word phantastikós formed on phantazein
meaning “to make visible”124 or picture to oneself, “the fantastic is to be used to reveal the
120
Spindler, 168.
Bowers, 20-21.
122
Schroeder, 7.
123
Warnes, 3.
124
T.F. Hoad, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996),
166.
121
44
truth of the human heart.”125 Like magical realism, modern fantastic literature has been
usually defined “in relation to what has been characterized as the ‘rise’ of the realistic novel
in the eighteenth century”126 because “Fantasy is a co-equal counterpart to Realism as a basic
mode of human thought. As Realism keeps us alive in the here and now, Fantasy helps us
achieve the there and then.”127
According to Todorov, the fantastic, as a literary genre, is described as the “hesitation
experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently
supernatural event.” Thus, what makes a literary text fantastic is that ambiguity or hesitation
felt by a reader concerning natural and supernatural descriptions of the phenomena described
in the text: a reader always questions whether the described phenomenon is real or dream,
whether it is illusion or truth. Todorov indicates that “the fantastic occupies the duration of
this uncertainty.”128 This hesitation may also be shared by one of the characters in a text or
“it may be emphasized in the text to produce a theme of ambiguity and hesitation.” 129 As
soon as someone chooses between whether the phenomenon is real or dream, the fantastic
leaves its place to a neighboring genre: the uncanny – a term borrowed from Sigmund Freud
who used the word for something familiar and old, yet seems new or foreign at the same
time because of the operation of unconscious 130 – or the marvelous. For Todorov, if the
phenomenon turns out to be explained in terms of the laws of reality, the work enters the
genre of the uncanny. On the contrary, if the phenomenon has a supernatural explanation
rather than a natural and rational one, then the work enters the genre of the marvelous.
According to Todorov, the differential character of the fantastic is that it holds its place as “a
125
Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1977), 27.
David Sandner, ed., Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 7.
127
Rabkin, ed., Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories (New York: Oxford UP, 1979), 397.
128
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaka: Cornell UP, 1975), 25.
129
Bowers, 24.
130
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael
Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 429.
126
45
dividing line between the uncanny and the marvelous.”131 After determining his basic
division of the fantastic into the uncanny (the supernatural events explained), the fantastic
(ambiguity concerning whether the phenomena have a natural or a supernatural explanation),
and the marvelous (supernatural accepted), Todorov offers two further categories: the
uncanny is classified as “pure uncanny” and “fantastic-uncanny.” Similarly, the marvelous is
categorized as “pure marvelous” and “fantastic-marvelous.” The fantastic occurs at the line
between fantastic-uncanny and fantastic-marvelous: “This line corresponds perfectly to the
nature of the fantastic, a frontier between two adjacent realms.”132 Privileging the reader’s
point of view, Todorov summarizes the conditions of the fantastic in the following way:
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text
must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a
world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or
supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this
hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s
role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the
hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work –
in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with
the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with
regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic”
interpretations. These three requirements do not have an equal value.
The first and the third actually constitute the genre; the second may
not be fulfilled. Nonetheless, most examples satisfy all three
conditions.133
131
Todorov, 27.
Todorov, 44.
133
Todorov, 33.
132
46
As seen in the quotation, besides a hesitation felt by a reader or a character, another
important feature of the fantastic is that it is closed to allegorical and poetic interpretations
because “the fantastic is always linked to both fiction and literal meaning.”134
While Todorov regards the fantastic as a literary genre, Eric S. Rabkin reflects a
different view of the fantastic and explains that “the fantastic is the affect generated as we
read by the direct reversal of the ground rules of the narrative world. Fantasy is that class of
works which uses the fantastic exhaustively.”135 Rabkin explains that art has certain ability
“to create its own interior set of ground rules” 136 and the fantastic contradicts the
perspectives “legitimized by these internal ground rules.”137 Rabkin indicates that
Although the dictionary may define the fantastic as “not real or based
on reality”, the fantastic is important precisely because it is wholly
dependent on reality for its existence. Admittedly, the fantastic is
reality turned precisely 180º around, but this is reality nonetheless, a
fantastic narrative reality that speaks the truth of the human heart.138
As shown in the quotation above, according to Rabkin, 180º turnabouts from reality
create the fantastic. As a result of these180º turnabouts, the fantastic creates a sense of
astonishment on the reader:
The fantastic is a quality of astonishment that we feel when the ground
rules of a narrative world are suddenly made to turn about 180º. We
recognize this reversal in the reactions of characters, the statements of
narrators, and the implications of structure, all playing on and against
our whole experience as people and readers. The fantastic a potent
134
Todorov, 75.
Rabkin, Fantastic Worlds, 22.
136
Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, 4.
137
Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, 5.
138
Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, 28.
135
47
tool in the hands of an author who wishes to satirize man’s world or
clarify the inner workings of man’s soul.139
As it is understood from Todorov’s and Rabkin’s ideas on the fantastic, the fantastic
(‘Fantasy’ in Rabkin’s terms) seems a genre adjacent to magical realism. Like magical
realism, it combines two distinct levels of reality: “One is our everyday world, ruled by laws
of reason and convention, and the other is the supernatural, or that which is inexplicable
according to our logic.”140 In the fantastic, the harmony of the world ruled by the norms of
reason is destroyed by the supernatural. Magical realism, like the fantastic, uses the
supernatural elements but it combines them with realistic ones in a realistic atmosphere, and
these elements are presented as ordinary events. In contrast, “the fantastic exists in the
hinterland between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary,’ shifting the relations between them through its
indeterminacy.”141 In magical realist texts, neither the realistic nor the fantastic elements
have any privileges over another. While the most important feature of the fantastic is
hesitation common to reader and character in fantastic literature, this hesitation is
exterminated in magical realist texts by the use of authorial reticence. While magical realism
attempts to naturalize or normalize the supernatural, it also breaks the quality of
astonishment in fantastic literature:
In contrast to the fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does
not disconcert the reader, and this is the fundamental difference
between the two modes. The same phenomena that are portrayed as
problematical by the author of a fantastic narrative are presented in a
matter-of-fact manner by the magical realist. Since the supernatural is
not perceived as unacceptable because it is antinomious, the characters
139
Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, 41.
Chanady, “Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy,” PhD diss.
(University of Alberta, 1982), 82.
141
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 2003), 35.
140
48
and reader do not try to find a natural explanation, as is frequently the
case with the fantastic.142
Magical realism and the fantastic also separate from each other in the most
distinctive feature of the fantastic. Fantastic literature is mostly regarded as an escapist
literature:
The most common of the marks by which we recognize a work that
has passed through the world of Fantasy is the vision of escape. As the
fantastic involves a diametric reversal of the ground rules within a
narrative world, a narrative world itself may offer a diametric reversal
of the ground rules of the extra-textual world. If those external ground
rules are seen as a restraint on the human spirit- be they, for instance,
the belief that there is no excitement in life, the belief in the decline of
man, the belief in the lawlessness of the universe – then a fantastic
reversal that offers a narrative world in which these ground rules are
diametrically reversed serves as a much-needed psychological escape.
[…] Boredom is one of the prisons of the mind. The fantastic offers
escape from this prison. 143
While distinguishing magical realism from other genres, Leal indicates that “in
contrast to avant garde literature, magical realism is not escapist literature.”144 As offered by
Leal, magical realism has never been escapist literature whereas “literature of the fantastic
has been claimed as ‘transcending’ reality, ‘escaping’ the human condition and constructing
superior alternate, ‘secondary’ worlds.”145 Leal summarizes the differences between magical
realist and fantastic texts:
142
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 28-29.
Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, 42.
144
Leal, 122.
145
Jackson, 2.
143
49
[…] in magical realist works the author does not need to justify the
mystery of events, as the fantastic writer has to. In fantastic literature
the supernatural invades a world ruled by reason. In magical realism
“the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather
hides and palpitates behind it.” In order to seize reality’s mysteries the
magical realist writer heightens his senses until he reaches an extreme
state [estado límite] that allows him to intuit the imperceptible
subtleties of the external world, the multifarious world in which we
live. 146
Apart from the differences mentioned above, there is also another important
difference between magical realism and the fantastic – and even the surreal – that should be
mentioned: Magical realism diverges from the fantastic in the ability to reflect historical
experiences. While explaining his ideas on the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous,
Todorov proposes:
The marvelous corresponds to an unknown phenomenon, never seen
as yet, still to come – hence to a future; in the uncanny, on the other
hand, we refer the inexplicable to known facts, to a previous
experience, and thereby to the past. As for the fantastic itself, the
hesitation which characterizes it cannot be situated, by and large,
except in the present.147
On the contrary, magical realism gives a chance to authors to reflect historical
experiences by the way of telling classical, mythological, and archetypal tales. While the
146
147
Leal, 123.
Todorov, 42.
50
fantastic and the surrealistic call for “the total negation of faith and tradition,”148 magical
realism greatly depends on both faith and tradition, which makes it possible to reflect
historical experiences of a nation: “the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith.
Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints.”149
This constitutes an important distinction between two genres:
Magical realism, unlike the fantastic or the surreal, presumes that the
individual requires a bond with the traditions and the faith of the
community, that s/he is historically constructed and connected. […]
Unlike magical realism, the fantastic and the uncanny posit an
individual who experiences a world beyond the community’s
parameters.150
This brings us closer to the distinction offered by Karla J. Sanders, for whom the
“fantastique is a universal way to present unreality without cultural ties” whereas “magical
realism is distinctly twentieth century genre that developed as a response to cultural
diversity, vast immigration, and colonization.”151
As explained before, Todorov considers that the third condition of the fantastic is that
the fantastic is not open to allegorical interpretations because “the allegorical meaning
disturbs the tension between the fantastical and realistic elements.”152 Allegory is a term used
to refer to “a form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative
are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself.”153 In an allegory there are two
meanings: a primary meaning and a secondary/ alternative meaning. Magical realism, unlike
148
Marguerite Suárez-Murias, quoted in P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the
Magical Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed.
Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 286.
149
Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” 86.
150
Foreman, 286.
151
Karla J. Sanders, quoted in Schroeder, 8.
152
Bowers, 26.
153
Harmon and Holman, 12.
51
the fantastic, may also be allegorical but the integration of allegory into a magical realist text
needs much attention:
In allegorical writing, the plot tends to be less significant than the
alternative meaning in a reader’s interpretation. This makes it difficult
to incorporate allegory into a magical realist novel, as the importance
of the alternative meaning interferes with the need for the reader to
accept the reality of the magical aspects of the plot. 154
Then, in a magical realist text, the allegorical meaning should not predominate over
the realism of the plot. If a magical realist text has an allegorical meaning “that colours with
irony the one presented on the surface, […] this undermines the claim on the realism of what
is presented in the surface meaning, and most particularly undermines the attempt to present
magical realist aspects as real.”155
As for science fiction, which may be included into the genre of Fantasy according to
the degree and kind of its use of the fantastic, it has also some certain differences from
magical realism. Science fiction, like magical realism, has been a difficult term to define.
Adam Roberts defines the term claiming that “science fiction as a genre or division of
literature distinguishes its fictional worlds to one degree or another from the world in which
we live: a fiction of the imagination rather than observed reality, a fantastic literature.”156
Science fiction works may be written about miscellaneous topics:
They include trips to other worlds, quests, the exploration of space,
visits to other planets and interplanetary warfare. Some SF stories are
concerned with utopia and utopist visions, and also with dystopia.
Others are set in the future but are not utopian. Still others are set in
the past. Many have a contemporary setting which is somehow
154
Bowers, 25.
Bowers, 27.
156
Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), 1.
155
52
influenced by the arrival or invasion of alien beings […] or by some
invention which profoundly alters normality. They are also concerned
with technological
change and development,
with scientific
experiment, with social, climatic, geological, and ecological change.
Some are concerned with supernatural forces and agencies. They are
often fantastic, though they may be rooted in reality. They stretch the
imagination.157
As understood from the quotation above, in quest of a definition of humankind and
his place in the universe, science fiction works attempt to create totally new worlds, unlike
magical realism. Bowers summarizes the difference between science fiction and magical
realism as follows:
One of the characteristics of science fiction that distinguishes it from
magical realism is its requirement of a rational, physical explanation
for any unusual occurrence. […] The science fiction narrative’s
distinct difference from magical realism is that it is set in a world
different from any known reality and its realism resides in the fact that
we can recognize it as a possibility for our future. Unlike magical
realism, it does not have a realistic setting that is recognizable in
relation to any past or present reality. 158
As understood from all the explanations above, magical realism, as an oxymoronic
expression describing the relationship between irreconcilable terms (reality and magic), has
been difficult to describe because of its closeness to other genres such as the fantastic,
allegory, surrealism, and science fiction. It is true that magical realism, together with its
variations such as magic realism used in art criticism and marvellous realism referring to the
157
158
Cuddon, 791.
Bowers, 28.
53
very nature of Latin America, has some similarities to the previously mentioned genres, and
because of these similarities it has mistakenly been confused with them. However, magical
realism, as a historical variation of marvellous realism, is now considered a specific narrative
mode in its own right. Until this point, all explanations made by considering the context of
its genesis and history and comparisons with other related art and literary traditions have
revealed magical realism as a mode of narrative fiction – rather than one unifying genre – in
literature and provided a common definition for this mode: making it most distinct from
other literary genres and traditions, magical realism fuses the magical and the fantastic
elements in a realistic atmosphere in a matter-of-fact tone, that is, without interrogating the
implausibility of these elements or events. In so doing, it investigates the nature of reality.
Characteristics and Techniques of Magical Realism
Magical realism, an important narrative mode which provides the amalgamation of
reality and fantasy keeping the ontological status of these binary oppositions equal in a
realistic environment, is an historical product of both modernism and colonialism. The
narrative mode helps “the margins to write back to the centre,” “blurs the binaries of modern
thought,” “critiques the assumptions of the Enlightenment,” “shows up the limitations of
European rationalism,” and “reveals the ethical failings of realism.”159 As these issues are
main topics discussed in both postmodernism and postcolonialism – two important
discourses of today’s world – in contemporary literature, magical realism is usually
examined as “a double-helix: postcolonialism as one genetic strand, postmodernism as the
other.”160 As postcolonial and postmodernist features of the mode will be studied later in this
chapter, this part of the dissertation will attempt to determine the common characteristics of
the mode, without focusing on a specific point of view – postcolonialist, postmodernist or
multiculturalist – while expanding the descriptions of the mode given in the previous part.
159
160
Warnes, 6.
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
54
In The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, the characteristics
of magical realism as a mode of narrative fiction are defined as follows:
Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the
mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre,
skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and
plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories,
expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the
element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the
inexplicable.161
Combining all features mentioned in the above quotation, magical realism has been a
literary mode whose main advantage “lies in its extraordinary flexibility, in its capacity to
delineate, explore, and transgress boundaries. More than other modes, magical realism
facilitates the fusion of possible but irreconcilable worlds.”162 Accordingly, “hybridity” can
be accepted as a key word while determining the characteristics of the mode. Stressing that
hybridity is found both “at the heart of the politics and the techniques of magical realism,” 163
Brenda Cooper explains:
Hybridity, the celebration of “mongrelism” as opposed to ethnic
certainties, has been shown to be a fundamental aspect of magical
realist writing. A syncretism between paradoxical dimensions of life
and death, historical reality and magic, science and religion,
characterizes the plots, themes and narrative structures of magical
realist novels. In other words, urban and rural, Western and
indigenous, black, white and Mestizo – this cultural, economic and
161
Cuddon, 488.
Jon Thiem, “The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction,” in Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 244.
163
Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
162
55
political cacophony is the amphitheatre in which magical realist
fictions are performed. The plots of these fictions deal with issues of
borders, change, mixing, and syncretizing. And they do so, and this
point is critical, in order to expose what they see as a more deep and
true reality than conventional realist techniques would bring to
view. 164
As a hybrid term itself, “magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that
the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction
between them.”165 In spite of the amalgamation of two opposing discursive systems in a
magical realist text,
[…] the characteristic maneuver of magic realist fiction is that its two
separate narrative modes never manage to arrange themselves into any
kind of hierarchy. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation, the novel is the
site of a “diversity of social speech types” in which a battle takes
place “in discourse and among discourses to become the language of
truth, a battle for what Foucault has called power knowledge.” In
magical realism this battle is represented in the language of narration
by the foregrounding of two opposing discursive systems, with neither
managing to subordinate or contain the other. This sustained
opposition forestalls the possibility of interpretive closure through any
act
of
naturalizing the text
to an established system of
representation.166
164
Cooper, Magical Realism, 32.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 1.
166
Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 410.
165
56
A characteristic feature in magical realist texts is that neither magical nor realist
elements can gain superiority over one another: “magical and realist elements co-exist with
equal ontological status.”167 Fusing the magical and the fantastic elements while keeping
them on equal levels, magical realist narratives are set in a realistic world. While providing
the amalgamation of the contradictory elements, magical realism uses the Russian
formalists’ technique of “defamiliarization”:
To prevent an overwhelming sense of disbelief, magic realists present
familiar things in unusual ways […] to stress their innately magical
properties. By doing this, magic realists use what the Russian
Formalists called defamiliarization to radically emphasize common
elements of reality, elements that are often present but have become
virtually invisible because of their familiarity. And through a process
of supplemental illusions, these textual strategies seem to produce a
more realistic text.168
Like Scott Simpkins, Irlemar Chiampi also indicates that magical realism naturalizes
the marvelous and denaturalizes the real elements in a text,169 as a result of which the unreal
starts to be seen as part of reality. Then, in a simple way, magical realism can be described
“as a mode of narration that naturalizes or normalizes the supernatural; that is to say, a mode
in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of
equivalence. On the level of the text neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality.”170
In her analysis of the mode, Faris puts a great emphasis on the importance of
focalization, “the perspective from which events are presented,”171 in magical realist texts.
As magical realism “reports events that it does not empirically verify through sensory data,
167
Warnes, 20.
Simpkins, 150.
169
Irlemar Chiampi, quoted in Warnes, 3.
170
Warnes, 3.
171
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 43.
168
57
within a realistic, empirically based, fiction,” in magical realist narratives “the narrative
voice seems to be of uncertain origin.”172 Faris uses the term “defocalization” to refer to the
special narrative situation of magical realism: “In magical realism, the focalization […] is
indeterminate; the kinds of perceptions it presents are indefinable and the origins of those
perceptions are unlocatable.” Thus, she offers, “the narrative is ‘defocalized’ because it
seems to come from two radically different perspectives at once.”173
According to Warnes, magical realist texts treat the supernatural in a specific way,
which is another common feature of such texts: Each one of these texts “treats the
supernatural as if it were a perfectly acceptable and understandable aspect of everyday
life.”174 In most of magical realist narratives, fantastic occurrences are recounted as though
they were rather commonplace. In these narratives, the narrator presents the magical,
supernatural, extraordinary, and fantastic events to the reader in a “deadpan, matter-of-fact
voice”175 without requiring any rational, psychological, or physical explanation for any of
these occurrences: “the reader is carried away by the matter-of-fact descriptions so that he
does not have the opportunity of questioning the fictitious world view.”176 Putting an
emphasis on this feature, Wendy Faris indicates that “the narrative voice reports
extraordinary – magical – events, which would not normally be verifiable by sensory
perception, in the same way in which other, ordinary events are recounted.” According to
Faris, the narrator’s presentation of magical elements “on the same narrative plane as other,
commonplace, happenings means that in terms of the text, magical things ‘really’ do
happen.”177 Like Faris, Rawdon Wilson also puts emphasis on the importance of “the
172
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 3.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 43.
174
Warnes, 2-3.
175
Aldea, ix.
176
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 138.
177
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7-8.
173
58
neutrality of the narrative voice”178 in magical realist texts. Quoting from Salman Rushdie,
who writes, “impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under
the midday sun”179 in these texts, Wilson offers that “the narrative voice bridges the gap
between ordinary and bizarre, smoothing the discrepancies, making everything seem normal.
(The narrative voice itself constitutes the ‘midday sun’ of which Rushdie speaks).”180
While examining matter-of-factness of magical realist narratives, Hegerfeldt explains
that the narrator, first of all “offers an absolutely deadpan delivery of fantastically absurd
events” and adds that such an unfazed attitude towards the marvelous or fantastic “exhibits
interesting parallels with the magical and animistic world-view psychologists have attributed
to children. Magic realist texts are in fact frequently told from a child’s or at least a childlike
point of view.”181 Supporting this idea, Faris also suggests that, as a common technique in
magical realist texts, the “narrator’s use of a matter of fact and detached style to narrate
fantastic events, presenting them without comment” posits a certain stance, which “is often
characterized as childlike or naïve because magical events are accepted by the narrator as
children seem to accept such events in stories, without questioning their reality.”182 Faris
claims that a magical realist narrative:
[…] appears to the late-twentieth-century adult readers to which it is
addressed as fresh, childlike, even primitive. Wonders are recounted
largely without comment, in a matter-of-fact way, accepted –
presumably – as a child would accept them, without undue
178
Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 231.
179
Salman Rushdie, quoted in Wilson, 210.
180
Wilson, 220.
181
Hegerfeldt, 55.
182
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 94.
59
questioning or reflection; they thus achieve a kind of defamiliarization
that appears to be natural or artless.183
Thus, magical realism, with its narrative strategies and its “constant fascination with
pre-Enlightenment culture, nonscientific belief systems,”184 seems to create a postmodernist
primitivism. Wilson strengthens this idea saying that “mannerism and primitivism often bear
a hand-in-glove relationship in magical realism.”185
In magical realist texts, the defamiliarization is provided especially by the help of
“authorial reticence,” which can be described as “the deliberate withholding of information
and explanation about the disconcerting fictitious world.”186 “Authorial reticence” is “a
criterion defining the very existence of magical realism.”187 Amaryll B. Chanady describes
three characteristics of the mode: the text has consistently to combine two different codes,
namely the natural and the supernatural, there must be no contradiction between these codes
that seem equally reasonable, and the text must use the measure of authorial reticence to
provide the co-existence of both codes. 188 In postcolonial studies the real has been equated
with a European perspective while the magic has been considered a part of an ethnic or
indigenous; that is, a non-European point of view. Authorial reticence, then, is a practical
device to resolve the antinomy between these two levels of realms.
In most examples of magical realism, the supernatural can never be explained;
furthermore, no magical realist author shows any attempt to explain it. The supernatural “is
naturalized by a narrator who shows no surprise at its existence, and in fact does not even
consider it as out of the ordinary.”189 Authorial reticence becomes the device that “serves the
purpose mainly of preventing the reader from questioning the narrated events, as no attention
183
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 177.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 59.
185
Wilson, 231.
186
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 21.
187
Cooper, Magical Realism, 34.
188
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 180.
189
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 172.
184
60
is drawn to the strangeness of the world view. The unnatural is naturalized by commenting
as little as possible on it and reducing the distance between the narrator and the situation he
is describing.”190 Thus, magical realists should keep their reticence and refuse to judge the
veracity of the characters’ worldview. With regard to the principle of authorial reticence, it
should be kept in mind that if the magical becomes explainable, then the reality is efficiently
privileged over the fantastic. This will, in turn, damage the very nature of magical realism.
Along with the measure of “authorial reticence,” Cooper mentions “authorial irony,”
which is also a common feature for magical realist texts: “If ‘hybrid’ is the keyword for the
magical realist plot, then ‘ironic’ is the keyword for its author’s point of view.”191 Referring
to Homi K. Bhabha, Cooper suggests that “the irony is militant and insurgent and the hybrid
plot, linking unstable elements, brings newness into a complex world.”192 She indicates that
magical realist authors, the majority of whom are Western educated, should “assume an
ironic distance from the lack of a ‘scientific’ understanding” while presenting “the prescientific view of the world that some of their characters may hold.”193 She explains, if the
magical realist author adopts a “worldview of an unreliable focalizer [the point of view from
which the characters and events are presented] who believes in magic” “in an age which
clearly distinguishes between fantasy and reality,”194 this will damage the credibility of the
fantastic and thus, will violate the realism of the text. For this reason, while the supernatural,
fantastic, or abnormal elements are introduced in a magical realist text, writers must have
ironic distance from the magical worldview introduced in the text. However, they must, at
the same time, show a deep respect for it. As revealed by the explanations so far, authorial
reticence and authorial irony can both be offered as necessary and defining features for
190
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 179.
Cooper, Magical Realism, 33.
192
Cooper, Magical Realism, 22.
193
Cooper, Magical Realism, 33.
194
Chanady, quoted in Cooper, Magical Realism, 34.
191
61
magical realist texts to prevent readers from questioning the supernatural and thus to provide
the balance of the magical and the realistic in a magical realist text.
As well as postmodernist narrative techniques, magical realist texts greatly make use
of postmodernist strategies such as irony, parody, disruption, and pastiche “to both invite
Western appropriation and also contest imperialism.”195 Along with these postmodernist
strategies, metamorphoses that “embody in the realm of organisms a collision of two
different worlds,”196 “the presence of intertextual bricolage,”197 and metafictional dimensions
are also very common in contemporary magical realism. Many magical realist texts
[…] provide commentaries on themselves, often complete with
occasional mises-en-abime – those miniature emblematic textual selfportraits. Thus the magical power of fiction itself, the capacities of
mind that make it possible, and the elements out of which it is made –
signs,
images,
metaphors,
narrators,
narrates
–
may
be
foregrounded.198
While examining the use of figurative language in magical realist texts, Hegerfeldt
proposes that “literalization of metaphors” is an important technique of the mode. Magical
realist texts have a markedly metaphorical or allegorical quality and they render figures of
speech real. Not only figures of speech but also thoughts and concepts gain physical
existence in magical realist texts:
Magic realist fiction addresses the traditional Western distinction
between the literal and the figurative by rendering figures of speech
oddly real on the level of the text: in magic realist fiction, metaphors
become literally true. […] Idioms and sayings also must be taken at
195
Cooper, Magical Realism, 32.
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 178.
197
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 176.
198
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 175.
196
62
face value: for example, characters literally burn with love. Frequently
rejected as lies or mere rhetoric by the great thinkers of modernity, in
magic realist fiction figurative language acquires the referentiality,
and by extension also the status, of literal language. Through
techniques of literalization, magic realist fiction suggests that
metaphors can be as important and true as empirical descriptions of
reality. 199
Considering magical realism from a postmodernist point of view, Wendy Faris
proposes that magical realist texts contain an “irreducible element of magic,”200 “something
we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as they have been formulated in
Western empirically based discourse, that is, according to ‘logic, familiar knowledge, or
received belief,’”201 The irreducible element of magic persists in a text in an existentialist
manner enforcing that “I EKsist” – “I stick out.”202 It disturbs the ordinary logic of cause and
effect. The irreducible element of magic may be “anything that defies empiricism, including
religious beliefs, superstitions, myths, legends, voodoo, or simply what Todorov terms the
‘uncanny’ and ‘marvellous’ fantastic.”203 The irreducible element of magic seems to belong
to a non-european culture to be opposed to the rationality of European culture. Zamora and
Faris explain that
Texts labeled magical realist draw upon cultural systems that are no
less “real” than those upon which traditional literary criticism draws –
often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over
empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their
199
Hegerfeldt, 56.
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 167.
201
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7.
202
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 168.
203
Wen-chin Ouyang, “Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy,” in A Companion to
Magical Realism, ed. Hart and Ouyang (Woodridge: Tamesis, 2005), 14.
200
63
primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals – that
is, in collective (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written)
practices that bind communities together. 204
Accordingly, “ancient systems of belief and local lore often underlie” 205 magical
realist narratives. In magical realist texts, “we witness an idiosyncratic recreation of
historical events, but events grounded firmly in historical realities – often alternate versions
of officially sanctioned accounts” and, in this way, magical realist texts imply that “eternal
mythic truths and historical events are both essential components of our collective
memory.”206 Collective memory is “the cultural memory that had resided in every individual
at a time when such memory was still conscious.”207 As magical realist texts puts the
emphasis on collective memory (in Jungian words, on the “collective unconscious”),
[…] a Jungian rather than a Freudian perspective is common in
magical realist texts; that is, the magic may be attributed to a
mysterious sense of collective relatedness rather than to individual
memories or dreams or visions. […] Furthermore, the magic in
magical realism is unrepentant, unrecuperable, and thus may point
toward the spiritual realms to which Jungian psychology is receptive;
[…] the magic cannot usually be explained away as individual or even
as collective hallucination or invention.208
As indicated above, the magic in magical realist texts cannot be explained by
individual or collective hallucinations. However, these texts generally use hallucinatory
scenes and events and fantastic characters. In most cases, the use of such events and
204
Zamora and Faris, “Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 3.
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 182.
206
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 169-70.
207
David K. Danow, The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque, (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 79.
208
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 183.
205
64
characters are for criticizing political and cultural perversions. Thus, magical realist texts
“use magic to recuperate the real, that is, to reconstruct histories that have been obscured or
erased by political and social injustice.”209
Cooper indicates that magical realist fiction “embedded in myth, and particularly in
the foundational myth of the nation, is bonded to a cyclical view of time, to a privileging of
the recurrent over the historical linear, to the universal over the particular,” and she adds that
“if the here and now of history is syncretized with the mysterious and the magical, then time
and space are potentially transformed within the hybrid, magical realist plot.”210 In magical
realist texts, time rejects a linear progress and exists “in a kind of timeless fluidity.” 211 In
such texts, “time itself is hybrid. Magical realist time tries to be neither the linear time of
history, nor the circular time of myth”212 because
[…] the absence of a single linear time need not be read as the absence
of a historical consciousness, but rather as the operation of a different
kind of historical consciousness. The play of linear time with circular
time achieves its cognitive force through marvelous realism’s capacity
to generate and manage various kinds of alignments, tensions, and
discontinuities between sequential and nonsequential time. 213
Magical realist texts play with the perception of not only time but also space and
identity. They always question traditional ideas about identity, time, and space. In magical
realist texts
[…] our sense of time is shaken […]. Our sense of space similarly
undermined […]. Many magical realist fictions […] carefully
delineate sacred enclosures […] and then allow these sacred spaces to
209
Zamora and Faris, “Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 9.
Cooper, Magical Realism, 32.
211
Flores, 115.
212
Cooper, Magical Realism, 33.
213
Sangari, 157.
210
65
leak their magical narrative waters over the rest of text and the world
it describes. Magical realism reorients not only our habits of time and
space, but our sense of identity as well.214
Magical realist texts reorient our sense of identity because “the multivocal nature of the
narrative and the cultural hybridity that characterize magical realism extends to its
characters, which tend toward a radical multiplicity.”215
Another important feature of magical realism that has been agreed upon by the vast
majority of the critics is that magical realist narratives have a carnivalesque spirit. For
Cooper, disregarding the conventional classical realism and its techniques, magical realist
authors have used postmodernist techniques to achieve their postcolonial aims. Their
attempts have resulted in embracing the deliberations of the Russian philosopher,
semiotician and literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) and thus in
applying the carnivalesque in their works: “the embrace of magic, and of the improbable and
the blasphemous has led to the excavation of Mikhail Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, of the
cacophony of discordant voices and the profane body.”216
Danow explains that “carnival,” defined by folk culture, is “concrete cultural
manifestations” characterized by “the diverse ceremonies of death and rebirth […] with its
mock conflagrations and attendant symbolic resurrections.” Originating in ancient times,
carnival, in its most general sense, “celebrates the body, the senses, and the unofficial,
uncanonized relations among human beings that nonetheless exist alongside the official,
openly recognized forms of human intercourse.” Providing a mirror of carnival, the term
“carnivalesque” is used to denote “carnivalized attitude” or “spirit” reflected in various
manifestations in world literature: “It designates the transportation of carnival into the
language of literature” as “a mode and perspective that at once produce transformations,
214
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 173-74.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 25.
216
Cooper, Magical Realism, 23.
215
66
reversals, and inversions of fate and fortune that reveal in turn a resultant, necessarily
dualistic view of the world.”217
In his seminal work, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin examines the revolutionary and
political effects of medieval folk culture and the traditional form of carnival through the
French Renaissance author, doctor, and monk, François Rabelais, whose famous satire,
Gargantua and Pantagruel,218 was published in the sixteenth century. Bakthin puts a great
emphasis on folk laughter:
Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential
forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history
and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world
is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen
from the serious stand-point. Therefore, laughter is just as admissible
in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness. Certain
essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.219
Bakhtin explains that the culture of folk humor, which is based on laughter, was very
important during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The official medieval culture with
its intolerant seriousness prohibited laughter because it had been considered a sin by
Christianity. Although laughter was prohibited in medieval official life, it was granted
exceptional privileges of license on feast days. Thus, folk laughter, as a characteristic of the
human species, started to give form to carnival rituals and prepared the basis for Renaissance
consciousness.
Bakhtin affirms that besides its universality, laughter has two more important features
reflected in carnival rituals: “its indissoluble and essential relation to freedom” and “its
217
Danow, 3-5.
See François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006).
219
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
UP, 1984), 66.
218
67
relation to the people’s unofficial truth.”220 With these features, folk laughter, building “its
own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state
versus the official state,”221 reacted against violence, prohibitions, and limitations that were
prevalent in the Middle Ages. It fought against the fear inspired by the mystery of the world
and by power, revealed the truth about them, illuminated men’s consciousness, opened their
eyes on the future, and “remained a free weapon in their hands.”222 As carnival festivities,
comic spectacles, and rituals were given form by the basis of laughter, they were completely
free from all mysticism and ecclesiastic dogmatism. Bakthin explains that “carnival
celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it
marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival
was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all
that was immortalized and completed.”223 Thus, carnivals always became very different from
official, feudal, political, and ecclesiastical ceremonials and emphasized “nonofficial,
extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspects of the world and a second life outside
officialdom.”224
How does the carnivalesque reflect the spirit of these carnivals in literature? The
following abbreviated summary includes the principal features of the carnivalesque, which is
“the general world outlook expressed in the popular-festive carnival forms”:225 a continuous
sense of fiesta, of celebration and of music, “the absence of a “serious or pious tone,”
“freedom and lack of ceremony […] balanced by good humuor,” “the suspension of all
hierarchic differences, of all ranks, and status,” “the disappearance of differences between
superiors and inferiors,” “carnivalesque revelry […] marked by familiarity,” the existence of
220
Bakhtin, 89-90.
Bakhtin, 88.
222
Bakhtin, 94.
223
Bakhtin, 11.
224
Bakhtin, 6.
225
Bakhtin, 244.
221
68
“impropriety” as well as freedom and familiarity, “the ambivalent combination of abuse and
praise, of the wish for death and the wish for life” reflecting the dualistic view of the world,
the obscurity and destruction of established boundaries between life and death, the official
and unofficial, the use of the marketplace or central square figures as setting, and the sense
of theater keeping people not as spectators but as participants.226
When magical realist texts are examined with respect to the carnival forms, magical
realism reflects many of the features enumerated above: “magic realism’s fantastic character
is in fact based on a predilection for exaggeration and excess, a ‘baroque’ or generally
extravagant, carnivalesque style.”227 True to Bakthin’s ideas, carnival, “the people’s second
life, organized on the basis of laughter,” “a festive life,”228 has always been “a revolt against
and a reversal of fixed values.”229 As most magical realist texts are “antibureaucratic” and
“against the established social order” and “totalitarian regimes,”230 for these texts carnival
has been “a fictional shorthand, invoking a tradition of cultural politics of resistance.” 231
Thus, in magical realist texts, revolution and political upheaval have become the
characteristic of both magical realism and its carnivalesque source. Thanks to the
carnivalesque spirit prevalent in these texts, “magical realism at its best opposes
fundamentalism and purity; it is at odds with racism, ethnicity and the quest for tap roots,
origins and homogeneity; it is fiercely secular and revels in the body, the joker, laughter,
liminality and the profane.”232 With their carnivalesque spirit, magical realist texts attempt to
remove all boundaries of “mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and
imaginary, self and other, male and female.” Then, it is the carnivalesque spirit that makes
magical realism stronger and increases its socio-political value.
226
Bakhtin, 246-49.
Hegerfeldt, 51.
228
Bakhtin, 8.
229
Victor Terras, quoted in Danow, 4.
230
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 179.
231
Cooper, Magical Realism, 24.
232
Danow, 22.
227
69
These explanations bring us to another important feature of the mode, which
constitutes the main claim of the dissertation. Zamora and Faris indicate that “magical
realism is a mode suited to exploring – and transgressing – boundaries, whether the
boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic.” They go on claiming that
“magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages
resistance to monologic political and cultural structures, a feature that has made the mode
particularly useful to writers in postcolonial cultures and, increasingly, to women.” As seen
in the quotations Zamora and Faris determine two important features of the mode: magical
realist texts are transgressive and subversive.
For Zamora and Faris, magical realism should be accepted as “an admission of the
exceptional that subverts existing structures of power.”233 As a mode of narrative fiction, it is
generally used as a means of cultural, social, historical, and political correction and
enhancement. As magical realist texts are subversive, disruptive, and transgressive, they
seem to be efficient devices especially to serve the purposes of postcolonial literature.
Magical realism resolves the antinomy between the two opposite realms, the magic and the
real, which are regarded as “representatives of pre-capitalist and capitalist, native and
colonial, or non-Western and Western cultures or world-views.” It accomplishes its
postcolonial purposes using many of the postmodernist techniques both on structural and
thematic levels in literary texts. For this reason, in postcolonial reading, “the resolution of
antinomy in the magical realist text” directly implies “a subversion of the Western worldview, or a decolonizing movement, expressed as a cultural and generic ‘hybridity.’”234
Types of Magical Realism
Magical realism has been an important mode to express the reality of the Third World
counties (those countries, most of which are post-colonial and remained non-aligned with the
233
234
Zamora and Faris, “Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 5-6.
Aldea, 16.
70
West, the United States or the Soviet Union after the Cold War.) Although it has specifically
been used by authors from the Third World, the use of the mode cannot be confined only to
postcolonial authors from these countries. Magical realism has affected many men of letters
from the First World (“the dominant economic powers of the West”235) and the Second
World countries (“the former settler colonies like English Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand from the Third World.”236) Thus, magical realism, as “a strange seductiveness,”237
has proved to be an international mode that is used in miscellaneous forms in various
countries of all continents in the world. As a result of this diversity, different types of
magical realism such as “mythical,” “metaphysical,” “scholarly,” “anthropological,”
“ontological,” and “epistemological” have been produced.
Faris, quoting from the Belgian critic Jean Weisgerber and the Cuban critic Roberto
González Echevarría, attempts to explain the types of magical realism. Faris indicates that
there are two types of magical realism according to Jean Weisgerber: the scholarly, and the
mythic and folkloric types. Similarly, for Roberto González Echevarría, the epistemological
and the ontological are the types of magical realism. Although Faris admits that it is not easy
to make a distinction between these types in most cases, she tries to determine the
differences between these types:
Jean Weisgerber makes a […] distinction between two types of
magical realism: “the scholarly” type, which “loses itself in art and
conjecture to illuminate or construct a speculative universe” and
which is mainly be the province of European writers, and the mythic
or folkloric type, mainly found in Latin America. These two strains
coincide to some extent with the two types of magical realism that
235
Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2005), 231.
Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on
Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995), 262.
237
Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 302.
236
71
Roberto González Echevarría distinguishes: the epistemological, in
which the marvels stem from an observer’s vision, and the
ontological, in which America is considered to be itself marvelous
(Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso).238
As indicated in the above quotation, Roberto González Echevarría, in his 1974 book
on Carpentier,
determined two different
types
of
magical realism.
For
him,
phenomenological (epistemological) magical realism is parallel to “magic realism” described
by Franz Roh and ontological magical realism matches “marvellous realism” described by
Carpentier. Developed from ontology, “the philosophical study of those things related to
belief,” ontological magical realism is “a variant of magical realism whose magical aspects
are in accordance with the cultural beliefs of the context in which the fiction is set or
written.”239 In this type, magical realist ideas “can originate from a particular cultural context
where they are compatible with the belief systems of that culture.”240 Thus, Carpentier’s
definition of marvellous realism can be included in the ontological type because Carpentier
believes that Latin America itself is marvelous. As for epistemological (phenomenological)
magical realism, the cultural context of the text directly becomes the source of inspiration for
magical realist elements of that text. According to Bowers the epistemological type is
[…] a kind of magical realism in which the magical element is derived
from aspects of knowledge rather than from cultural belief, e.g. the
existence of a computer with a personality such as that in Amitav
Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. This form of magical realism
does not rely on the existence of a tradition of belief in such a magical
element in order for the magical realism to come into play. It is
derived from the distinction between the philosophical study of those
238
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 165.
Bowers, 127.
240
Bowers, 86.
239
72
things pertaining to knowledge (epistemology) and the study of those
things pertaining to belief (ontology). 241
According to Bowers, the Flemish writer Hubert Lampo’s work can be a good example of
the epistemological type of magical realism. Although Lampo is a Flemish writer, he does
not draw magical realist aspects from Flemish folklore with its Germanic root, instead, he
mostly uses Greek and Roman mythologies to express the mood of Belgium.
Another identification of three versions of magical realism, which is very similar to
those offered by Weisgerber and González Echevarría, is made by Jeanne Delbaere-Garant.
Drawing on discussions by Stephen Slemon in his article “Magic Realism as Postcolonial
Discourse,” in which he discusses magical realist texts from English Canada as a Second
World country, Delbaere-Garant considers magical realism from the viewpoint of
postmodernism. She argues that magic realism is not solely a postcolonial phenomenon. She
determines three types of magical realism: psychic, mythic, and grotesque realism. For her,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) by the British author Angela Carter
(1940-1992) can be recognized as an example of psychic realism:
The “magic” is almost always a reification of the hero’s inner
conflicts, hence the vagueness of the spatial setting […] and the
thematic recurrence of elements linked with the initiation journey.
[…] For this particular sort of magic realism generated from inside the
psyche – and sometimes referred to as “psychomachie” – I would like
to suggest the term “psychic realism.” It goes back to the earlier,
European variety and can be found in the works of, among others,
Massimo Bontempelli in Italy, Ernst Jünger in Germany, Johan
241
Bowers, 126.
73
Daisne and Hubert Lampo in Belgium, Julien Green and Julien Gracq
in France.242
Delbaere-Garant argues that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), William
Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), and John Fowles’ The Magus (1966) are all examples of
psychic realist texts in contemporary literature.
To explain what she meant by the term mythic realism, Delbaere-Garant draws on
Alejo Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso, in which magic reality is not something
created by imagination but inherent in the mtyhs, superstitions, and in the very topography of
Latin America. Indicating that British magical realism is different from its Latin American
manifestations because it “has to draw on a much more literary and attenuated folkloristic
tradition”:243
In the New World, where the climate is often less temperate and
landscapes more dramatic than in Britain, magic realism does indeed
often display a deep connectedness between character and place. […]
The interpenetration of the magic and the real is no longer
metaphorical but literal: the landscape is no longer passive but active
– invading, trapping, dragging etc. 244
For Delbaere-Garant, although the mythic realism is mostly found in the works of
authors from the Americas – like the Sri Lankan-born Canadian Michael Ondaatje’s Running
in the Family and the Canadian Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said (1978), the mythic
type of magical realism is suitable for “all the countries that still possess ‘unconsumed
space,’ where magic images are borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of
being projected from the characters’ psyches.”245
242
Delbaere-Garant, 251.
Angela Carter, quoted in Delbaere-Garant, 252.
244
Delbaere-Garant, 252.
245
Delbaere-Garant, 253.
243
74
In the final analysis, Delbaere-Garant indicates that the examples she has given are the
products of First and Second World fiction. Magical realist texts produced in the First World
countries (like England) and Second World countries (like Canada) differ from those
produced in Latin America and the Caribbean. The fiction produced in the First and Second
World countries is strongly attached to the moral and the real. For this reason, contrary to
Slemon’s ideas, she suggests magical realist texts produced especially in the First and
Second World countries – and, thus, the types of magical realism that she has determined –
should be analyzed in terms of postmodernism rather than postcolonialism.
The Guatemalan author and journalist William Spindler (1963- ), in his 1993 article
“Magic Realism: A Typology,” proposes another influential typology of magical realism. In
his typology he attempts to combine the descriptions made by European and Latin American
ctritics. According to Spindler there are three types of magical realism: metaphysical magic
realism, anthropological magic realism, and ontological magic realism. Each one of these
types corresponds to differing meanings of the term magic. For Spindler, metaphysical
magic realism is close to Roh’s magic realism and mostly found in art: “In literature,
Metaphysical Magic Realism is found in texts that induce a sense of unreality in the reader
by the technique of Verfremdung, by which a familiar scene is described as if it were
something new and unknown, but without dealing explicitly with the supernatural.”
Metaphysical magic realism, then, uses the defamiliarization techniques. It produces
an uncanny atmosphere although it does not use supernatural elements. According to
Spindler, Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß [The Trial] (1925), Jorge Luis Borges’ stories, Albert
Camus’ La Peste [The Plague] (1947), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) can
be included in this type of the mode. The second type, anthropological magic realism, is akin
to lo real maravilloso, the idea that was first articulated by Carpentier. It, thus, corresponds
to the most common and specific definition of the mode:
75
In this type of Magic Realism the narrator usually has “two voices.”
Sometimes he/she depicts events from a rational point of view (the
“realist” component) and sometimes from that of a believer in magic
(the “magical” element). This antinomy is resolved by the author
adopting or referring to the myths and cultural background (the
“collective unconscious”) of a social or ethnic group […]. The word
“magic” in this case is taken in the anthropological sense of a process
used to influence the course of events by bringing into operation
secret or occult controlling principles of Nature. 246
Spindler explains that in Latin American literature this type has been used to reflect
what is considered the strange, the supernatural, the uncanny, the fantastic and the grotesque.
It has also been helpful not only for the postcolonial search for the creation of new national
identities but also for the struggle to prove that the culture of indeginous peoples is as
valuable as that of the Western peoples. Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel
García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Wilson Harris, and Jacques Stephen Alexis are authors
who applied anthropological magic realism in their work. Finally, for the third type of the
mode, ontological magic realism, Spindler offers Kafka’s Metamorphoses as the best
example and explains the feature of ontological magic realism:
Unlike anthropological Magic Realism, ontological Magic Realism
resolves antinomy without recourse to any particular cultural
perspective. In this “individual” form of Magic Realism the
supernatural is presented in a matter-of-fact way as if it did not
contradict reason, and no explanations are offered for the unreal
events in the text. There is no reference to the mythical imagination of
preindustrial communities. Instead, the total freedom and creative
246
Spindler, 170.
76
possibilities of writing are exercised by the author who is not
worrying about convincing the reader. The word “magic” here refers
to inexplicable, prodigious or fantastic occurrences which contradict
the laws of the natural world, and have no convincing explanation. 247
When the typologies proposed by Weisgerber, González Echevarría, Delbaere-Garant
and Spindler are compared, these ostensibly different typologies are in fact very similar and
they usually overlap in magical realist texts. Weisberg’s “scholarly,” González Echevarría’s
“epistemological” (phenomenological), Delbaere-Garant’s “psychic,” and Spindler’s
“metaphysical magic realism” seem to be all in the same category referring to the same type
of magical realism. Similarly, Weisberg’s and Delbaere-Garant’s “mythic” corresponds to
González Echevarría’s “ontological” magical realism. González Echevarría’s ontological
magical realism seems to have been divided into two by Spindler’s anthropological and
ontological magic realisms “according to whether the magic originates in a specific extratextual reality, or within the text itself.”248 However, their function is the same: both attempt
to resolve the antinomy between the supernatural and the natural. It should be kept in mind
that such typologies do not necessarily mean that an author is to choose and write only in one
of these types. Commingling of these types is usually found in many magical realist texts. As
understood from the explanations, the typologies of the mode that are usually found on
mainland Europe (psychic, epistemological, metaphysical, scholarly) generally draw on the
ideas of their European precursor, Franz Roh’s ideas on post-expressionism. Therefore,
magical realism on mainland Europe can be best discussed under the term magic realism.
The main sources for magic realist texts on mainland Europe has become the Italian author
Massimo Bontempelli’s literary works, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s ideas on the
psychology of dreams, and European myths and fairy tales. The effects of surrealism and, in
247
248
Spindler, 171.
Aldea, 3.
77
later times, of postmodernism were also clear in the texts produced in Europe. To repeat
Delbaere-Garant’s words, these texts “remained strongly anchored in the real and the
moral,”249 being very far from their Latin American counterparts. However, in the typologies
of the mode such as ontological, mythic/ folkloric, and anthropological magical realism,
authors like Ben Okri, Tony Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez “all
derive magical realist elements from the mythology, cultural beliefs and folklore of the
cultural context in which their fiction is set – which is also of their own.”250 These typologies
have been the most common forms of magical realism.
As for grotesque realism, it seems to demand the greatest attention among all the other
typologies of magical realism explained above. For Delbaere-Garant, grotesque realism is
another type of magical realism, along with psychic and mythic types. Delbaere-Garant
describes grotesque realism as a combination of Latin American baroque, North American
tall tale, and Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Drawing on the novel The Invention of the World
(1977) by the Canadian Jack Hodgins, she explains the features of what she calls grotesque
realism:
Magic realism of Hodgin’s The Invention of the World combines
“magic” occurrences à la García Márquez with psychic and mythic
elements […]. Grotesque elements are used to convey the anarchic
eccentricity of popular tellers who tend to amplify and distort reality
to make it more credible. […] “grotesque realism” [is] used not just
for popular oral discourse but also for any sort of hyberbolic distortion
that creates a sense of strangeness through the confusion or
249
250
Delbaere-Garant, 261.
Bowers, 88.
78
interpenetration of different realms like animate/ inanimate or human/
animal. […] “grotesque realism” recalls Bakhtin’s carnival body.251
The relation between grotesque realism and magical realism can be best explained
referring to Bakthin’s ideas. As explained previously, Bakthin puts a great emphasis on
laughter with its victory over fear and its power of freeing people, and indicates that folk
laughter and the culture of folk humor play an important role in grotesque imagery. For him,
it is not possible to understand grotesque images without considering the defeat of fear.
While people are playing with fear and trying to laugh at it, “the awesome becomes a ‘comic
monster.’ […] All that was terrifying becomes grotesque.”252 Thus, for Bakthin, one of the
essential aspects of grotesque is its folklore source. He shows that although grotesque
imagery can be found in the mythology and the archaic art, grotesque realism flowered “as a
system of images created by the medieval culture of folk humor and its summit is the
literature of the Renaissance.” The term “grotesque” was first used at the end of the fifteenth
century to refer to a certain type of Roman ornaments that were found during the excavation
of Titus’s baths and were called grottesca from the Italian word grotto. These ornaments
reflected “the extremely fanciful, free, and playful treatment of plant, animal, and human
forms. These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other.”253 There was
nothing static and “finished” about them.
Bakthin indicates that “the grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation,
an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming.” Along with
its folklore sources, another important feature of the grotesque image is ambivalence,
because it reflects “both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the
251
Delbaere-Garant, 256.
Bakhtin, 91.
253
Bakhtin, 31-32.
252
79
procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis.”254 To explain the grotesque
concept of the body, Bakthin gives the following example:
In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile
pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical
and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant
death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing
calm and stable in the bodies of these hags. They combine a senile,
decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but
as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it
is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque
concept of the body.255
Bakthin indicates that grotesque realism employs two essential principles: material
bodily principle and degradation principle. Material bodily principle is represented by “the
images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” presented “in an
extremely exaggerated form” and these images are “the heritage […] of the culture of folk
humor.” The bodily element in grotesque realism is extremely positive, gay, gracious, and
universal representing all people. As it represents all people, it is usually hyperbolic,
exaggerated, and immeasurable. These exaggerated, hyperbolic and excessive images reflect
the themes of “fertility, growth and a brimming-over abundance.” As for degradation
principle, it is “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the
material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”256 For Bakthin,
Degradation […] means coming down to earth, the contact with earth
as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To
degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring
254
Bakhtin, 24.
Bakhtin, 25-26.
256
Bakhtin, 18-20.
255
80
forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern
oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and
copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a
bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative
aspect, but also a regenerating one. 257
Grotesque realism has two aspects: a negative (degrading) and a positive
(regenerating) aspect. Indicating that the regenerating power of grotesque comes from the
principle of laughter and the carnival spirit, Bakthin combines these two concepts as
“carnival-grotesque.”258 In grotesque realism, “death and renewal are inseparable in life as a
whole”:259
The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory
and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of
the old) are included as an essential phase, inseparable from
affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very
material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image (food, wine, the
genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive
character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always
abundance, increase.260
In its positive way, the grotesque can express “the people’s hopes of a happier future,
of a more just social and economic order, of a new truth,”261 as a result of which it can
257
Bakhtin, 21.
Bakhtin, 34.
259
Bakhtin, 50.
260
Bakhtin, 62.
261
Bakhtin, 81.
258
81
liberate “man from all the forms of inhuman necessity that direct the prevailing concept of
the world.”262
Grotesque realism, which is characterized by the people’s laughter and bodily
principle, survived with its degrading and regenerating principles during the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance. However, during the centuries following the Renaissance, especially in
the Romantic period, it was separated from folk culture, and the carnival spirit was
transferred into a subjective, idealistic philosophy. As there was a transformation of the
principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque, grotesque realism lost its regenerating
power. According to Bakthin, the differences between Romantic grotesque and medieval and
Renaissance grotesque “appear most distinctly in relation to terror. The world of Romantic
grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying world, alien to man.”263 Thus, after the
Renaissance, grotesque images, as they lost their regenerating power, were considered “ugly,
monstrous, hideous from the point of view of ‘classic’ aesthetics.”264
Referring to Bakhtin’s ideas, in The Spirit of Carnival, David K. Danow compares
magical realism (especially of Latin America) and the literature of the Second World War in
terms of the carnivalesque spirit they reflect. Danow notes that magical realism reflects a
positive and hopeful vision of life in which the fastastic is made believable. As magical
realism represents fundamentally the bright side of human experience, it reflects a “bright
carnivalesque” spirit. With this bright, life affirming, life-enhancing, magical carnivalesque
spirit, Latin American magical realism “laughs,” “gazes in joy and wonder,” and
“appreciates the vast potential for surprise in the world, relative to man’s place within it.” 265
Danow indicates that “in magical realism, death figures in the carnivalesque sense that
Bakthin perceives in popular-festive imagery; it allows for (re)birth and new life. There is a
262
Bakhtin, 49.
Bakhtin, 38.
264
Bakhtin, 25.
265
Danow, 9-10.
263
82
regenerative feature evident in its humor and consequent laughter.” For this reason,
according to Danow, “what Bakthin has to say about medieval and Renaissance grotesque,
with its attendant regenerative laughter, bears greatly on Latin American magical realism.”266
The above explanations clearly show that magical realism owes much to grotesque
realism. Moreover, grotesque realism can also be regarded as a type of magical realism. True
to Delbaere-Garant’s ideas, it seems that grotesque realism overlaps mythic/ folkloric and
ontological types as it combines Latin American baroque, North American tall tale, and
Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Today’s magical realism, with its closeness to folk culture, with
its gay and regenerative carnivalesque spirit that revolts against established value systems in
order to create new ones, and with its grotesque imagery, can be regarded as the twin of
medieval and Renaissance grotesque realism.
Postmodernist and Postcolonial Magical Realism
As indicated previously, magical realism “constitutes a point of convergence between
postmodernism and postcolonialism”:267
Magical realism […] has served as the common ground for
discussions of many issues pertinent to cultural and identity politics
termed as postcolonialism and postmodernism in the past three or four
decades, from the native recovering “local” or “indigenous” cultures
and writing back at empire to creating hybridities that accommodate
multiplicities, and from questioning the epistemological premises of
European post-Enlightenment realism to remapping the novel and the
visual arts.268
266
Danow, 40.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 1.
268
Ouyang, “Ideology of Fantasy,” 14.
267
83
As seen in the quotations above, magical realism is inextricably connected to
postmodernism and postcolonialism. Moreover, it has been influential in the development of
multicultural literature by the help of its hybridity and its multicultural nature.
Since magical realism has so far been much studied in terms of both postmodernism
and postcolonialism, it is necessary to give a short explanation about the two discourses to be
able to determine the general characteristics of postmodernist magical realism and
postcolonial magical realism. The term “postmodernism,” like “magical realism,” has been
popular since the 1960s. Especially in the 1980s, it started to be used to refer to an art and
literary movement that is based on “ontological uncertainty and epistemological
skepticism.”269 Until today, postmodernism has been one of the umbrella terms used to cover
many innovations and developments in Western literature. As for post-colonialism (or often
postcolonialism), like postmodernism, it has been effective from the 1960s onwards –
although postcolonial activities and resistance by the colonized and post-colonial theory have
“existed for a long time before that particular name was used to describe it.”270 From the late
1970s, postcolonialism has been used to refer to a movement that focuses on the destructive
outcomings of colonization on the colonized lands, peoples, and cultures, and investigates
the “the ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are represented in
the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their independence.” 271 In
contemporary literary studies, the followings are included in the scope of postcolonialism:
“Post-colonialism/ postcolonialism” is now used in wide and diverse
ways to include the study and analysis of European conquests, the
various institutions of European colonialisms, the discursive
operations of empire, the subtleties of subject construction in colonial
269
Chris Snipp-Walmsley, “Postmodernism,” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed.
Patricia Waugh (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 408.
270
Ashcroft et al., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 1.
271
Galens, 225.
84
discourse and the resistance of those subjects, and, most importantly
perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions and their
contemporary colonial legacies in both pre-and post-independence
nations and communities. While its use has tended to focus on the
cultural production of such communities, it is becoming widely used
in historical, political, sociological and economic analyses, as these
disciplines continue to engage with the impact of European
imperialism upon world societies.272
Bill Ashcroft et al. indicate that the rise of theoretical interest in post-colonial has concurred
with the rise of postmodernism in the Western world, which has led to a great confusion and
overlap between them. The mentioned confusion between these movements has also been
caused because of the similar themes they study and discursive strategies they apply:
This confusion is caused partly by the fact that the major project of
postmodernism – the deconstruction of the centralized, logocentric
master narratives of European culture, is very similar to the postcolonial project of dismantling of the Centre/ Margin binarism of
imperial discourse. The decentering of discourse, the focus on the
significance of language and writing in the construction of experience,
the use of the subversive strategies of mimicry, parody and irony – all
these concerns overlap those of postmodernism and so a conflation of
the two discourses had often occurred.273
Ashcroft et al. also try to explain the differences between the two discourses although they
usually overlap: “Post-colonialism is not simply a kind of ‘postmodernism with policies’ – it
is a sustained attention to the imperial process in colonial and neo-colonial societies, and an
272
273
Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies, 187.
Ashcroft et al., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 117.
85
examination of the strategies to subvert the actual material and discursive effects of that
process.” Ashcroft et al. conclude discussions indicating that “in the final analysis, the
problems of representation in the post-colonial text assume a political dimension very
different from the radical provisionality now accepted as fundamental to postmodernism.”274
Postmodernist Magical Realism
Magical realism is considered “a truly international development of the last half
century or so and, a major, perhaps the major, component of postmodernist fiction.”275 Most
critics, although they admit that magical realism has a postcolonial nature as well, have
stressed that it uses structural, stylistic, and thematic characteristics and concerns of
postmodernism. To be able to comprehend the connection between magical realism and
postmodernism, the ideas of two postmodernist theorists, the American literary critic and
Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson (1934- ) and the French philosopher and literary
theorist Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), are useful because they “provide definitions of
postmodernism that accentuate the importance of history and the need to find ways to
represent that which so far has been beyond ordinary discourse.”276
Lyotard’s influence is essential in postmodernist theory, which depends on
“scepticism about the claims of any kind of overall, totalizing explanation.”277 Lyotard
argues that throughout history, “society has been founded upon metanarratives which
legitimate the social bond and the relationship of science and knowledge to it.”278 At the turn
of the World War II, the world witnessed a crisis and “decline of the unifying and
legitimating power of the grand narratives of speculation and emancipation.”279 Especially
274
Ashcroft et al., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 117-18.
Matei Calineascu, on the dustcover of Magical Realism, by Zamora and Faris, eds. (Durham, NC
and London: Duke UP, 1995).
276
Bowers, 72.
277
Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 15.
278
Snipp-Walmsley, 412.
279
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1984), 38.
275
86
focusing on two main narratives: “those of the progressive emancipation of humanity – from
Christian redemption to Marxist Utopia – and that of the triumph of science,” Lyotard rejects
all totalizing and legitimizing metanarratives that “are contained in or implied by major
philosophies” that “argue that history is progressive, that knowledge can liberate us, and that
all knowledge has a secret unity.”280 He defines postmodern as “incredulity toward
metanarratives”281 as all grand narratives have lost their credibility. For this reason,
postmodernism is considered to be “the loss of the real” and “a renunciation of all critical
philosophical standards.” It has explored “uncertainties in the nature of what had been
essential and unarguable knowledge about the nature of things (ontology) to create a
dialogue between man and history” and insisted on “a skeptical awareness of historical
truth.”282 Referring to the historical perspective of postmodernism, Jameson, from a Marxist
point of view, indicates that postmodernism, “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” is “as an
attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically
in the first place.”283
As indicated previously, magical realist texts are interested in history, and they are full
of historical references: “magical realist texts include historical references, not only to situate
their texts in a particular context, but also to bring into question already existing historical
assumptions.”284 Magical realism adopts a view of history similar to the postmodernist view
of history following Jameson’s assertion that “people make their history, but not in
circumstances of their own choosing.”285 Bowers offers that “following Jameson’s Marxist
stance, […] versions of history that claim to be the only truth are usually created by people
in power in order to justify their position and maintain it. For this reason, such an approach
280
Butler, 13.
Lyotard, xxiv.
282
Snipp-Walmsley, 406.
283
Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP,
1991), vii.
284
Bowers, 72-73.
285
Jameson, Postmodernism, 407.
281
87
to history and postmodernism is frequently adopted by postcolonial magical realist
writers.”286
When Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands (1991) proposes that “history is
ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality
is built on prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and
knowledge,”287 he in fact emphasizes that in his magical realist works, he is adopting that
kind of historical postmodernism. Like Rushdie, the majority of magical realist writers
reflect history in their works. Their aim seems to be to change history “by addressing
historical issues critically and thereby attempting to heal historical wounds.”288
Hegerfeldt
emphasizes
magical
realism’s
preoccupation
with
history
and
historiography as the associated Western mode of production. She explains that because of
this obsession, many magical realist texts may be categorized as “historiographic
metafiction.” According to Hegerfeldt, magical realist texts
[…] undertake rewritings of official versions of history, playfully
offering alternate accounts. By telling the story from a different,
usually oppressed perspective, they reveal the extent to which history
never consists of purely factual and impartial accounts, but serves the
interest of those who write it. Historiography’s claim to objectivity
again is critically examined in texts that probe the possibilities of
accurately knowing the past in the first place, drawing attention to
gaps in historical knowledge and the way these are filled through
interpretation and reconstruction. 289
286
Bowers, 73.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Vintage,
2010), 25.
288
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 138.
289
Hegerfeldt, 63.
287
88
Such a critique of Western historiography and official history links magical realism not only
to postcolonial theory but also to “magical realism’s subversion of literary realism, which
has been seen as the mode of representation par excellence of post-enlightenment
historiography.” However,
Magical realist fiction not only shows up the interestedness and
constructedness of historical accounts, but also asks about the
respective social and psychological importance of proven historical
fact versus fictitious embellishments of history. Typically, an
empiricist or materialist historiographic practice based on presumably
known facts will be complemented or even replaced by legend, local
tales, gossip and rumour, showing how such knowledge shapes
people’s perception of the past just as much as, if not more than, real
historical events. Magic realist fiction strongly suggests that such
fictions need to be taken into consideration if one wants to understand
a community’s past, as well as its present.290
As well as the postmodernist view of history, the postmodernist attempt to find the
ways of representing the “unrepresentable” has also influenced magical realism. Lyotard
proposes that “postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities. It refines our
sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”291 He
concludes his book, “let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable;
let us activate the differences.”292 For Faris, who studies magical realism as a postmodernist
narrative mode, magical realism exemplifies Lyotard’s assertion “first of all in its
paradoxical name. Part of its attraction for postmodern writers may be all in its willfully
290
Hegerfeldt, 64.
Lyotard, xxv.
292
Lyotard, 82.
291
89
oxymoronic nature, its exposing of the unpresentable, its activation of differences.”293 Faris
explains, “modernism is epistomological, concerned with questions of knowledge”; that is,
in modernism “we ask how we know something” whereas “postmodernism is ontological,
concerned with questions of being”; that is, in postmodernism “we ask what it is.”294 For
Faris, as the main concern of magical realism is to question mankind and his life on earth
and to discover “the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances,”295 magical
realism definitely contributes to postmodernism. Faris determines five primary features that
make the mode postmodernist:
First, the text contains an “irreducible element” of magic; second, the
descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the
phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling
doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of
events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and, finally,
magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and
identity.296
As well as these primary features, Faris adds another list showing secondary characteristics
of postmodernist magical realism. In the list of secondary characteristics of the mode, she
enumerates such features as metafictionality, self-reflexiveness, self-awareness, linguistic
playfulness, the use of metamorphoses, an antibureaucratic agenda, and the existence of a
carnivalesque spirit.
Like Faris, Theo L. D’haen attempts to define magical realism as part of
postmodernism, whose main features are “self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism,
redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character
293
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 185.
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 166.
295
Leal, 121-22.
296
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7.
294
90
and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader.”
D’haen indicates that there is no difference between magical realism and postmodernism,
and especially in Canada and Latin America, both are used to point out the same type of
narrative mode. According to D’haen, magical realism, blossoming under the influence of
European avant-garde movements, has been a reaction against Anglo-American modernism,
a “privileged center” discourse. The most important feature of magical realism, as a strain of
postmodernism, is “precisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the
margin, from a place ‘other’ than ‘the’ or ‘a’ center.” Magical realism tries to break up
discourses considered to be “privileged” and/ or “central.” For D’haen, “to write excentrically, […] or from the margin, implies dis-placing this [privileged] discourse.” 297
D’haen explains that
[…] magical realist writing achieves this end by first appropriating the
techniques of the “centr”-al line and then using these, not as in the
case of these central movements, “realistically,” that is, to duplicate
existing reality as perceived by the theoretical or philosophical tenets
underlying said movements, but rather to create an alternative world
correcting so-called existing reality, and thus to right the wrongs this
“reality” depends upon. Magic realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to
invade and take over dominant discourse(s).298
Linda Hutcheon, like D’haen, regards the state of excentricity, that is, “the notion of
marginalization,” as an important feature of postmodernism, “that thought which refuses to
turn the Other into the Same.”299 She proposes that “in granting value to (what the centre
297
D’haen, 192-95.
D’haen, 195.
299
Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed.
Bill Ashcroft et al. (London: Routledge, 1995), 132.
298
91
calls) the margin or the Other, the postmodern challenges any hegemonic force that
presumes centrality.”300 Thus, magical realism resists centrality.
To sum up, magical realism makes much use of postmodernist narrative techniques.
As offered by Faris, “the ontological questions raised by the presence of magical events, and
the confrontations between different worlds and discourses, together with the collective spirit
and political pointedness of the writing, align it with postmodernism.”301 Echoing Faris’s
ideas, Zamora also argues that “magical realism is truly postmodern in its rejection of the
binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western modernity and that its
counterrealistic conventions are particularly well suited to enlarging and enriching Western
ontological understanding.”302 Postmodernist magical realism “wage[s] war on totality by
using magical realist devices to disrupt fixed categories of truth, reality and history” and thus
it contributes to decentering the privileged/ central discourses with its ex-centricity,
accomplishes to “think historically from a historical perspective that has been silenced” 303
and attempts to find ways to represent the unrepresentable. However, although D’haen and
Faris study magical realism in connection with postmodernism, the features above cannot be
limited solely to postmodernist magical realism. In her article “Circling the Downspout of
Empire,” Hutcheon shows that “thematic concerns regarding history and marginality and
discursive strategies like irony and allegory” 304 are the features of postcolonial magical
realism as well.
Postcolonial Magical Realism
Like postcolonial literature, magical realism started to rise at the end of the twentieth
century. As both magical realism and postcolonialism developed in the same period, “the
300
Simon During, quoted in Hutcheon, 132.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 33.
302
Zamora, “Magical Romance/ Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” in
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris (Durham, NC and London:
Duke UP, 1995), 498.
303
Bowers, 77.
304
Hutcheon, 131.
301
92
two developments appear almost inextricable.”305 Because of its inherent transgressive and
subversive qualities, magical realism has always been a handy device for writers in
postcolonial cultures and, as counter-discourses, magical realist texts have always best
served postcolonial communities.
Chanady, considering magical realism from the postcolonial perspective, proposes that
in the postcolonial period, writers from the previously colonized lands pursue effective ways
to fight against the hegemony of metropolitan values and the dominant paradigms of the
colonizer. These authors, before and after the independence of their formerly colonized
countries, attempted to legitimize their autonomy in three ways:
The hegemony of metropolitan values, institutional systems, and
conceptual paradigms leaves the colonies three main alternatives for
legitimating their autonomy: demonstrating that the similitude
between the colonizer and colonized invalidates any justification of
the colonial enterprise; insisting on their right, as well as the
colonizer’s right, to difference; and categorically rejecting the
paradigms of the colonizer in order not only to demand autonomy and
respect for their difference, but also to claim their superiority. 306
Based on the claims of similitude, difference, and superiority, Latin American authors
practiced new models in literature to rebel against imposed models and to resist neocolonial
domination. According to Chanady, the marvelous real introduced by Alejo Carpentier as a
reaction against French Surrealism, was a result of these efforts because he used the
marvelous real to emphasize the distinctive feature of Latin American rejection of European
models. As indicated by Elleke Boehmer, following Latin American colleagues, postcolonial
authors in English started to use magical realism as a postcolonial device:
305
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (New York: Oxford
UP, 2005), 228.
306
Chanady, “The Territorialization of the Imaginary,” 133.
93
Postcolonial writers in English share with their South American
counterparts like Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and
Isabel Allende a view from the fringe of dominant European cultures,
an interest in the syncretism produced by colonization, and access to
local resources of fantasy and story-telling. Drawing on the special
effects of magic realism, postcolonial writers in English are able to
express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible
by cultural displacement. Like the Latin Americans, they combine the
supernatural with local legend and imagery derived from colonialist
cultures to represent societies which have been repeatedly unsettled by
invasion, occupation, and political corruption. Magic effects,
therefore, are used to indict the follies of both empire and its
aftermath.307
Faris indicates that “magical realism has tended to concentrate on rural settings and
to rely on rural inspiration.”308 It is true that rural areas are especially preferred as settings in
magical realist texts. However, as indicated by Bowers, whether it is set in rural or urban
areas, magical realism has been used by those who have been neglected and dispossessed by
some central powers:
Much magical realism has originated in many of the postcolonial
countries that are battling against the influence of their previous
colonial rulers, and consider themselves to be at the margins of
imperial power. It has also become a common narrative mode for
fictions written from the perspective of the politically or culturally
disempowered, for instance indigenous people living under a covert
307
308
Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 229.
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 182.
94
colonial system such as Native Americans in the United States,
women writing from a feminist perspective, or those whose lives
incorporate different cultural beliefs and practices from those
dominant in their country of residence, such as Muslims in Britain. 309
As drawn from the quotations above, the majority of magical realist texts are usually set in a
postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective. For this reason, many
critics have argued how and why magical realism is appropriate for representing and
discussing postcolonial issues.
One of the most influential works considering magical realism from a postcolonial
perspective is “Magic Realism as a Post-colonial Discourse,” an essay written by Stephen
Slemon in 1988. Slemon argues that magic realism has especially been an auspicious mode
for fiction from not only Third World countries such as Latin America and the Caribbean,
but also Second World countries like India, Nigeria, and English Canada. He attempts to
explain how the narrative structure of the mode is linked to its postcolonial thematic aspects.
According to Slemon, magical realism is “most visibly operative in cultures situated at the
fringes of mainstream literary traditions” and “carries a residuum of resistance toward the
imperial center and its totalizing systems of generic classification.”310
Slemon indicates that “the metaphysical clash or double vision inherent in colonial
history and language is recapitulated in transmuted form in the [magical realist] text’s
oppositional language of narration and mirrored in its thematic level.”311 Referring to the
way magical realism combines binary oppositions of the real and the magic, he claims that
A battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working
toward the creation of a different kind of fictional world from the
other. Since the ground rules of these worlds are incompatible, neither
309
Bowers, 31-32.
Slemon, 408.
311
Slemon, 420.
310
95
one come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a
continuous dialectic with the “other,” a situation which creates
disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems, rending
them with gaps, absences, and silences. 312
Calling on Bakthin’s dialogic discourse, Slemon explains that magical realism has a certain
narrative structure in which the magic and the real, as “two opposing discursive systems,
with neither managing to subordinate or contain the other” exist together. When magical
realism is considered as “as a socially symbolic contract,”313 such a structure reflects “the
tension between the ever-present and ever-opposed colonized and colonialist discourses in a
postcolonial context.” The tension between these oppositions also suggests “there are ‘gaps’
in the narrative which can be read either as a negative gap that reflects the difficulty of
cultural expression for the colonized in the oppositional face of the colonialist power, or it
can provide a positive gap which can be filled with the expression of an alternative
perspective from the colonized point of view.”314 Thus, such a process gives a chance to the
colonized to express itself and helps the marginalized, the silenced and the disposed to regain
their voice. As a result, magical realism becomes a useful device to express the following
postcolonial elements:
First, due to its dual narrative structure, magical realism is able to
present the postcolonial context from both the colonized peoples’ and
the colonizers’ perspectives through its narrative structure as well as
its themes. Second, it is able to produce a text which reveals the
tensions and gaps of representation in such a context. Third, it
provides a means to fill in the gaps of cultural representation in a
postcolonial context by recuperating the fragments and voices of
312
Slemon, 409.
Slemon, 410.
314
Bowers, 92-93.
313
96
forgotten or subsumed histories from the point of view of the
colonized. 315
Slemon’s assertion has influenced many magical realist critics who consider the mode from a
postcolonial perspective. For instance, Faris reflects a similar idea when she says magical
realism is a kind of “narrative inscription [which transfers] discursive power from colonizer
to colonized, to provide a fictional ground in which to imagine alternative narrative visions
of agency and history.” Like Slemon, Faris also proposes that narrative techniques of
magical realism serve a certain transformative decolonizing project. For this reason, she
regards magical realism as a “decolonizing mode.”316 Faris proposes that by the help of
postmodernist narrative techniques, magical realism “subvert[s] the colonial authority of
European realism by disengaging it from the empirical basis on which that authority seems
to be built.”317 Magical realism not only attempts to subvert the colonial authority of
European realism which has supported imperialism, but also fights against the established
social order, bureaucratic mentality, and oppressive regimes. While explaining postcolonial
cultural politics of the mode, Cooper echoes Faris’s ideas above:
Magical realists are postcolonials who avail themselves most
forcefully of the devices of postmodernism, of pastiche, irony, parody
and intertextuality; they are alternatively recognized as oppositional to
cultural imperialism […]. In other words, magical realism and its
associated styles and devices is alternatively characterized as a
transgressive mechanism that parodies Authority, the Establishment
and the Law. 318
315
Bowers, 92.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 136-38.
317
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 154.
318
Cooper, Magical Realism, 29.
316
97
Jameson, like the aforementioned critics, considers magical realism to be an
historical and political mode. He connects the development of capitalism to the rise of
magical realism. Jameson indicates that magical realism is understood “as a kind of narrative
raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the
world of village or even tribal myth”:319
The possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively
dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is
structurally present; or, to generalize the hypothesis more starkly,
magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the
coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological
features.320
Jameson points out that the magical realist authors such as the Latin American Alejo
Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, and the Nigerian Amos Tutuola
(1920-1997) are usually left-wing or revolutionary writers. According to Jameson, the
anthropological magical realist texts written by these authors have often been considered
from postcolonial perspective because of their political or mystificatory value. Although he
mainly focuses on a reading of films in his article, his assertion that the development of
capitalism is closely connected to the birth and development of magical realism has been
highly influential on Cooper in Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a
Third Eye (2001). Expanding on Jameson’s ideas, Cooper explains the political
circumstances from which magical realism emerged:
Magical realism thrives on transition, on the process of change,
borders and ambiguity. Such zones occur where burgeoning capitalist
development mingles with older pre-capitalist modes in postcolonial
319
320
Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 302.
Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 311.
98
societies, and where there is the syncretizing of cultures as creolized
communities are created. […] at the heart of the emergence of magical
realism in the Third World is the fact that these countries encountered
Western
capitalism,
technology
and
education
haphazardly.
Communications – road and rail – were set up where raw materials
required transportation; elsewhere areas remained isolated and only
indirectly transformed by new economies. Cities grew wildly from
rural origins, and families were divided between members who were
Western-educated and those who remained inserted in pre-colonial
economies and ways of seeing the world, with any number of
positions in between these extremes. This social patchwork, dizzying
in its cacophony of design, is the cloth from which the fictional
magical carpet is cut, mapping not the limitless vistas of fantasy, but
rather the new historical realities of those patchwork societies. 321
As explained before, Cooper regards hybridity as an important aspect in the center of the
ideology and techniques of magical realism. Cooper links this hybridity to a postcolonial
context indicating that it is only by the help of this hybridity that magical realism can oppose
cultural imperialism and popularize cultural manifoldness: “such a thematic and stylistic
hybridity allows the magical realist writer to ‘see with a third eye’ or to create a ‘third
space,’ beyond the binary structure of colonizer-colonized.”322
According to Faris, as well as its decolonizing properties, the hybrid qualities of
magical realism, reflecting the hybrid nature of postcolonial societies, are helpful in
transculturation processes of the mode: “The hybrid qualities of magical realism are thus
analogous to the performances of ‘a modern kind of shaman, who […] acts as a mediator
321
322
Cooper, Magical Realism, 15-16.
Aldea, 5.
99
between cultures.’”323 As magical realism joins two different worlds – the world of reality
and the world of the spirits – it “reflects the ideology of shamanism, which pictures the
shaman’s journey to a different realm.”324 In shamanism, the role of the shaman is to
preserve and create “cultural or group identity by mediating between cultural heritage of the
past and the present everyday situations people find themselves in.”325 Resembling this
performance of a shaman, magical realism offers a shamanistic healing for the cultural selfdefinition of postcolonial societies. Because of its similarity to shamanism, magical realism
proves to be very convenient in postcolonial studies as “a counter-discourse that transforms
not only the discourse of the colonized but that of the colonizer as well.”326
Wen-chin Ouyang’s assertion in “The Politics of Magic” best summarizes the idea
represented in this part so far:
Magical realism is inherently political[,] concerned not only with the
continuing influence of empire in the postcolonial world but also with
the corruption of political authority set up in postindependence nationstates, not to mention the attendant cultural politics that partake in the
formulation of a plausible postcolonial national identity.327
As a result, postcolonial magical realism, with its powerful political nature, becomes a useful
device for authors to express anti-imperialist and non-Western perspectives and to challenge
the dominant Western world-view. In this sense, it is a revolutionary narrative mode with its
transgressive, subversive, and revisionary features. Amalgamating two different ways of
thinking, successfully “migrating to various cultural shores” and expressing “the tensions
323
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 155.
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 105.
325
Gloria Anzaldúa, quoted in Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 105
326
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 155.
327
Ouyang, “The Politics of Magic,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Hart and Ouyang
(Woodridge: Tamesis, 2005), 153.
324
100
within different societal frameworks,”328 it provides a third way of seeing things. According
to Faris, magical realism, with its antibureaucratic nature, attempts to subvert all kinds of
authority and totalitarianism and offers shamanistic healing, especially for postcolonial
societies. Thus, as offered by Bhabha, it has proved to be the language par excellence of
emergent postcolonial societies.
In the final analysis, as drawn from the above critics’ assertions, magical realism can
be considered postmodern in terms of its narrative techniques, styles, and strategies, whereas
it is completely postcolonial in terms of its cultural politics. Its hybrid nature lets the mode
represent two different perspectives, genres, and cultures at the same time. Its subversive,
transgressive, and revolutionary powers, which make it a miraculous weapon for writers,
seem to be closely connected to postmodernist and postcolonial properties of the mode. As
well as these properties, magical realism seems to owe much to its carnivalesque spirit,
which increases its socio-political value.
328
Stephen M. Hart, “Magical Realism: Style and Substance,” introduction to A Companion to
Magical Realism, ed. Hart and Ouyang (Woodridge: Tamesis, 2005), 6.
101
CHAPTER 2
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
The Latin American Boom
In postcolonial societies of the second half of the twentieth century, the majority of
authors attempted to find effective ways to construct “a strong sense of identity in their
independent nations” and to express cultural displacement caused by Western colonialism as,
for centuries, imperialistic powers have “deprived the colonized people not only of their
territories and wealth but also of their imagination.”329 With a colonial history of several
centuries, Latin America was not immune from these considerations.
Latin American literary tradition, spanning several centuries, has been shaped by
colonialism and “indebted to the European forms since explorers and conquerors first put
pen to paper to describe it.”330 According to Schroeder, the continent has only recently come
into its own as a literary power, abandoning the use of the European styles. This rising of
Latin American literature has been accomplished especially with the help of magical realism.
In his 1954 essay, Flores indicates that Latin American fiction had been considered “secondrate” till the discovery of a new way of imaginative writing, which he calls magical realism,
in the 1940s. Under the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, a group of “brilliant” Latin
American novelists and short story authors attempted to prove that Latin American fiction
was equal to the fiction of the colonizer:
Never before have so many sensitive and talented writers lived at the
same time in Latin America – never have they worked so unanimously
to overhaul and polish the craft of fiction. In fact their slim but
weighty output may well mark the inception of a genuinely Latin
American fiction. We may claim, without apologies, that Latin
329
330
Durix, 187.
Schroeder, 20.
102
America is no longer in search of its expression […] – we may claim
that Latin America now possesses an authentic expression, one that is
uniquely civilized, exciting, and, let us hope, perennial. 331
As indicated by Flores, the studies of these “brilliant” Latin American authors of the 1940s
and 1950s, keeping the example of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones [Fictions, 1944] at the
heart, gave rise to a “new way of imaginary writing” called the New Novel or New Narrative
in Latin American literature: “In terms of international recognition, the most important
development in the whole of Latin American literature was the growth of the so-called New
Novel or New Narrative [nueva novela or nueva narrative] in – roughly – the 1940s and
1950s.”332
During the first half of the twentieth century, Latin American fiction was mostly
dominated by a kind of simplistic social realism, trying to reflect local/ regional social,
economic, political, or geographical conditions. Philip Swanson explains that the Latin
American New Novel became a reaction against or rejection of traditional realism: what
“defines the new novel in Latin America or unites its disparate manifestations” is the desire
“to re-evaluate or reject the values, belief systems and formal or stylistic patterns that lie at
the roots of traditional realism.” According to Swanson,
Generally, the “new novelist” perceives realism as fundamentally
flawed in its simplistic supposition that reality is essentially
observable, comprehensible and transferable to a written medium
(and, by implication, therefore, ordered and coherent) and, more
specifically, perceives Latin American social realism as misleading in
its attempt to present to its readers a socially or politically skewed or
slanted vision of society as a mirror of reality. In the new novel,
331
332
Flores, 116.
Philip Swanson, Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction (Cornwall: Blackwell, 2005), 37.
103
therefore, regional issues give way to universal epistemological or
ontological skepticism and the ordered narrative form which reflected
an ordered world view gives way to a fragmented, distorted or
fantastic narrative form which reflects a perception of a contradictory,
ambiguous or even chaotic reality. Hence the novel is a literary space
in which the reader plays an active rather than a passive role, seeking
[…] an order in an apparently formless world rather than simply
accepting a previously given version of it. 333
The Latin American New Novel, which has been shaped by “the relationship […] with
Europe, and the tensions surrounding modernization and the consolidation of national
identities”334 as well as the experiences of colonialism and independence, culminated in the
remarkable success of what is known as the Boom [el boom].
The phenomenon of the Latin American Boom [Boom latinoamericano] was “the
eruption in the 1960s of a new kind of experimental Latin American fiction onto the
international scene.”335 The Latin American Boom was concentrated around four central
figures, who are called “the Big Four”: the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), the
Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (1936- ), the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and the
Argentinean Julio Cortázar (1914-1984). Together with the Big Four, the Boom also brought
fame to the old generation of authors such as the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and the
Argentinean Ernesto Sabato (1911-2011). These authors’ works can be “characterized by a
tension between Europe and Latin America, North and South, the universal and the specific,
the existential and the political”336 because they were influenced by European and North
American modernism and Latin American Vanguardia movement. As Latin American novel
333
Swanson, The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1955), 3.
334
Swanson, Latin American Fiction, 2.
335
Swanson, New Novel in Latin America, 1.
336
Swanson, Latin American Fiction, 54.
104
has always given a great place to the historical and political, the main feature of the Boom
works was that they were extremely political as well as experimental. Especially, all of the
Big Four have produced commentaries on Latin American society and politics.
While speaking of the Boom, Gerald Martin, in his article “Boom, Yes; ‘New’ Novel,
No: Further Reflections on the Optical Illusions of the 1960s in Latin America,” indicates
that
No cultural phenomenon of the 1960s did more than the apparent
explosion of creativity in the Spanish American novel to bring Latin
America to international attention. It is no exaggeration to state that if
the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in
the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and
its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and
secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall
coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between
1959 and 1971.337
As indicated by Martin, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which replaced Cuban dictator
Fulgencio Batista’s regime with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, was one of the
factors that provided the internationalization of the Latin American New Novel during the
Boom. The Cuban Revolution “put Latin America on the world map, promoted new interest
in the region and made its cultural output marketable as one of alternative perspectives, and
helped foster a sense of cross-national subcontinental identity, identification and community
amongst
different
Spanish
American
authors,”338
The
second
factor
of
the
internationalization of the Latin American New Novel during this period was that Latin
American fiction started to be published in Spain by Barcelona’s Seix Barral publishing
337
Gerald Martin, “Boom, Yes; ‘New’ Novel, No: Further Reflections on the Optical Illusions of the
1960s in Latin America,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 3.2 (1984): 53.
338
Swanson, Latin American Fiction, 60.
105
house thanks to the attempts of the Spanish publisher Carlos Barral and the Spanish literary
agent Carmen Balcells. The award of the Biblioteca Breve Prize (of the Barcelona-based
Seix Barral publishing house) in 1962 was given to Mario Vargas Llosa for his novel La
ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero]. This event is usually considered to be the
beginning of the Boom because it was the first time a non-Spaniard had ever won the prize.
In the late 1960s, with the emergence of a new generation of authors and with some
changes in the writings of the authors associated with the Boom, the so-called Post-Boom
started to be influential in Latin American literature. Referring to the developments from the
late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, the Post-Boom was both a rejection and a continuation
of the New Novel and reflected the combination of “a return to some form of traditional
structures, an embracing of or engagement with mass or popular culture, and an increased
orientation towards social or political reality.”339 What the Boom and Post-Boom share in
common was “a link with the political upheavals of their respective time periods: the 1959
triumph of the Cuban revolution for the Boom, the dictatorial regimes of the 1970s for the
post-Boom.”340 As a number of political events such as “the defeat of the Chilean President,
Salvador Allende in 1973, the Cuban dependence on the Soviet Union, and the contra war in
Nicaragua in the late 1970s”341 became catalysts for the Post-Boom, like the Boom, it was
highly political and thus seemed closer to postcolonialism rather than postmodernism.
Magical realism became famous in literary criticism especially in the 1960s with the
rise of the Latin American Boom movement and definitely played a great part in carrying
Latin American literature to the international arena. During the Boom and the post-Boom,
magical realism bridged “the gap between social realist regional fiction and fantasy or formal
innovation” and became “an important, evolving strand of anti-traditional experimental
339
Swanson, Latin American Fiction, 87.
Schroeder, 28.
341
Jean Franco, quoted in Schroeder, 28.
340
106
writing that was very much involved with the issue of defining Latin American identity.”342
Durix notes that “magic[al] realists usually have a definite idea of their social role and pose
political problems, which beset the (postcolonial) country described.”343 This was true of
Latin American magical realists of the Boom as their works were highly sociopolitical. Latin
American antitotalitarian magical realists attempted to reestablish Latin American identity
damaged or lost through Western colonization and neocolonialism:
[…] even though the Latin Americans are intellectuals distanced from
the indigenous peoples whose myths they use and thus are only partial
dissidents, they nearly always oppose totalitarian regimes. Their
agenda of “reestablishing an identity lost through colonization and
neocolonialism,” together with the use of popular myths for those
ends, gives their writing an obvious political meaning. 344
According to Schroeder, “the new fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, symbolized by
such authors as Borges and Carpentier, had already begun to project Latin American
literature on to the ‘global stage,’ but the acquisition of the new catch phrase ‘magical
realism’ placed Latin American literature more firmly on the map.”345 In the Boom, Latin
American authors, by demanding sole rights to magical realism, tried to create a new
literature that would attract the attention of the whole world. As indicated before,
Carpentier’s idea of the marvellous realism became the starting point of the discussion of
magic realism as a narrative mode unique to Latin America. However, it was Gabriel García
Márquez who made magical realism global rather than solely Latin American. García
342
Swanson, Latin American Fiction, 49.
Durix, 146.
344
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 150.
345
Schroeder, 2.
343
107
Márquez, “the biggest of the Big Four,”346 became the writer most associated with magical
realism:
Gabriel García Márquez, born in Colombia in 1927, is the best known
writer to have emerged from the “Third World” and the best-known
exponent of a literary style, “magical realism” […]. García Márquez is
perhaps the most widely admired and most representative Latin
American novelist of all time inside Latin America itself; and even in
the “First World” of Europe and the United States, in an era in which
universally acknowledged great writers have been difficult to find, his
reputation over the last four decade has been second to none. 347
Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel Prize winner, published his masterpiece Cien años
de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] in 1967. One Hundred Years of Solitude is
generally regarded as “the greatest Latin American novel of all time.”348 Moreover, the novel
has “come to stand, by way of synecdoche, for all of Latin American literature.”349 While
explaining the novel’s widespread influence, Warnes claims that
Estimated to have sold more than 30 million copies in 37 languages,
the novel [One Hundred Years of Solitude] continues to attract a
startlingly diverse range of readers from around the world. It appeals
to Marxist critics, to literary aristocrats and Aquarian baby-boomers,
to theorists of the postcolonial condition and to the Californian “stayat-home moms” book group selected by Oprah Winfrey in 2004, who
discuss it over margaritas while their kids play in McDonalds. 350
346
Swanson, The New Novel in Latin America, 9.
Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), xix.
348
Swanson, The New Novel in Latin America, 9.
349
Johnny Payne, quoted in Schroeder, 32.
350
Warnes, 75.
347
108
Considering García Márquez to be “a rare phenomenon” both in Latin American
literature and World literature, Martin claims that One Hundred Years of Solitude have found
millions of readers from different cultures, countries, and continents. In terms of its subject
matter and its reception, One Hundred Years of Solitude has become “the world’s first truly
‘global’ novel,”351 turning its author to “something of an icon” 352 not only in his native
Colombia and Latin America but also throughout the Third-World countries and throughout
the world.
Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez’s “magnum opus,”353 One Hundred Years of Solitude, in its
original name Cien años de soledad, was published by the Editorial Sudamericana
publishing company in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1967. As soon as it was published, it
provoked a “literary earthquake”354 all over the world and became a legend bringing fame
and popularity to its author Gabriel García Márquez, who was then a forty-year-old,
“experienced journalist and a little known if respected writer, living with his wife and two
young sons in Mexico City.”355 The novel gained widespread critical acclaim and many
prizes: “In 1969, One Hundred Years of Solitude won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy and was
named the Best Foreign Book in France. In 1970, literary critics in the United States […]
selected the novel as one of the 12 best books of the year.”356
According to Susan Muaddi Darraj, there are several factors contributing to the
novel’s success, popularity, and critical acclaim: First, “the novel has a distinctive voice” as
351
Martin, A Life, xix.
Swanson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez (New York: Cambridge UP,
2010), 1.
353
Tomás Eloy Martinez, quoted in Rubén Pelayo, Gabriel García Márquez: A Biography (Westport:
Greenwood, 2009), 130.
354
Mario Vargas Llosa, “García Márquez: From Aracataca to Macondo,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical
Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1999), 5.
355
Gene H. Bell-Villada, introduction to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:
A Casebook, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 3.
356
Susan Muaddi Darraj, The Great Hispanic Heritage: Gabriel García Márquez (New York: Chelsea
House, 2006), 79-80.
352
109
a magical realist text. Second, it was semi-autobiographical: “the novel finally accomplishes
García Márquez’s goal of depicting the Aracataca of his childhood.” Third, the novel reflects
the history and politics of Colombia: “One Hundred Years of Solitude incorporates much of
Colombia’s history and politics into its storyline.”357 In the following quotation, Ruben
Pelayo supports Darraj’s contention:
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the work prior to it, García
Márquez portrayed the life of Macondo, its peoples, and the saga of
the Buendía family, mainly from his place of birth: the small town of
Aracataca, near the Colombian Caribbean coastline. But he also
sketched from the history of the country and the past of the continent
at large, from its discovery to colonial times and the wars of
independence. […] nearly everything he has written is interconnected
with García Márquez’s own life. The memories of his childhood
helped him create his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.358
García Márquez has always been obsessed with the ambition of writing about the land and
the people he belongs to, and he indicated many times that his primary aim, while writing
One Hundred Years of Solitude, was to reconstruct his childhood spent in Aracataca. Thus,
the material for the novel mostly derives from his own life. All the characters and events in
the novel are based on real characters and real events: “Images, sounds, settings, characters,
and frequently even the themes find their origins in Aracataca, in Zipaquirá, in Santa Marta,
in Cartagena, someplace in the Colombian landscape, but particularly the Caribbean
countryside, for he calls himself a Carib.”359 However, not only the material for the novel but
also its mode of representation has derived from García Márquez’s personal history. Through
his own experiences, especially his memories of his childhood, the novel gets the power to
357
Darraj, 80-82.
Pelayo, xiv.
359
Pelayo, 9.
358
110
represent the social, cultural, historical and political life of Colombia. As the novel is semiautobiographical, it might be a good idea to give short information about his life story. Such
information will provide a social, cultural, and political background for the analysis of the
novel.
Gabriel José García Márquez, the eldest of the eleven children of Luisa Santiaga
Márquez Iguarán de García and Gabriel Eligio García, was born in Aracataca (aka
Macondo), a small town in the Caribbean region on Colombia’s north coast on Sunday 6
March 1927. His birthplace Aracataca, meaning “the place of diaphanous waters”360 in the
language of Chimila Indians, was on the side of the Aracataca River and was founded in
1885. With its tropical climate, it was in the Banana Zone of Colombia, and it was a small
town with unpaved streets and no drainage system. Long before García Márquez, nicknamed
“Gabo” or “Gabito,” was born, banana cultivation had been introduced into the region by
planters from Santa Marta in 1887. In 1905, the Boston-based United Fruit Company started
to operate in Aracataca, pulling many workers from all over Colombia, the Caribbean,
Venezuela, Europe, and the Middle and Far East into the town:
In the early years of the century the North American Fruit Company
had moved into the area to exploit its banana-producing potential and
in the 1910s Aracataca became something of a boom town. By the
time of the author’s birth the boom had passed, but it was still a
bustling, prosperous little community. However, following United
Fruit’s withdrawal from Colombia in 1941, the economy of the region
collapsed. 361
360
Martin, A Life, 19.
James Higgins, “Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 33.
361
111
During its heyday, the biggest bananas were produced in Aracataca thanks to its hot climate.
Moreover, this “Wild West boom town” 362 became known for its boom-town excitements
such as circuses, balls, a lottery held on Sundays, and the Aracataca carnival, first held in
1915. The Aracatacan society, with a mixture of race and class, was Catholic. Marriages
between cousins, adultery, and illegitimacy were quite common in the town, as is the case in
the whole of Latin America. For this reason, illegitimacy and incest became an obsession in
García Márquez’s fiction.
When García Márquez was less than a year old, he was left by his mother in the care
of his maternal grandparents, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez and Colonel Nicolás
Márquez Mejía, who were descendants of white European families from the Guajira, an
Indian territory. His grandfather Colonel Márquez had fought in Colombia’s great civil war,
called the Thousand Days War (1899-1902) between the Liberals and the Conservatives. He
had joined the Liberal army under the command of war hero General Rafael Uribe Uribe. He
was the local treasurer of the municipality of Aracataca and the supporter of the Colombian
Liberal Party. On 5 December 1928, when Gabo was twenty months old, Aracataca
witnessed one of the most violent events in Colombian history: The massacre of the banana
workers in Ciénega. The massacre, known as the Santa Marta massacre, was so important
that it “would change Colombian history by leading directly to the return of a Liberal
government in August 1930 after half a century of civil war and exclusion, thereby uniting
the small boy with his nation’s history”363 and would take its place in his novel years later.
During the formative years of his childhood, until he was eight years old, he lived in
his grandparents’ huge old house. The house was full of women, mysteries, and ghosts.
Although they were Catholics, the women in the house – especially the grandmother – were
362
363
Martin, A Life, 20.
Martin, A Life, 31.
112
credulous and superstitious, and they were telling of fantastic and magical events as if they
were commonplace. This house would reappear in One Hundred Years of Solitude
[…] in such a way that Gabito’s vivid but anguished and often
terrifying childhood could become materialized for all eternity as the
magical world of Macondo, at which point the view from Colonel
Márquez’s house would encompass not only the little town of
Aracataca but also the rest of his Native Colombia and indeed the
whole of Latin America and beyond.364
In the Colonel’s house, Gabo was the only boy and had to experience isolation and solitude
that would become the main themes of his novel. Gabo was greatly affected by his
grandparents. He developed a close relationship with his grandfather from whom he would
inherit his political views and life-philosophy. It was also his grandfather who introduced
him with a dictionary that determined his destiny as a writer. Many years later, in his novel,
García Márquez combined two different ways of interpreting reality: the worldly reality of
his grandfather and the other-wordly reality of his grandmother. When his grandfather died
in March 1937, Gabo was eight years old. His first eight years in Aracataca carry a great
importance because the grandparents’ house and people in it did much to shape not only the
essence of his nature and ways of thinking, but also his narrative style. After the death of the
Colonel, the García Márquez family, together with Gabo, moved to Sincé, a small northern
town in the Sucre Department of Colombia. The family had to struggle through financial
difficulties. When he was almost thirteen, García Márquez was sent to the San José College
in Barranqilla. In 1943, when he was sixteen, he won a scholarship to attend the National
College for Boys in nearby Zipaquirá thirty miles away from the capital of Colombia,
Bogotá. His left-oriented tendencies and interest in Marxism developed at the Liceo
Nacional de Zipaquira. It was also at this school that he could understand the nature of his
364
Martin, A Life, 30.
113
country and became conscious what it meant to be a costeño (an adjective meaning “coastal”
and used to refer to the peoples of Caribbean Colombia as opposed to a cachaco referring to
cold, rigid and arrogant Bogotá dwellers). The Liceo was very suitable for García Márquez
because his imaginative tendencies were encouraged by his school teachers such as Carlos
Julio Calderón and Carlos Martín, a poet. He widened his love of literature reading
everything from the Greeks up to recent Colombian, Latin American, and Spanish texts, as
well as European ones. García Márquez, together with his friends, founded a literary
magazine called La Gaceta Literaria. His first poems were published under the pseudonym
Javier Garcés in 1944 by El Tiempo, Colombia’s most important newspaper.
When García Márquez was in his last year at the Liceo in 1946, there were some
changes in the political life of Colombia, putting the whole country on a razor edge.
Although there had always been a political rivalry and feud between the Liberal and
Conservative parties of Colombia since the nineteenth century, the tension between them
was now at its peak. The Conservatives had been in power for many years. However, during
the last years of the 1940s, the Liberals achieved more political ground with their favorable
candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, “the most charismatic politician in twentieth-century
Colombian history and one of the most successful political leaders in Latin America in an era
of populist politics,” to go against the Conservative Luis Mariano Ospina Pérez. La
Violencia [the Violence], “the horrific wave of violence that would kill a quarter of a million
Colombians from the late 1940s to the 1960s,” was “under way during García Márquez’s last
years in Zipaquirá.”365
On 25 February 1947, unable to come out against his parents, who wished him to
become a professional, García Márquez started to study law at the National University in
Bogotá. Studying law was against his own will as he desired to be a writer. It was also hard
for him to get used to Bogotá. García Márquez “would associate Bogota with centralized
365
Martin, A Life, 91.
114
power and dictatorship. Colombia, like most Latin American countries, has suffered from
centralized power since colonial times.”366 In Bogotá, He focused on reading and writing. It
was in Bogotá in 1947 that he first read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Kafka’s
impact on García Márquez was so great that his first published stories “The Third
Resignation” and “Eva is Inside Her Cat” – both published in 1947 by El Espectador – were
completely Kafkaesque.
The year 1948 became a crucial one for both García Márquez and all of his country. In
April 1948, the ninth Pan-American Conference was being held in Bogotá and “the
Organization of American States was in the process of being set up at the behest of the
United States.”367 Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate of the Liberal party, was
murdered by an unemployed worker called Juan Roa Rierra in downtown Bogotá at
lunchtime on 9 April 1948. Gaitán’s assassination gave way to the Bogotazo [the strike of
Bogotá], a wave of fury and violence that swept through Bogotá for three days:
The assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán caused an uproar in
Colombia. Liberals accused the Conservative government of being
responsible for the murder, and all the old tensions between the two
parties raged anew. Riots consumed the city of Bogotá and came to be
known as the Bogotazo, or “the strike of Bogotá.” On a larger scale,
another civil war, known as La Violencia [The Violence], erupted in
Colombia. It would last until 1958. By the time it was over, it would
be blamed for the murders of hundreds of thousands of Colombians. 368
As shown above, although the Bogotazo lasted for three days, its effects long survived
in Colombia. It divided the nation in two and gave way to the dictatorship of the successive
presidents Luis Mariano Ospina Pérez (1946-1950), Laureano Gómez (1950-1951), Roberto
366
Pelayo, 16.
Martin, A Life, 105.
368
Darraj, 51.
367
115
Urdaneta Arbeláez (1951-1953), and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957). The fighting,
deaths, and guerilla movements continued throughout the mid-1960s. As Martin opines, “if it
can be said that the War of a Thousand Days showed the upper classes the need to unite
against the peasantry, the Bogotazo similarly showed the danger represented by the urban
proletarian masses.”369 La Violencia, which followed the Bogotazo, would be the leitmotiv in
One Hundred Years of Solitude. With this leitmotif he criticized militarism.
On 29 April 1948, just after the Bogotazo, García Márquez returned back to his
homeland, the Caribbean coast. He enrolled in the law school at the University of Cartagena,
which he would drop out of in 1950. His working life as a journalist first started in El
Universal, a Liberal newspaper of Cartagena in 1948. He would then work for the
Colombian newspapers El Heraldo and El Espectador, a tabloid magazine La Crónica, the
Venezuelan magazines Momento and Venezuela Gráfica, the Cuban press agency Prensa
Latina, and the Mexican magazines Sucesos and La Familia. Keeping him “in contact with
reality,”370 journalism became supportive, providing the verisimilitude in his work:
“Journalism taught me stratagems to give validity to my stories.”371 He learned from
journalism “conciseness, terseness and directness.”372 Although journalism was not
completely thematized in his novel, there would be “a subtle reminiscence of journalism in
One Hundred Years of Solitude’s parody of history-writing, particularly in Melqíades’
manuscript, which, surpassing journalism, prophesies, in minute – journalistic – detail, the
future history of Macondo.”373 The meeting with Germán Vargas, Álvaro Cepeda Zamudio,
Alfonso Fuenmayor, and Ramon Vinyes, while he was working for the newspaper El
369
Martin, A Life, 109.
García Márquez, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Gene H. BellVillada, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada,
(New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 22.
371
García Márquez, quoted in Aníbal González, “The Ends of the Text: Journalism in the Fiction of
Gabriel García Márquez,” in Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, ed. Ortega (Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1988), 63.
372
García Márquez, quoted in Martin, A Life, 213.
373
Aníbal González, “The Ends of the Text,” 66.
370
116
Heraldo in Barranquilla in 1950, was another stepping-stone in his life. These bohemian
intellectuals, known as the Barranquilla Group, introduced him to the work of authors such
as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway and inspired him
in his writing. The group members, including García Márquez himself, would reappear with
their own names – “Álvaro, Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel,” as well as the “wise Catalonian”
bookseller representing Vinyes in the last chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In 1955, García Márquez developed a contact with the Communist Party. However,
“his flirtation with the Communist Party was transitory, and he has always rejected hard-line
Marxist dogmatism, but he has consistently championed left-wing causes and has always
maintained that the future of the world lies with socialism.”374 As indicated by himself, he
has been “a leftist liberal, but not a Communist.”375 In the same year, he went to Europe as a
foreign correspondent of El Espectador. His travels in various European countries such as
Switzerland, France, Italy, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Russia
provided him with a better understanding of not only his native Colombia but also Latin
America as a whole. Frustrated by the totalitarianism of the Communist regimes in Europe,
he could better appraise the binaries between West and East, Capitalism and Communism. In
1957, he moved to Venezuela. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, turning back to Bogotá,
he started to work for Latin Press [Prensa Latina or Prela], which was a Cuban news agency
founded after the Revolution and aimed at helping the Colombians apply the lessons of Cuba
to their country. His closeness to Fidel Castro, beginning in the 1970s, would always be
controversial; nevertheless, Castro became his lifelong friend. He would later apply in his
novel an anti-imperialist perspective that the Cuban Revolution had given him. In June 1961,
García Márquez moved to Mexico City. Meanwhile, his novels Leaf Storm [La hojarasca]
(1955), No One Writes to the Colonel [El coronel no tiene quien le escriba] (1961), In Evil
374
375
Higgins, 35.
García Márquez, quoted in Pelayo, 127.
117
Hour [La mala hora] (1962), and a short story collection Big Mama’s Funeral [Los funerals
de la Mamá Grande] (1962) had been published, all paving the way for his masterpiece.
Now, with a Latin American perspective, he was ready to create the Macondo of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, which would be “an allegory of Latin America as a whole.”376
Infatuated with “writing about his childhood, the images of the people he knew, and
the Caribbean places he had seen,”377 García Márquez produced his epic novel that tells
Colombian history through the lives of the people in a small town, Macondo. The physical
setting for the fictional Macondo was, of course, his native Aracataca. Macondo, meaning
“banana” in the Bantu language, 378 is a small banana plantation. The real Macondo is one of
the thirty-three neighbourhoods of Aracataca: “The real region around the literary town
‘Macondo’ is the northern part of the old Department of Magdalena, from Santa Marta to the
Guajira by way of Aracataca and Valledupar.”379 Since the publication of the novel, the
fictional Macondo has internationally been recognized just like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
County.380
One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects “the rise and fall of an idealistic community,
dominated by several generations of a provincial, Creole aristocratic family.”381 It is the story
of six generations of the Buendía family in Macondo during the course of one hundred years.
Although this one hundred years of the Buendía family seems to refer to one hundred years
of the real Colombian history, from the end of the nineteenth until the end of the twentieth
century, the chronology of the novel “actually spans from the beginnings of European
settlement in America to the dislocations of our time – later sixteenth century to
376
Martin, A Life, 277.
Pelayo, 73.
378
Bell-Villada, García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1990),
18.
379
Martin, A Life, 158.
380
Florence Delay and Jacqueline de Labriolle, “Is García Márquez the Colombian Faulkner?” in
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude,
ed. Bloom (New York NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 128.
381
Jeff Browitt, “Tropics of Tragedy: the Caribbean in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude,” Shibboleths: A Journal of Comparative Theory 2.1 (2007): 18.
377
118
approximately mid-twentieth.”382 Accordingly, Macondo’s foundation, development, and
destruction “allegorically parallels the foundation, consolidation, and eventual violent
decline of the Colombian national state.”383
As One Hundred Years of Solitude is composed of countless interrelated stories, it is
hard to summarize. According to Michael Wood, all that can be said about its plot is that the
novel is “the story of a family, the prodigious Buendías; and even more the story of a place,
the human geography of the family's fortunes.”384 Reflecting the effects of the Bible on
García Márquez, the novel “has an Old Testament ring to it – there is an original sin, an
exodus, the discovery of an (un)promised land, a plaque, a deluge, an apocalypse – that is a
reflection both of the cultural environment and of the myth-making tendency of popular
history.”385 According to Rubén Pelayo, “One Hundred Years of Solitude encompasses the
beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the genesis and the apocalypse, of Macondo
and its people.”386 This suggestion is also strengthened by Carlos Fuentes, who indicates that
in One Hundred Years of Solitude,
All “fictional” history coexists with “real” history, what is dreamed
with what is documented, and thanks to the legends, the lies, the
exaggerations, the myths … Macondo is made into a universal
territory, in a story almost biblical in its foundations, its generations
and degenerations, in a story of the origin and destiny of human time
and of the dreams and desires by which men are served to
destroyed. 387
382
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 94.
Browitt, 18.
384
Michael Wood, Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Cambridge
UP, 2008), 24.
385
Higgins, 38.
386
Pelayo, 70.
387
Carlos Fuentes, quoted in Pelayo, 71.
383
119
As seen in the quotations above, with biblical insinuations, One Hundred Years of
Solitude “gives expression to the worldview of a rural people living in remote isolation from
the modern developed world.”388 In the first chapter of the novel, Macondo is founded by the
first inhabitants of the town, José Arcadio Buendía, his wife Úrsula Iguarán and their friends.
After killing a neighbor, Prudencio Aguilar, in a duel of honor, José Arcadio Buendía,
together with his family and friends, decides to cross the mountains of Riohacha “to head
toward the land that no one had promised them,”389 which symbolizes the exodus. After
twenty-six months of expedition, they reach an isolated place where José Arcadio Buendía
dreams that “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up.”390 Right there he founds
Macondo, whose name has a supernatural echo in his dream. Macondo is introduced as an
Eden, an earthly paradise in its primordial form:
Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a
river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which
were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so
recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it
was necessary to point.391
This primitive paradise, with its population of three hundred people, is “a truly
happy village where no one [is] over thirty years of age and where no one [has] died.” 392
Thus, the foundation of Macondo represents Genesis – the genesis of the world and the
genesis of human beings. Similarly, it is an ‘original sin’ that starts the history of the
Buendía family. The two main characters, Jóse Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, who
388
Higgins, 38.
García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 10.
390
García Márquez, Solitude, 24.
391
García Márquez, Solitude, 1.
392
García Márquez, Solitude, 9.
389
120
are the founders and the first settlers of Macondo, are first cousins. They fear that incest, as a
great sin, might cause perdition in the form of the birth of a freak baby with a pig’s tail:
They were cousins. They had grown up together in the old village that
both of their ancestors, with their work and their good habits, had
transformed into one of the finest towns in the province. Although
their marriage was predicted from the time they had come into the
world, when they expressed their desire to be married their own
relatives tried to stop it. They were afraid that those two healthy
products of two races that had interbred over the centuries would
suffer the shame of breeding iguanas.393
The fear of the outcome of incest is just one of many myths and cycles in the novel. In the
final chapter, the family’s fear comes true. The fulfillment of the fear links the beginning, a
genesis, to the end, an apocalypse. The city of mirrors dreamt of by Jóse Arcadio Buendía at
the beginning turns out to be a city of “mirages.”394 Although the plot of the novel is
generally miserable and reflects a strong sense of solitude, isolation, and nostalgia, in the last
chapter, the last two members of the family, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula,
finally find true love: they become “the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face
of the earth.”395 This is the feeling that has never been experienced by any previous members
of the Buendía family. However, Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula love each other without
knowing that Amaranta Úrsula is the aunt of Aureliano. As a result of this incestuous
relationship, they produce a monstrous baby born with the tail of a pig. The birth of the freak
baby puts an end to the family line, with biblical insinuations. After the birth of the cannibal
baby, Amaranta Úrsula dies and the newborn baby is eaten by ants, proving Melquíades’
prophecy: “the first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”
393
García Márquez, Solitude, 20.
García Márquez, Solitude, 417.
395
García Márquez, Solitude, 404.
394
121
Aureliano, the very last of the Buendía family, understands that “his fate was written in
Melquíades’ parchments.” He realizes that “it was the history of the family, written by
Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time.” It was the
fate of the family: “and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering as he
lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if
he were looking into a speaking mirror.” Aureliano understands that he cannot avoid being
eliminated from the earth as the last member of the family, because “everything written on
them [the parchments] was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because
races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on
earth.”396
As drawn from the explanations so far, One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects “the
genesis, exodus, growth, corruption, and final destruction of a people” 397 with biblical
allusions. It tells the history of Macondo as it was recorded by oral tradition over six
generations, and in this way, it allows a rural society to express its own cultural experience.
The novel can be considered “a metaphor for the rise and decline of all human civilizations,
which from modest and rugged beginnings do grow, ripen, and become wealthy and wise,
but also lose sight of their original roots and better traditions, eventually reaching a state of
decadence and anomie.”398
Stephen Hart suggests that García Márquez’s fiction is at its peak when it combines
the following five features:
1. magical realism, or the deadpan description of uncanny,
supernatural or magical events as if they were real; 2. the portrayal of
time as a truncated, or dislocated reality rather than an historical
continuum, namely, a time in which, for example, the sequence of
396
García Márquez, Solitude, 415-17.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 76.
398
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 116.
397
122
past, present and future may be reversed, as in prolepsis […] 3. the use
of punchy dialogue often characterized by lapidary one-liners whose
significance resonates intensely with the world outside the fiction; 4.
the use of a humour which is often absurd and sometimes black; 5. the
portrayal of events in such a way that they may be interpreted as a
political allegory.399
Thus, Hart considers that magical realism is only one of the distinctive features of García
Márquez’s fiction. However, the remaining four features are inseparable aspects of García
Márquez’s type of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Combining all these
characteristics as a magical realist text, the novel attempts to develop its social, cultural,
historical and political discussions. Thus, One Hundred Years of Solitude turns out to be “a
multidimensional microcosm” and can be studied as “symbolic of Colombia (the sociopolitical level), Latin America (the mythico-cultural level), Christianity (the mysticoreligious level), the world (the historical/ archetypal levels), or the universe (the cyclical/
entropic levels).”400 Taking into account the features that make it a magical realist text, the
following part attempts to examine One Hundred Years of Solitude on socio-political,
historical, and mythico-cultural levels.
One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Magical Realist Text
While accomplishing his primary aim of recreating the lost world of his childhood in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez uses the vehicle of magical realism,
skillfully combining fantasy with reality and drawing from both oral and written traditions.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, which appeared on the verge of the transition between
modernist and postmodernist fiction, provides a balanced synthesis of oral and written Latin
399
Hart, “García Márquez’s Short Stories,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García
Márquez, ed. Philip Swanson (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 129-30.
400
Floyd Merrell, “José Arcadio Buendía’s Scientific Paradigms: Man in Search of Himself,” in
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House,
1999), 21.
123
American and Euro-American elements. It blends “Euro-American Modernist methods,
gleaned from Kafka, Faulkner, and Woolf (among others) – with Colombian folk elements,
select colloquialisms, and good old-fashioned story-telling.”401 According to the Nobel
Committee, in the novel, “folk culture, including oral storytelling, reminiscences from old
Indian culture, currents from Spanish baroque in different epochs, influences from European
surrealism and other modernism are blended into a spiced and life-giving brew.”402 In spite
of its modernist sophistication, the sources of García Márquez’s magical realist imagination
in the novel “are of a local nature […]. Among such materials, one must mention the rich,
popular culture of his native, Caribbean-coastal Colombia, a fascinating amalgam of African,
indigenous, and Spanish-Galician lore.”403 Explaining the ethnographic dimension of his
work, García Márquez himself asserts that his work is loyal to the cultural characterisitcs of
the Caribbean coast of Colombia. He writes about a place where “the exuberant imagination
of African slaves, mixed with that of the pre-Columbian natives and added to the Andalusian
taste for fantasy and the Galician cult of the super-natural, had produced an ability to see
reality in a certain magical way.”404 With this ethnographic dimension, the novel has the
power to capture and reflect the Latin American consciousness. García Márquez derives
what is called “fantastic” in his novel directly from the daily life of northern Colombia, from
its myths, folk legends, and supersititon; that is, he directly derives from the lived fabric of
Colombian/ Latin American experience. Alluding to Carpentier’s idea that Latin America is
itself marvelous and relying mostly on mythic truths, folk wisdom, local lore, and the ancient
belief systems of Latin America, García Márquez has created a narrative of ordinary Latin
folk. For this reason, he has been regarded as a “people’s writer.”405 Moreover, since its
401
Bell-Villada, introduction, 4.
Award Ceremony Speech, presentation speech by Lars Gyllensten (1982), accessed January 7,
2013, Nobelprize.org. [Online]
403
Bell-Villada, introduction, 8.
404
García Márquez, quoted in Warnes, 77-78.
405
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 6.
402
124
publication, One Hundred Years of Solitude has “tapped into the ‘DNA’ of Latin American
culture,”406 and thus become “the best example of the Latin American phenomenon of
‘magic realism.’”407 As magical realist elements in One Hundred Years of Solitude are drawn
from the folklore and cultural beliefs of Latin America, as a place where the novel is
produced, magical realism of the novel may be included in the typologies of the mode such
as “ontological,” “mythic/ folkloric,” and “anthropological magical realism.” In his
discussion on the oral/ popular, ethnographic/ anthropological attributes of the novel, Eric
Camady-Freixas states that García Márquez’s type of magical realism, which is “the
folkloric and the tribal, the provincial and the indigenous,”408 draws near to that of Miguel
Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo. Putting the emphasis on “the archaic
perspective” of the works of these authors, Camady-Freixas claims that “the hyperbolic
tendencies of primitivism assimilate the provincial into the indigenous.”409 García Márquez’s
anthropological magical realism stands out for its carnivalesque quality, giving way to
humor and parody.
Latin American narratives are usually very interested in history and myth. Given that
myths are in search of origins, this interest of Latin American literature can be explained as
Latin America’s attempt to get a better understanding of its history. In terms of his theory of
Latin American narrative, Roberto González-Echevarría examines García Márquez’s novel
as myth and archive. He defines the term “archive” as “repository of stories and myths, one
of which is the story about collecting those stories and myths.”410 For González-Echevarría,
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the prominent examples of Latin American archival
fiction. Archival fictions are “narratives that still attempt to find the cipher of Latin
406
Martin, A Life, 560.
Hamilton, GALE| H1420031434.
408
Eric Camady-Freixas, quoted in Warnes, 78.
409
Warnes, 78.
410
Roberto González-Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1990), 144.
407
125
American culture and identity; hence, they fall within the mediation provided by
anthropological discourse.”411 These fictions are mythic because their main concern is with
origins. They attempt to produce a modern myth. According to González Echevarría, One
Hundred Years of Solitude, with its combination of mythic elements and Latin American
history, exhibits a desire to create a new Latin American myth.412
Although the novel is usually considered in its Latin American context, Mario Vargas
Llosa argues that One Hundred Years of Solitude does not reflect solely the Latin American
reality: “it is a spiral of concentric circles, the first of which would be a family with
characters more or less extravagant, the second the tiny town of Aracataca with its myths and
problems, the third Colombia, the fourth Latin America and the last one, humanity.”413 James
Higgins supports Llosa’s ideas. For Higgins, although García Márquez writes in Western
novelistic tradition, he challenges it. His novel does not depict Latin American reality only.
It has also the power to reflect the universal through the local. Higgins argues that One
Hundred Years of Solitude incorporates “popular oral history into literature to convey a
third-world experience.” The novel also shows
[…] the relativity of all worldviews, for events that appear fantastic to
the sophisticated reader – Remedios’s ascent into heaven, trips on
flying carpets, the parish priest’s feats of levitation – are accepted as
everyday realities in the cultural environment of Macondo, and, by
contrast, the modern technology that the sophisticated reader takes for
granted – ice cubes, false teeth, the locomotive – is greeted with awe
as something wonderful and magical. Cien Años thus not only
challenges assumptions as to what constitutes reality but subverts the
411
González-Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 173.
See González-Echevarría, “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive,” in Bloom’s
Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1999), 10723.
413
Llosa, 18.
412
126
novelistic genre’s conventional Eurocentrism and, indeed the whole
rationalist cultural tradition of the West. 414
Thus, One Hundred Years of Solitude attempts to challenge and subvert Western literary and
cultural traditions. However, with the ironic stance of the narrator distancing himself from
the fantastic world reflected in the novel, it also tries to subvert Latin Americans’
perceptions of their own history. Thus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its narrative
mode of magical realism, is subversive.
García Márquez has generally been praised, especially for his wild imagination in his
work. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, he was described by the
Nobel Committee as being “a rare storyteller richly endowed with a material, from
imagination and experience, which seems inexhaustible.”415 Though One Hundred Years of
Solitude is sometimes considered “a fantastic novel,”416 García Márquez rejects this label and
comments, “it always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the
imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have
a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest
imagination.”417 For García Márquez, “reality is not restricted to the price of tomatoes.” 418
As understood from the quotations above, “‘reality’ for García Márquez consists not only of
everyday events and economic hardships but also of such things as popular myths, beliefs,
and home remedies – not just ‘the facts’ but what ordinary people say or think about those
facts.”419 This idea is strengthened by James Higgins, who indicates that “what the novel
does is to present events, not as they actually occurred but as they were perceived and
414
Higgins, 39.
Award Ceremony Speech.
416
Darraj, 80.
417
García Márquez, quoted in Pelayo, 63.
418
García Márquez, quoted in Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 12.
419
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 12.
415
127
interpreted by the local people.”420 Thus, what readers and critics consider as wild
imagination in his work is nothing more than the “shameless reality itself”421 in Latin
America. Employing “the aesthetic potential of Latin American folklore, ontology, and
reality” in his work, Gabriel García Márquez “follows Carpentier in his attention to the
marvelous nature of the Latin American everyday reality.”422 In his work, he draws from the
“outsized reality”423 of Latin America: “I believe that if one knows how to look, the
everyday can be truly extraordinary. Everyday reality is magical, but people have lost their
ingenuity and do not pay attention anymore. I find incredible connections everywhere.”424
Quoting from García Márquez’s conversations with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Warnes
comments,
García Márquez cites accounts of circus animals caught in fishermen’s
nets in Argentina, of a Colombian boy born with a tail of a pig of
“ordinary people” in Latin America who have read One Hundred
Years of Solitude with “no surprise at all” because they encounter
nothing in the novel that they have not encountered in their own
lives.425
As García Márquez persistently writes about the reality of his own country and claims that
“truth is always the best literary formula,”426 he considers himself a realist writer rather than
a magical or fantastical writer: “The trouble is [….] many people believe that I’m a writer of
fantastic fiction, when actually I’m a very realistic person and write what I believe is true
420
Higgins, 38.
Award Ceremony Speech.
422
Jesús Benito Sánchez et al., Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures, Critical
Approaches to Ethnic American Literature, Vol. 3 (Amsterdam, NLD: Editions Rodopi, 2009), 115.
423
García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” 89.
424
García Márquez, quoted in Sánchez et al., 115.
425
Warnes, 77.
426
García Márquez, quoted in Aníbal González, “The Ends of the Text,” 67.
421
128
socialist realism.”427 Martin also explains that, as “there is always a reference to a concrete
reality” in his novels, García Márquez has always emphasized that rather than a “magical
realist,” he is “just a ‘poor notary’ who copies down what is placed on his desk.”428
Although its author does not regard himself as a magical realst author, One Hundred
Years of Solitude is today considered “the most successful magical realist text ever
written.”429 Satisfying the definitive condition of magical realism, the novel interweaves
improbable, even impossible events with observably real experiences in real environments –
that is, it perfectly amalgamates magic and reality. These two distinct and contradictory
strands exist equally in the novel without disturbing the ontological status of each other.
Magic and reality continuously support and strengthen each other. Magic is made believable
as it is presented as if it is commonplace.
The fantasy in One Hundred Years of Solitude “forms a broad and diverse spectrum
ranging from the literally extraordinary though nonetheless possible, to the farthest extremes
of the physically fabulous and unlikely.”430 The account of the plague of the dead birds is a
good example of fantasy that is extraordinary yet possible. When she is over one hundred
twenty, Úrsula dies on a very hot day. Very few people attend her funeral:
[…] because it was so hot that noon that the birds in their confusion
were running into walls like clay pigeons and breaking through
screens to die in the bedrooms. At first they thought it was a plague.
Housewives were exhausted from sweeping away so many dead birds,
427
García Márquez, quoted in Morton P. Levitt, “The Meticulous Modernist Fiction of García
Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1999), 231.
428
García Márquez, quoted in Martin, A Life, 157.
429
Warnes, 75.
430
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 108.
129
especially at siesta time, and the men dumped them into the river by
the cartload.431
This account, although it seems impossible, is based on a real event in South America:
“in 1925, the north-south El Niño current in the Eastern Pacific caused the death of millions
of birds, which were hurled upon the shores of Ecuador and Colombia.”432 Accounts of dead
people talking to the living, flying carpets, and human levitation, however, are more
fantastical.
As explained previously, while examining magical realism as a postmodernist mode of
fiction, Faris explains the way in which two different worlds (the fantastic and the real) are
combined in a magical realist work. She claims that it is possible to observe the closeness
and near-merging of two different realms and worlds. Magical realism wipes out the fluid
boundaries between the living and the dead. Gabriel García Márquez successfully crosses
and recrosses these fluid boundaries in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel wipes out
the boundaries between the living and the dead: the living can talk to the dead, and the dead
give information and advice to the living as seen in the following example: “The officer
obviously did not understand. He paused with his glance on the space where Aureliano
Segundo and Santa Sofía de la Piedad were still seeing José Arcadio Segundo and the latter
also realized that the soldier was looking at him without seeing him. Then he turned out the
light and closed the door.”433 In this example, after the massacre of the banana workers, the
military officer searches the house of the Buendía family. However, he cannot see José
Arcadio Segundo, who is hiding in Melquíades’ room. For Hart, in magical realist texts the
ghosts are usually “politicized”: “the phantom in magical realist fiction is the projection
within an ideologically riven nation of a subaltern forced to “disappear” as a result of lying
431
García Márquez, Solitude, 342-43.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 109.
433
García Márquez, Solitude, 312.
432
130
[…] on the wrong side of the political, gender, or race line.”434 Phantoms, for Hart, function
as “disembodied memorialisations of a trauma experienced by the subaltern, normally in the
past.”435 According to Hart, then, the reason why the officer does not/ can not see José
Arcadio Segundo in Melquíades’ room is that the officer represents authority and has not
experienced the trauma experienced by the subaltern. However, Aureliano Segundo and
Santa Sofía de la Piedad, as the representatives of the subaltern, can easily see him. This
symbolizes the completely different perspectives and psychology of the two groups. From
the perspective of the colonizer, the image of the colonized does not exist.
According to Bell-Villada, what makes the accounts such as flying carpets and human
levitation believable and acceptable is “the entire narrative and physical scaffold that
surrounds them.”436 He gives the example of the character Father Nicanor Reyna to explain
his idea. When Father Nicanor comes to Macondo, he finds that the people in Macondo are
“prospering in the midst of scandal, subject to the natural law, without baptizing their
children or sanctifying their festivals.” He decides “to Christianize both circumcised and
gentile, legalize concubinage, and give the sacraments to the dying” and to build a church in
the village. In order to collect money to build the church, he arranges a demonstration. He
rises “six inches above the level of the ground” when he drinks “a cup of thick and steaming
chocolate.”437 He repeats the demonstration of levitation for a few days in Macondo.
According to Bell-Villada, the fact that Father Nicanor performs this demonstration in order
to earn money for the church “serves to demystify its significance somewhat.”438 Moreover,
José Arcadio Buendía, sitting under the chestnut tree because he has lost his mind, attempts
to explain Father Nicanor’s levitation scientifically: “Hoc est simplicissimus,” José Arcadio
434
Hart, “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicised Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The
House of Spirits, and Beloved,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 9.2 (2003): 115.
435
Hart, “Politicised Ghosts,” 116.
436
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 109.
437
García Márquez, Solitude, 81-82.
438
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 110.
131
Buendía said. “Homo iste statum quartum materiae invenit.” Father Nicanor raised his hands
[…]. “Nego,” he said. “Factum hoc existentiam Dei probat sine dubio.”439 [the founder:
“This is very simple. This man here has entered the fourth state of matter.” The priest: ‘No,
this fact proves beyond doubt the existence of God.’”440 Thus, every fantastic or magical
event in the novel, whether they seem to be literally extraordinary yet possible or completely
impossible, has a logical explanation or they are based on real events. They take place as if
they were common and daily occurrences and are told in a matter-of-fact manner: “Magical
events are recounted with a calm objectivity, ‘with a straight face’ (one might say), as if
what is being reported were merely one more item in what is an ongoing and endless
series.”441
When One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered in terms of two important features
of magical realism, that is, in terms of the authorial reticence and authorial irony, it is clear
that the novel well satisfies these conditions of mode. In the novel, García Márquez provides
defamiliarization not only with the help of “authorial reticence” but also “authorial irony.”
One of the significant features of One Hundred Years of Solitude is that it has its own
distinctive voice:
[One Hundred Years of Solitude] came written with utter authority,
had the voice of a wise yet involved and caring speaker who – like an
African griot, or a super-narrator of folk epic and fairy tale, or an
ancient biblical scribe – truly knows everything about everyone in a
society, from its high notables to its sullen rejects, and moreover sees
fit to tell the whole world about them. 442
439
García Márquez, Solitude, 82.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 110.
441
Bell-Villada, introduction, 8.
442
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 10-11.
440
132
For Bell-Villada, this distinctive voice is a “wise voice-omniscient about the
townspeople yet still of rather than above the townspeople.” It is “the narrative’s consistent
unity of voice, a voice unflaggingly sustained throughout the novel” that holds together
many strands in the novel. Bell-Villada proposes “whether the subject be love or phantoms,
orgies, or uprisings, the narrator conveys it with the same serene attitude of
unperturbability.”443 Furthermore, this wise, omniscient narrator of the novel tells the events
“with childlike fascination.”444 Thus, throughout the novel, its tone “slips very easily into
whimsy and mock innocence.”445 As retrospectively claimed by García Márquez himself, the
person who provided him with the style and sound he needed in his writing was his maternal
grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes – Mina. She was extremely superstitious and
a perfect story-teller. With these features, she became the primary source of other-worldly
perception of reality for her grandchild. Although the fables and stories she told to her
grandson were full of ghosts, omens, premonitions and portents, she was telling them with a
deadpan voice: “My grandmother […] used to tell me about the most atrocious things
without turning a hair, as if it was something she’d just seen. I realized that it was her
impassive manner and her wealth of images that made her stories so credible.”446 Inspired by
her way of storytelling, García Márquez always wished to be able to tell the most fantastic
and supernatural tales “without a moment’s hesitation, as if it were all matter-of-fact.”447
Years later, when he read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, García Márquez would hear
the natural tone of voice of his grandmother and try to catch this tone in his own writing. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude he could accomplish his aim of telling a story in a deadpan
voice, applying the examples of not only his grandmother but also Franz Kafka.
443
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 112.
Jack Shreve, “Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Overview,” in Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. Dave
Mote (Detroit: St. James Press, 1997), accessed 6 October 2010, GALE| H1420003143.
445
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 61.
446
García Márquez, quoted in Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 61.
447
Pelayo, 63.
444
133
Julio Ortega, a professor of Hispanic studies, contends that García Márquez’s novel
was created in the tradition of fables, myths and legends. For Ortega, the omniscient narrator
of the novel does not “merely represent a viewpoint or distribute information” but the
narrator is “an instance of the fable itself.”448 Quoting the oft-cited opening sentence of the
novel – “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to
remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” 449 – Ortega argues
that
The narrator knows future time (“years later”), past time (“distant
afternoon”), and also precisely what the Colonel is thinking or
remembering. Yet the narrator, knowing that the firing squad will not
fire, maintains the reader’s ignorance through the deception of
suspense. It is as if he himself were uninformed, thus making of his
apparent ignorance another sign of his knowledge […]. The narrator is
not a person […] but the grammatical voice used by the fable to state
and retract impassively, to form and transform. 450
Similarly, Wood, while explaining the tone (the relation of narrator to narrated
material), argues that “the chief vehicle for García Márquez’ vision of reality’s
astonishments is his unastonished tone, his refusal of the questions or comments which the
state of his (and our) culture would seem to require.”451 According to Wood, it is difficult to
know whether or not the author/ narrator believes in his tales as he tells them in One
Hundred Years of Solitude because García Márquez applies the author’s “disappearance into
his text” in Flaubert’s terms. Quoting from Flaubert, who once wrote that “the author in his
work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. The effect,
448
Julio Ortega, “Exchange Systems in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez
and the Power of Fiction, ed. Ortega (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1988), 2.
449
García Márquez, Solitude, 1.
450
Ortega, “Exchange Systems,” 2-3.
451
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 60.
134
for the spectator, must be a kind of amazement. How has that been done? he should say, and
he should feel crushed without knowing why,”452 Wood indicates that, without making them
feel crushed, García Márquez wants his readers to question the limits of reality. Wood
suggests that the term “deadpan” is the best term to define the tone of the novel and
concludes that
The tone of One Hundred Years of Solitude works as a strongly felt
silence or absence, a smile which fades before it starts, like an
improvement on the Cheshire cat, a grin without even a grin. We can’t
say the narrator is simply ironic, a disbeliever in his story, because
there are no signs that he is. Yet we can’t make him a naïf, a mere
echo of his characters’ erratic sense of the world. I have used the term
deadpan several times […]. But we have to remember that the
deadpan strictly tells us nothing, not even that it is not as serious as it
looks. What is does is court our suspicion, so that we feel that
whatever it is up to it is not saying just what it says or only what it
says. It is a form of irony, but so faint on the surface that irony seems
too assertive a word for it.453
While the fantastic events such as flying carpets, ghosts and miracles are narrated in
a deadpan voice (in Wood’s terms, a “deadpan tone”) in the novel, the narrator keeps his
reticence, always telling the events and the actions of the characters but never commenting
on the events and insisting on the details. This gives way to a fast-paced narration. As well as
his meticulousness in rendering the history and folklore of his region, which arises from a
fidelity to reality itself, García Márquez’s ironic stance is always felt throughout the novel.
The narrator in One Hundred Years of Solitude “writes in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek manner
452
453
Gustav Flaubert, quoted in Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 60.
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 61.
135
that distances him from the oral history that he is transmitting.”454 The narrator’s ironic
distancing of himself from Macondo’s history seems to show that he is disconnecting
himself from the superstitious worldview reflected in the novel. The character Remedios the
Beauty’s ascension to heaven – “a parody of the Catholic folk-legend (and official dogma
since 1950) of the Assumption of Virgin Mary” 455 – is a good example to explain the
narrator’s ironic stance as well as the authorial reticence in the novel. When she helps
Fernanda to fold the sheets in the garden, Remedios the Beauty, who has a “legendary good
look” and a “magical fascination,”456 ascends to heaven with the sheets:
[…] Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula […] left the sheets to
the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving
good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her,
abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and
passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came
to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere
where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.457
In this episode, although her ascent into heaven is told in a deadpan voice, the
extraordinariness of the event is challenged through straightforward explanation of the facts
and the implication of the real. Although the Macondones believe in this miraculous event,
the outsiders say that her family “was trying to save her honor with that tale of levitation”
and Fernanda prays to God for a long time “to send her back her sheets.” The narrator keeps
his ironic distance and narrates the event in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
As for the narrative form of the novel, the chapters in One Hundred Years of Solitude
are not numbered in order to make readers perceive the text as a complete whole. As
454
Higgins, 39.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 110.
456
García Márquez, Solitude, 195.
457
García Márquez, Solitude, 236.
455
136
indicated by Bell-Villada, the long-term changes and passing of time in Macondo can be
grouped as follows: “utopian innocence/ social harmony (1-5), military heroism/ struggle for
autonomy (6-9), economic prosperity/ spiritual decline (10-15), and final decadence/
physical destruction (16-20).”458 While fashioning the narrative form of One Hundred Years
of Solitude, the fundamental influence on García Márquez was the writings of William
Faulkner, an American man of letters and the 1949 Nobel Prize winner. García Márquez has
always stated that among his favorite authors are William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and
Virginia Woolf, and his fondest hope has been to write like them. García Márquez has
always written about his native country and its people, as did Faulkner. He created the
fictional town of Macondo and its inhabitants, just as Faulkner created his imaginary
Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants.459 Moreover, he followed Faulkner’s style in
representing time in his novel. Faulkner’s representation of time and structuring of a
chronology that moves continuously back and forth over decades are easily recognized
throughout García Márquez’s text. One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a magical realist text,
is successful in creating a new space and a new temporality, as suggested by Ian A. Bell:
Time is made to stand still when appropriate, conventional
expectations about ageing are suspended, and each life story flows
over and around those preceding and those following. The human
imagination intrudes upon and transforms the world of Macondo time
458
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 98.
See Harley D. Oberhelman, “The Development of Faulkner’s Influence in the Work of García
Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom, 65-79 (New
York: Chelsea House, 1999) and William Plummer, “The Faulkner Relation,” in Bloom’s Modern
Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom, 33-47 (New York, NY: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1999).
459
137
and again, transgressing the normally-understood limits of the
possible and creating a sense of wonder and enchantment. 460
When the following examples are taken into consideration, we see that our sense of
time is violated throughout the novel: there are rains that last “for four years, eleven months,
and two days,”461 Úrsula estimates her age as “between one hundred fifteen and one hundred
twenty-two,”462 the ancient vagabond, Francisco the Man, is “almost two hundred years
old,”463 and the insomnia plague erases the past and hence the meaning of words.464
According to Danow, time is conceived in miscellaneous ways in One Hundred Years
of Solitude: as “capable of (carnivalesque) reversal,” “repetitive,” “circular,” “fragmented,”
“translucent,” “coexistent.”465 Danow chooses the following quotations from the novel to
explain his ideas (the quotations follow the same order above): “It’s as if time had turned
around and we were back at the beginning,”466 “It’s as if the world were repeating itself,” 467
“time was not passing […] it was turning in a circle,”468 “time also stumbled and had
accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room,” 469
conforming “the scientific possibility of seeing the future showing through in time as one
sees what is written on the back of a sheet of paper through the light,”470 having
“concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.”471
Although, in its broad outlines, One Hundred Years of Solitude is basically
chronological and linear, its inner structure does not follow a chronological and linear order.
460
Ian A. Bell, “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Overview,” in Reference Guide to World Literature,
ed. Lesley Henderson (New York: St. James Press, 1995), accessed 6 October 2010,
GALE|H1420003149.
461
García Márquez, Solitude, 315.
462
García Márquez, Solitude, 342.
463
García Márquez, Solitude, 50.
464
García Márquez, Solitude, 43-49.
465
Danow, 146.
466
García Márquez, Solitude, 193.
467
García Márquez, Solitude, 298.
468
García Márquez, Solitude, 335.
469
García Márquez, Solitude, 348.
470
García Márquez, Solitude, 391-92.
471
García Márquez, Solitude, 415.
138
While representing the fictive time, “in which the story line moves freely back and forth
from present to past to future, or any combination thereof,”472 García Márquez follows the
example of Faulkner, and this way of representing time seems convenient for writing about
Latin America:
[…] writing about an area that has known centuries of poverty and
oppression, where Iberian conquistadors and their elite descendants
have the authority of invaders essentially, and where even the
worthiest struggles of the just have been compromised or vanquished,
his own representations of local realities would have been less than
adequately served by linear, developmental narrative procedures. 473
Thus, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a non-linear conception of time that was
structured through a set of numerous flashbacks, flashforwards, and foreshadowings takes
the place of straight linear narrative. The novel contains abundant zigzags in time with
flashbacks of the past events and leaps toward future events. As well as the deadpan voice of
the novel, the loops and flashbacks also provide a fast-paced narration. By the help of these
frequent loops and flashbacks, it is possible to feel “a suggestion of time in a hurry, of a
future in Macondo which can’t wait for the present to pass, a galloping toward what looks
like an end.”474 For example, in the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the
fictional place Macondo is introduced in its edenic state. The second chapter of the novel
leaps back to the events that took place two centuries ago, and it starts to tell the prehistory
of the family: Francis Drake attacks Riohacha, the father of the Buendía family, José
Arcadio Buendía, murders Prudencio Aquilar, which causes the Buendías’ exodus from
Riohacha, and the family found Macondo.
472
Bell-Villada, introduction, 6.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 83.
474
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 69.
473
139
According to Ortega, such a pattern of zigzagging time functions as a marker of social
and political disorders and disturbances. However, it may also be considered a glimmer of
hope. Ortega’s ideas about the temporality of the novel are as follows:
The novel maintains traditional temporality through a cycle of ages
whose beginnings and ends spiral toward the following age. While
chronological time is linear, cyclical time is periodic; at the end of the
spiral, destruction implies a new beginning. In various traditional and
rural versions of this temporality […] one age corresponds to the
“world right-side up,” the following age, to the “world upside down.”
The disorders of injustice, chaos, and violence correspond, on a
simultaneously cosmic and social plane, to the world upside down,
while the next age develops the restoration of order. 475
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the pattern of zigzagging time is provided especially by
the continuous repetition of events and names of the characters. The first names of the family
members are obsessively repeated in the novel. There are four José Arcadios, three
Aurelianos, seventeen bastard Aurelianos, three women called Remedios, and two Úrsulas.
When García Márquez was questioned about these names-in-repetition, he ironically asked
in 1951 that “is there anybody here who wasn’t named after his dad?” 476 As understood from
this rhetorical question, García Márquez, in his family saga, was aiming at not only
representing a family tradition of repeating the names through the generations, but also
portraying family differences and similarities at his work: “Throughout the long history of
the family the insistent repetition of names had made her [Úrsula] draw some conclusions
that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the
475
476
Ortega, “Exchange Systems,” 5.
García Márquez, quoted in Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 96.
140
José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign.” 477
The repetitions of the first names, then, causes the repetitions of some character features,
which are transferred from generation to generation. Thus, the characters do, feel, say, and
dream the same things as did their great-grandfathers or great-grandmothers. Even they seem
to “inherit their parents’ madness.”478 For instance, José Arcadio Segundo decides to open a
“channel in order to establish a boat line,” which is certainly “a mad dream, comparable to
those of his great-grandfather.”479 As observed by the character Pilar Ternera, “the history of
the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have
gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the
axle.”480
Attributing the novel’s success to the socialist – not social realist – reading of Latin
American history, Martin rejects that One Hundred Years of Solitude contrives “a magical
reality”:
Whatever contemporary reality may be, it is determined and defined
by the metropolitan centres of culture in Europe and, above all now,
the United States. As Marx and Engels noted, “The ruling ideas of
each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Latin America
can therefore be viewed, by definition, as a home of irreality, where
people are larger or smaller than life: […] specimens in the nationalgeographical catalogue of planetary showbiz safaris (in short, less than
human).481
477
García Márquez, Solitude, 181.
García Márquez, Solitude, 40.
479
García Márquez, Solitude, 193.
480
García Márquez, Solitude, 396.
481
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism in García Márquez,” in Gabriel García Márquez: New
Readings, ed. McGuirk and Cardwell (New York: Cambridge UP, 2009), 103.
478
141
Consequently, García Márquez shows that the “irreality” of Latin America is nothing more
than a concept imposed by Western colonialism. Considering itself superior, Europe has
designed the official history. In this history, the places and the fate of the Latin American
people have been determined by the Europeans. They cannot escape from their destiny
predetermined by the European rationality, science, imperialism, capitalism, and
colonialism. Similarly, the characters in the novel can never escape from their fate and find a
way to break the vicious cycle of their lives. Thus, the repetitions of the novel refer to their
destiny and the perpetual backwardness of Latin America, both of which were created by
Western colonialism. However, there is also a criticism of the Macondones/ Latin American
people because of their privation of memory. The constant repetitions of foolish acts by the
family members represent that they learn nothing from their experiences. Hence, the novel
proves that the primary curse on Macondo and its inhabitants is, in fact, the lack of historical
consciousness.
Wood explains that One Hundred Years of Solitude consists of many stories that “are
so often broken into, dislocated, delayed, forgotten, that we don’t know where to expect
them, and some of them turn out not to be stories at all.” Some of these stories seem to end
too soon whereas others end after many interruptions provided by the insertion of other
stories. While explaining the narrative movement in the novel, Wood suggests that García
Márquez applies a narrative strategy that may be called “the principle of interruption.”482
According to Wood,
The story line of One Hundred Years of Solitude proceeds […] by a
sequence of loops and flashbacks, but more generally settles into a
system of rather unnerving alternations, governed, it seems, by an
active principle of narrative interruption. There are plenty of cycles
and repetitions in the novel, but more striking still is this sense of
482
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 70.
142
parallel but broken tracks- our attention brusquely switched from one
to the other and back, as if to test and find wanting our ability to hold
enough stories in our minds at all.483
The novel’s complicated system of parallelisms, congruences, and repetitions is typical. All
these repetitions, parallelisms, and congruences in the novel prove that “the stories all belong
together, can’t get out of each other’s way. No story is an island, entire of itself, and the only
escape from stories is into other stories. This is one of the reasons why One Hundred Years
of Solitude offers so strong a sense of a world.”484
Although the main concern of the novel is the chronicle of the Buendía family in
Macondo, the novel cannot be considered merely “a family saga.” With its vast cast of
characters, it creates an all-inclusive human geography. The novel is full of major and minor
characters such as rigid imperialists, merciless conservatives and liberalists, adventurous
inventors, didactic clerics, heroic rebels, cunning merchants, shallow opportunists, crazy
dreamers, clear-headed scholars, earthly hedonists, exotic wanderers, sensitive prostitutes,
and so many others. These characters come up in different stories. Every possible aspect of
life is reflected through the experiences and stories of these character types that are presented
as cartoonlike stereotypes. With its colossal cast of characters the novel reveals every
possible human experience and provides a vast panorama of not only the Latin American
people and their life style but also the entire human race and life on earth with its full range
of manifestations.
The huge cast of characters provides One Hundred Years of Solitude to deal with both
private and public concerns. The private concerns usually embrace such things as family life,
romantic love, incest, death, sexual desire, solitude, isolation, and nostalgia. On a public
level, the novel comprises the social and political movements such as migrations, upheavals,
483
484
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 67-68.
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 74.
143
strikes, and civil wars, government actions such as repression, technological change and
development such as cinema, railroads, trains, automobiles, telephones, all ceremonies such
as funerals, wakes, and group mornings, festivals, circuses, and carnivals. It is important to
keep in mind that the public/ civic and private discourses in the novel cannot be separated
from each other: they interpenetrate. Private matters have social consequences, and vice
versa.
On the private level, female characters seem to be more dominant than male
characters. This aspect of One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminates one of the biographical
features of García Márquez. While talking about his grandparents’ house where he spent his
childhood, and the household, García Márquez claims that “I cannot imagine a family
environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house, in particular because of
the character of the numerous women who reared me.”485 Owing to these “archangels of
purity,”486 he confesses that, throughout his life, he has always felt more comfortable and
sure with women than with men. For him, the women are “the ones who maintain the world
while we men throw it into disarray with our historic brutality.”487 This conviction of García
Márquez is reflected in his novel: There is a severe contrast between the male and female
characters, which provides the dramatic tension and irony in the novel. Luis Harss explains
this contrast:
In García Márquez men are flighty creatures, governed by whim,
fanciful dreamers given to impossible delusions, capable of moments
of haughty grandeur, but basically weak and unstable. Women, on the
other hand, are solid, sensible, unvarying and down to earth, paragons
of order and stability. They seem to be more at home in the world,
485
García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Vintage International,
2004), 90.
486
García Márquez, Living, 75.
487
García Márquez, Living, 77.
144
more deeply in nature, closer to the center of gravity, therefore
equipped to face up to circumstances. García Márquez puts it another
way: “My women are masculine.”488
The male characters of the novel seem to be engaged in flighty and irrational conduct
whereas the female characters are usually stronger, more logical, and more down to earth.
For example, José Arcadio Buendía is depicted as a rudderless and limitless dreamer, but his
wife, Úrsula is considered the archetype of feminine wisdom and stability. She is the
mainstay who does her best to hold the Buendía family together for years. Amid all the
female characters of the novel, Úrsula Buendía is highlighted as an instance that shows
human greatness. A reminiscence of García Márquez’s grandmother, Doña Tranquilina
Iguarán Cotes, Úrsula is introduced as the classical mother figure not only for Latin
Americans but also for all nations.
In her essay “The Sacred Harlots of One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Lorraine Elena
Roses examines the female characters of the novel from a postcolonial perspective. Quoting
from Mario Vargas Llosa, who has regarded the Buendía men as “lord and master of the
world” and the woman as “lady and mistress of the heart,”489 she explains that, for Llosa, the
men of the family are shown as the representatives of scientific progress whereas the women
are kept in the domestic sphere. She rejects Llosa’s idea as it reflects the dominant
nineteenth-century ideology about women. For Roses, García Márquez is very engaged in
“the tenure of political power by vested interests” and wants to show that women
“subalternity is a factor detracting from (gender) justice in the history of the world, […] as a
preponderance of male power has led to intense bellicosity.”490 Consequently, putting the
emphasis on “masculine” female characters, García Márquez, as an “antimachista,” wants to
488
Luis Harss, quoted in Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 100.
Mario Vargas Llosa, quoted in Lorraine Elena Roses, “The Sacred Harlots of One Hundred Years
of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. BellVillada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 67.
490
Roses, 76.
489
145
show that “machismo is cowardly, a lack of manliness”491 and to attract attention on the lost
and unperceived power of women.
García Márquez’s favorite themes are the topic of plagues and the concept of human
solitude. In the private sphere of his novel, the most important theme reflected throughout
the six generations of the Buendía family thus becomes solitude, longing, and isolation. All
the characters in the novel are defined as lonely, isolated people and they always feel “that
fearful solitude.”492 Sometimes they take refuge in their solitude and sometimes they try to
find ways to escape from their solitude: Amaranta takes charge of her nephew, Aureliano
José, in order to “share her solitude.”493 Not only the living people in the novel but also the
dead people and objects are in complete solitude. For instance, Melquíades turns back to
Macondo: “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear
the solitude.”494 And similarly, during his expeditions, José Arcadio Buendía finds an
enormous Spanish galleon lying in its “solitude and oblivion.”495 At the end of the novel, the
last member of the family, Aureliano Babilonia, whose face is “marked forever and from the
beginning of the world with the pox of solitude,”496 dies in a complete solitude after losing
Amaranta Úrsula and their newborn baby Aureliano.
García Márquez insists that his novel talks about “the solitude which results when
everyone is acting for himself alone.”497 Thus, the key to understanding the novel should be
“solitude versus solidarity”:
Nobody has touched upon what really interested me in writing the
book, that is, the idea that solitude is the opposite of solidarity; I
491
García Márquez, “Interview with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Rita Guibert, in
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom, updated edition (New York
NY: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 16.
492
García Márquez, Solitude, 27.
493
García Márquez, Solitude, 88.
494
García Márquez, Solitude, 49.
495
García Márquez, Solitude, 12.
496
García Márquez, Solitude, 395.
497
García Márquez, “Interview with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Rita Guibert, 15.
146
believe it is the essence of the book…Solitude considered as the
negation of solidarity is an important political concept. Nobody has
seen it. […] Macondo’s frustration comes from there. […] It is the
lack of love. 498
Thus, the theme of solitude, as opposed to solidarity, has political implications. For Jeff
Browitt, the “solitude versus solidarity theme” certainly claims “some warrant given that the
novel was written in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, which still held out the promise of
socialist redemption for Latin America from the ravages of neocolonialism and right-wing
dictatorship, and given García Márquez’s well-known socialist proclivities.”499 Considering
this theme from socio-political perspective, Higgins attests that
The patrician Buendías represent that oligarchy that has traditionally
ruled Latin America. Macondo’s founding family, they develop into a
land-owning class, the process by which the latifundia system was
established being encapsulated in the episode in which the second José
Arcadio makes use of his enormous physical strength to appropriate
the best lands in the district, and subsequently they evolve into an
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie by branching into business. The solitude
that is their dominant family trait is directly related to their egoism:
living exclusively for themselves, they are incapable of loving, of
sharing, of giving themselves to others. 500
Then, the theme of solitude can be understood in two ways, either as the lack of solidarity
which underlies the Buendías’ degeneration and collapse or as Buendías’ lack of love,
which, in effect, reflects the lack of solidarity in the oligarchic system. This theme is
combined with the theme of incest.
498
García Márquez, quoted in Browitt, 17.
Browitt, 17.
500
Higgins, 44.
499
147
As indicated earlier, another important leitmotiv in the novel is the intuitive desire
for incest and the fear of the outcome of incest. The Buendía family comes into existence as
a result of an incestuous marriage. Through six generations, the men of the family, mostly
unaware of their kinship because of illegitimacy, usually desire their aunts and mothers.
Throughout the novel, some family members always fear that they will produce a baby with
a pig’s tail because of incest. For instance, when Aureliano José wants to be with his aunt
Amaranta, she retorts, “any children will be born with the tail of a pig.”501 Úrsula warns
Remedios the Beauty not to marry any of the seventeen Aurelianos because “with any of
them your children will come out with the tail of a pig”502 and, in her old age, she always
prays to God “never to let any Buendía marry a person of the same blood because their
children would be born with the tail of a pig.”503 Bell-Villada explains the importance of the
leitmotif:
By making the dialectic of incest attraction/ repression so crucial a
force in the Buendías’ existence, their Colombian creator succeeds in
touching upon the very foundations of human society, for, as
anthropologist A.L. Kroeber noted, the incest taboo is “the only
universal institution.” Or in Levi-Strauss’s words, incest prohibitions
are “on the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense … [are]
culture itself.”504
The leitmotiv of incest, as the only universally forbidden institution, becomes a device of
socio-political criticism. For Higgins, who regards the themes of solitude and incest as a
complete whole, “the solitude of the Buendías […] is a reflection of the egoistic,
individualistic values by which they live. And their propensity to incest mirrors the selfish,
501
García Márquez, Solitude, 149.
García Márquez, Solitude, 230.
503
García Márquez, Solitude, 342.
504
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 100.
502
148
inward-looking attitude of a privileged oligarchy jealously defending its class interests
against other sectors of society.”505
In addition to the themes of solitude and alienation, the theme of death is important in
the novel. As indicated by the Nobel Committee, death is another common theme in García
Márquez’s work:
Death is perhaps the most important director behind the scenes in
García Márquez’ invented and discovered world. Often his stories
revolve around a dead person – someone who has died, is dying or
will die. A tragic sense of life characterizes García Márquez’ books –
a sense of the incorruptible superiority of fate and the inhuman,
inexorable ravages of history. But this awareness of death and tragic
sense of life is broken by the narrative's unlimited, ingenious vitality,
which in its turn is a representative of the at once frightening and
edifying vital force of reality and life itself. 506
With the help of the theme of death, García Márquez combines not only the world of the
living and the dead but also the dynamic force of reality and life in One Hundred Years of
Solitude. The account of José Arcadio Buendía is a good example to reflect the theme of
death and to show how the novel combines the world of the living and the dead and violates
our sense of time and place. After Melquíades’s funeral in Macondo, José Arcadio, being so
much interested in scientific inventions, starts to lose his sanity and his sense of time. He
sees and talks to the ghost of Prudencio Aquilar:
After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense,
the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that
other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had
505
506
Higgins, 45.
Award Ceremony Speech.
149
ended up loving his worst enemy. He had spent a great deal of time
looking for him. He asked the dead from Riohacha about him, the
dead who came from the Upar Valley, those who came from the
swamp, and no one could tell him because Macondo was a town that
was unknown to the dead until Melquíades arrived and marked it with
a small black dot on the motley maps of death. 507
After José Arcadio Buendía completely gets mad while trying to discover something
that will reveal the passage of time, he is “tied to the trunk of the chestnut tree”508 in the
courtyard and sits there half-dead and half-alive for years under a shelter of palm branches.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, literature is considered “the best plaything that had
ever been invented to make fun of people.”509 García Márquez’s novel is, “first of all, a
comic novel, an entertainment, which adopts an irreverent attitude toward literature […] as
something not to be taken seriously.”510 As indicated by Martin, García Márquez has always
had “a sense of humour and a Cervantine sense of irony.”511 His novel reflects his strong
sense of humour. Bell-Villada shares this idea:
[One Hundred Years of Solitude] remind[s] us that literary novels
could be not just beautiful, moving, and profound but also exciting,
entertaining, and fun. The Colombian’s learned, secular magic
evoke[s] both military battles and love affairs, depict[s] both
exploration adventures and bedroom romps, all without so much as a
hint of the maudlin, the puerile, or the vulgar.512
507
García Márquez, Solitude, 77.
García Márquez, Solitude, 78.
509
García Márquez, Solitude, 388.
510
Higgins, 37.
511
Martin, A Life, 155.
512
Bell-Villada, introduction, 6.
508
150
Carlos Fuentes agrees with Bell-Villada and suggests that “without a doubt, One Hundred
Years of Solitude is one of the most entertaining books ever written in Latin America.”513
García Márquez himself has many times proposed that it is a novel “completely lacking in
seriousness”514 and even told humorously that he “merely wanted to tell the story of a family
who for a hundred years did everything they could to prevent having a son with a pig’s tail,
and just because of their very efforts to avoid having one they ended by doing so.”515
While explaining the humor of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Clive Griffin argues
that in Western societies, the violation of taboos has been a universal source of laughter. The
commonest subjects that provide humor are thus related to sexual and bodily functions. For
Griffin, as well as sexual and bodily functions, death and religion are also sources of humor
especially in Catholic socities such as Colombia.516 Griffin’s contention brings to mind the
humor in The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French author François
Rabelais. As “one of literature’s great humorists, a genius of comic ribaldry in the best
traditions of Rabelais,”517 García Márquez in his novel relies mostly on “the Rabelaisian
aesthetic” and “Bakhtinian concerns”518 such as folklore, folk laughter, and carnivalesque.
His type of magical realism, “with its outrageous humor and endless irony that grow from a
solid and well-rooted commonsense folk wisdom and political radicalism,”519 draws heavily
on Medieval and Renaissance grotesque realism.
According to Bell-Villada, François Rabelais’s effects on García Márquez are
undeniable: “from the comical, lowlife, late-medieval universe of François Rabelais in The
Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel he learned ways of giving verbal shape to the more
513
Carlos Fuentes, “García Márquez: On Second Reading,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 25.
514
García Márquez, quoted in Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 116.
515
García Márquez, “Interview with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Rita Guibert, 14.
516
Clive Griffin, “The Humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez: New
Readings, ed. McGuirk and Carwell (New York: Cambridge UP, 2009), 82-83.
517
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 13.
518
Bell-Villada, introduction, 16.
519
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 67.
151
plebeian side of our humanity, to irreverence, ribaldry, and burlesque.”520 Bell-Villada
indicates that García Márquez has never hidden his admiration for Rabelais. In the last
chapter of the novel, García Márquez reveals this admiration and salutes Rabelais: Aureliano
Babilonia’s friend, Gabriel “won the contest and left for Paris with two changes of clothing,
a pair of shoes, and the complete works of Rabelais.”521 One of the Rabelaisian techniques
borrowed by García Márquez is literary gigantism. García Márquez’s type of fantasy mostly
depends on hyperboles, his crafty exaggeration, and his narrative gigantism. However,
García Márquez’s gigantism is nourished from the reality of Latin America:
[…] disproportion also forms part of reality in Latin America, with its
rivers so wide one often cannot see across them, and its earthquakes
and tempests the likes of which are not seen in Europe. “Hurricane” in
fact is a word of Caribbean Indian origin, and there have been
recorded instances of South American rainstorms that go on for
months. […] To convey this disproportionate reality the folk
imagination of García Márquez in turn further exaggerates, tells
history as a tall tale. 522
As indicated by Bakhtin, one of the characteristics of Rabelais’s style is the
carnivalesque, grotesque use of numbers. Almost in every part of his work, Rabelais uses
many numbers. These numbers are usually large, exaggerated numbers. Bakhtin explains
that Rabelaisian numbers are “intentionally rendered immeasurable” and “the comic effect is
obtained by a pretense at exactitude in situations where a precise count is impossible.” 523
Following the model of Rabelais, whose hyperboles are known for their arithmetical
precision, García Márquez makes much use of this arithmetical exactitude. Like Rabelais’s
520
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 78.
García Márquez, Solitude, 404.
522
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 12-13.
523
Bakhtin, 464.
521
152
work, One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several large numbers intended to create a
comic effect. The use of such carnivalesque, grotesque features in a literary work is
necessary for García Márquez. He once explained his own style as follows:
If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not
going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and
twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.
[…] When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the
house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he
used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother
used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the
house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that
if I didn’t say that the butterflies were yellow, people would not
believe it. 524
García Márquez applies these ideas in his novel: Pilar Ternera reaches “one hundred
forty-five years of age.”525 While Aureliano Segundo looks for the treasure buried in a place
that merely Úrsula knows, Pilar Ternera confirms “the existence of the treasure with the
precision of its consisting of seven thousand two hundred fourteen coins buried in three
canvas sacks reinforced with copper wire within a circle with a radius of three hundred
eighty-eight feet with Úrsula’s bed as the center.”526 When these large numbers are taken
into consideration, it is realized that they follow the example of Rabelaisian numbers which
are all ambiguous, incomplete, unbalanced, unstable figures like the grotesque body which
“is never finished, never completed, […] continually built, created, and builds and creates
another body”527 reflecting Rabelais’s main theme of “death-renewal-fertility.” Accordingly,
524
García Márquez, quoted in Darraj, 24.
García Márquez, Solitude, 395.
526
García Márquez, Solitude, 329.
527
Bakhtin, 317.
525
153
these carnivalesque, grotesque features are the means not only of creating a comic effect, but
also of conveying the theme of wholeness and continuity of life and reflecting a general
worldview in the popular carnival forms.
Furthermore, García Márquez’s novel follows the two essential principles of grotesque
realism: the material bodily principle and degradation principle. As indicated by Bakhtin, the
grotesque images of material bodily lower stratum such as food, drink, the genital organs, the
genital force, and defecation all have a positive nature, and their primary source is the culture
of folk humor. In his work, García Márquez easily applies the model of “Rabelais’ constant
joking with turds, urine, and penises.”528 For instance, in the last chapter of the novel, the
relationship of Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano is told as follows:
While he would rub Amaranta Úrsula’s erect breasts with egg whites
or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter,
she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a
doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a
Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza
bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from
head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made
mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a
torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive. 529
According to Bakhtin, “eating and drinking are one of the most significant
manifestations of the grotesque body” because “man’s encounter with the world in the act of
eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured
himself.”530 Thus, these images “conclude the process of labor and struggle of the social man
528
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 79.
García Márquez, Solitude, 406.
530
Bakhtin, 281.
529
154
against the world.”531 In the example above, García Márquez combines the images of eating
and food with the images of the sexual organs and genital force. Thus he emphasizes
Bakhtin’s idea that “all the images of the material bodily lower stratum […] debase, destroy,
regenerate, and renew simultaneously. They are blessing and humiliating at the same time.
Death and death throes, labor, and childbirth are intimately interwoven. On the other hand,
these images are closely linked to laughter.”532 Although García Márquez’s work contains
obscenity and ribaldry, it is certain that the novel is far removed from pornography, banality,
depravity, or vulgarity: “Rather [García Márquez’s and Rabelais’] bodily references
celebrate life in all its manifestations and take joy in what are normally considered the least
noble aspects, the animal side of human existence.”533
Undoubtedly reflecting a carnivalesque spirit, carnivals, circuses, marketplaces,
church fairs, school parties, rituals such as funerals and wakes, carnival squares and main
squares where the town pour in to have a great place in García Márquez’s novel. The public
sphere of the novel includes them because they have a great effect on the social life in
Macondo. These fetes, rituals and places hosting social gatherings function just as the
marketplaces of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. According to Bakhtin,
The marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a world
in itself, a world which was one; all “performances” in this area, from
loud cursing to the organized show, had something in common and
were imbued with the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and
familiarity. Such elements of familiar speech as profanities, oaths, and
curses were fully legalized in the marketplace and were easily adopted
by all festive genres, even the Church drama. The marketplace was the
center of all that is official; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a
531
Bakhtin, 302.
Bakhtin, 151.
533
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 79.
532
155
world of official order and official ideology, it always remained “with
the people.”534
Thus, like Rabelais, García Márquez creates in his novel a certain marketplace atmosphere
“in which the exalted and the lowly, the sacred and the profane are leveled and are all drawn
into the same dance.”535 In his work, carnivals serve as his political criticism, and circuses
are usually the metaphors for “the return for communal origins.”536 Danow indicates that
circus has always been one of the vital aspects of carnival because circus is “the most recent
continuation of the ancient carnival tradition,”537 García Márquez is worth praising
especially for his representation of circuses in the novel. García Márquez elucidates the
particular place of the circuses within the human domain and depicts the arrival of a circus
“as a moment of epiphany”:538
Santa Sofía de la Piedad dropped what she was doing in the kitchen
and ran to the door. “It’s the circus,” she shouted. Instead of going to
the chestnut tree, Colonel Aureliano Buendía also went to the street
door and mingled with the bystanders who were watching the parade.
He saw a woman dressed in gold sitting on the head of an elephant.
He saw a sad dromedary. He saw a bear dressed like a Dutch girl
keeping time to the music with a soup spoon and a pan. He saw the
clowns doing cartwheels at the end of the parade. 539
Circuses also become good vehicles of García Márquez’s ethical and social criticism. To
give lessons about some moral issues that provide the integrity and continuity of societies, he
534
Bakhtin, 153-54.
Bakhtin, 160.
536
Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, “The Economy of the Narrative Sign in No One Writes to the Colonel
and In Evil Hour,” in Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, ed. Julio Ortega (Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1988), 23.
537
Viacheslav Ivanov, quoted in Danow, 55.
538
Danow, 55.
539
García Márquez, Solitude, 267.
535
156
uses the characters who work for the circuses. For instance, José Arcadio witnesses “the sad
spectacle of the man who had been turned into a snake for having disobeyed his parents” and
the show of the woman “who must have her head chopped off every night at this time for
one hundred and fifty years as punishment for having seen what she should not have.” 540
Similarly, in the last chapter of the novel, Aureliano Babilonia talks to a bartender “who had
a withered and somewhat crumpled arm because he had raised it against his mother.” 541
When José Arcadio leaves Macondo with a group of gypsies, his father José Arcadio
Buendía approves because he thinks “That way he’ll learn to be a man.”542
García Márquez has always been “strongly committed politically on the side of the
poor and the weak against oppression and economic exploitation.”543 His political, social,
and religious satire is one of the vital aspects that surround the representation of daily life in
his work. His satire and irony are considered “the basis of criticism for testing and contesting
moral and ethical values.”544 García Márquez’s socio-political satire usually takes advantage
of grotesque gigantism. For instance, in chapter twelve of the novel, Mr. Herbert’s Yankee
technology is described in a satirical way. Coming to Macondo after the construction of the
railroad, Mr. Herbert eats at the house of the Buendías. After tasting a banana from a tigerstriped bunch of bananas, he starts to investigate the bananas one by one using complex
equipment:
[…] he kept on eating as he spoke, tasting, chewing, more with the
distraction of a wise man than with the delight of a good eater, and
when he finished the first bunch he asked them to bring him another.
Then he took a small case with optical instruments out of the toolbox
that he always carried with him. With the auspicious attention of a
540
García Márquez, Solitude, 32-33.
García Márquez, Solitude, 413.
542
García Márquez, Solitude, 34.
543
Award Ceremony Speech.
544
Pelayo, 75.
541
157
diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it
with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale,
and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers. Then he took a
series of instruments out of the chest with which he measured the
temperature, the level of humidity in the atmosphere, and the intensity
of the light. It was such an intriguing ceremony that no one could eat
in peace as everybody waited for Mr. Herbert to pass a final and
revealing judgment, but he did not say anything that allowed anyone
to guess his intentions. 545
As seen in the quotation above, Mr. Herbert’s high technology is mocked by applying
grotesque gigantism. This account serves to criticize neo-colonialism. While explaining
García Márquez’s satire, Bell-Villada claims that
[…] the satire in García Márquez is not of an angry or malignant kind.
[…] His anti-solemnity and his fundamental loyalty to the folk
cultures of street and public square are rather the expressions of his
larger belief in the possibility of a better world. As the great Soviet
scholar Mikhail Bakhtin observed about Rabelais, García Márquez’s
fiction helps deflate official truths and reinterpret them from the point
of view of people’s laughter.546
As shown by Bell-Villada, One Hundred Years of Solitude contains numerous satirical
portraits of capitalists, oligarchs, corrupt soldiers, administrators, politicians, U.S.
imperialists, and the clergy. With these satirical portraits, his novel defies the established
social order and value systems in order to create new ones. Offering the possibility of a
545
546
García Márquez, Solitude, 225- 26.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 80.
158
better world and life for people, it attempts to create its own church, state, and world against
the official church, state, and world.
To sum up, thanks to carnivalesque-grotesque features, a strong regenerative
carnivalesque spirit is felt throughout García Márquez’s novel. This spirit makes the novel
stronger in its sociopolitical struggle and draws it closer to Medieval and Renaissance
grotesque realist fiction.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Politics, History, and Society
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez creates Macondo as a microcosm
of a greater world. Thus, the history of Macondo represents the history of Colombia and
Latin America. Although the events of the novel chronologically span the years after
Independence to around 1930, that is, the neocolonial period, the novel in fact reflects 500
hundred years of Latin America since it was discovered by Christopher Columbus. The
novel makes use of real political, social and historical events. It has been considered “the
best general introduction to Latin America.”547 Consequently, the novel is studied as a
course-book in many history and political science courses in the United States. According to
Bell-Villada,
[…] One Hundred Years of Solitude is among other things a great
novel about politics, dealing as it does with such subjects as civil
wars, labor strike, and military repression, all of it reimagined by a
man who, along with Orwell and Sartre, qualifies as one of our
century’s great political writers – “political” in the broadest sense of
the word. As author, García Márquez shows unusual insight into the
deepest and most intimate recesses of power […]. In a continent
where people tend to be much preoccupied with the question, “Who’s
547
Bell-Villada, in García Márquez, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with
Bell-Villada, 20.
159
in power?” García Márquez’s fiction puts together and brings vividly
to life the experiences that make this obsession a concrete everyday
reality. 548
One of García Márquez’s aspects that deserve to be mentioned is his left-wing
commitments: “My political views are clear. They may resemble the views of many a
Communist Party man – but I’ve never belonged to a party.”549 For García Márquez, as a
writer with leftish liberal ideas, it has been impossible not to mention the political problems
of his country – and by extension, his continent – in his novel. To be able to include civil
wars, labor strikes, migrations, public ceremonies, repressions and rebellions in the public
sphere of his novel, García Márquez employs the political history of not only Colombia, but
also the whole Latin America: “the early process of colonization and inland settlement, the
bloody wars of the nineteenth century, the repeated instances of illusory prosperity based on
a single product, and the hegemonic power of the U.S. economy in our time.”550
As a postmodern and postcolonial text, One Hundred Years of Solitude has developed
a fresh viewpoint for the concept of history. In his influential essay “García Márquez: On
Second Reading,” Carlos Fuentes regards the novel as a fundamental text giving way to
“mythical imagination.” Fuentes suggests that, among the narrative categories of Myth,
Utopia, and Epic, Myth best reflects all human times to improve freedom. One Hundred
Years of Solitude, which is “not about history-and-myth, but about the myths of history and
their demystification,”551 has shown that “history as officially documented” should not
satisfy us because “history is also all the Good and Evil dreamt, imagined, desired by men
for their self-preservation and self-destruction.”552 The novel portrays central Latin American
548
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 13.
García Márquez, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Bell-Villada, 23.
550
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 102.
551
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism,” 99.
552
Fuentes, 28.
549
160
truths, “truths that official chroniclers and legislators, court historians, and realist novelists in
the past could not or would not tell, eliding or concealing such truths, instead”:553
Freshly dissolving those false polemics and dilemmas concerning
realism versus fantasy, art engagé versus art for art’s sake, national
literature versus cosmopolitan literature, García Márquez’s book
destroys those idiotic a prioris in order to proclaim and conquer the
right to an imagination that nonetheless can distinguish between
msytifications – in which a living past wishes to pass as living
present- and mythifications – in which a living present recaptures,
also, the life of the past.554
Consequently, One Hundred Years of Solitude can be considered “an attempt to
reconstruct Latin American history as myth” and its “purpose of reconstructing history as
myth represents an act of self-definition, which attempts to shrug off false romanticized
interpretations of Latin America.”555 Based on mythical imagination, the novel focuses on
history. Its structure corresponds to the history of Colombia beginning from its discovery by
the Spanish conquistadors. Historical sections in the novel contain a great deal of details
about the periods mentioned.
García Márquez manages to look at Latin America with the eyes of the chroniclers and
explorers who regarded the continent as a magical world.556 For this reason, his novel can be
553
Bell-Villada, introduction, 11.
Fuentes, 31.
555
James C. Jupp, “The Necessity of the Literary Tradition: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred
Years of Solitude,” The English Journal: Our History, Ourselves 89.3 (January 2000): 114.
556
See Humberto E. Robles, “The First Voyage around the World: From Pigafetta to García
Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom, 183-201 (New
York: Chelsea House, 1999) and Bell-Villada, “History of Macondo,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical
Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude, ed. Bloom, new edition,
39-62 (New York: Infobase, 2009).
554
161
considered “a new chronicle of the Indies.”557 As proposed by Martin, since the discovery of
the New World, Latin America has been an antithesis of Europe, and its people have been
considered inferior by European people: “We, Europeans, […] have always viewed Latin
America, like Africa, through all the twists and turns of a long historical relationship […] as
alternately the earthly paradise or the heart of darkness, their inhabitants as noble or ignoble
savages, according to the opportune requirements of the moment.”558 Thus, García
Márquez’s aim while writing a new chronicle of the Indies is to deconstruct the image of
Latin America and its people through the myths of the continent and their demystification.
As the first two chapters of the novel evoke the Spanish discovery of the New World
and colonization, it might be useful to start with short information about the discovery of the
present-day Colombia by the Spaniards. The discovery of the New World was the Utopia of
the Old World. As indicated by Fuentes, “when losing the geocentric illusion, destroyed by
Copernicus, Europe needed to create a new space that would confirm the extent of the
known world […]. America is above all the renewed possibility of an Arcadia, of a new
beginning of history whose ancient presuppositions had been destroyed by the Copernican
revolution.”559 Thus, the Europeans set off in search of Arcadia, as the promised land of
origins. It was the Caribbean coast that the Spanish conquistadors first set foot in Colombia
at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On his fourth voyage, Columbus himself had
investigated the area and reached the central waterway called the Magdalena River. After
Columbus, “an initial voyage of exploration and trade by Alonso de Ojeda to the Guajira
(1499) was followed by a second of Juan de la Cosa (1501), which identified the salient
features of Colombia’s northern coast, notably the bays of Santa Marta and Cartagena and
557
Iris M. Zavala, “One Hundred Years of Solitude as Chronicle of Indies,” in Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP,
2002), 109.
558
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism,” 96.
559
Fuentes, 26.
162
the mouth of the Magdalena River.”560 Afterwards, other Spanish expeditions persisted on
the Caribbean coast of Colombia “looking for gold and pearls, Indian slaves, adventure – and
the elusive waterway to Asia that Columbus himself had been seeking.”561 Alonso de Ojeda,
who had sailed with Columbus to America, and his men, after fighting, killing, and enslaving
Indians along their way, started the acts of colonization in the Gulf of Urabá, near Panama,
where they founded the town of San Sebastián in 1510. The Spanish explorer, Vasco Núñez
de Balboa, colonized the region around Urabá and discovered the Pacific Ocean (Sea of the
South) in 1513. The Spanish colony of Castilla del Oro on the Isthmus of Panama was
established. The colony in Panama served as the base for the successive expeditions into the
interior parts of Colombia. The Spanish conquistadors founded Santa Marta, which is the
oldest Spanish city of today’s Colombia, in 1526 and Cartagena in 1533: “Needless to say,
the Spanish settlers at Cartagena and Santa Marta had also been hearing about wealthy
kingdoms supposed to exist somewhere in the interior and had begun sending expeditions to
find out.”562 In April 1536, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, with an army of 800 men, led an
expedition to conquer the Muiscas, one of the Amerindian peoples of pre-Columbian
Colombia living in the intermountain basins of the Cordillera Oriental:
From the outset the expedition suffered heavy losses. In a storm two
ships sank at the mouth of the Magdalena, while others were carried
westward to Cartagena. Meanwhile, the main force trooping overland
suffered from food scarcities; the indigenes’ poisoned arrows; the hot
damp climate of the Magdalena; and mosquitos, ticks, and worms. 563
560
Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York:
Oxford UP, 2002), 27.
561
David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 7.
562
Bushnell, 8.
563
Safford and Palacios, 31.
163
After losing many soldiers because of starvation, illness and exhaustion, in March 1537
approximately 200 men arrived at the highland domain of the Muiscas, which seemed a
paradise to the Spanish conquistadors. Within a few months, the Spaniards collected a good
quantity of gold and established control over the region that offered them salt, potatoes, corn,
emeralds, and especially gold artifacts. After living in the region isolated from the other
Spaniards in the region – there were three different groups of Spanish explorers coming from
different directions – and fighting with the Muiscas, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada founded
Bogota as “the capital of the newly conquered territory, which he named the New Granada
after his birthplace in Spain”564 in 1538. Beginning from the second half of the sixteenth
century, New Granada was governed by the Spanish viceroys as the representatives of the
Spanish monarch. The colonial administration in New Granada was decidedly centralized.
Although Jiménez had used the term “el Nuevo Reino de Granada” [the New Kingdom of
Granada] to refer to the area of Muisca culture,565 in 1717, the Spanish Viceroyalty of the
New Kingdom of Granada included today’s Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, most of
Venezuela, and Trinidad and Margarita islands.
The events told in the first two chapters of García Márquez’s novel correspond to the
early stage of Colombia’s colonialization explained above. The first part of the novel is full
of references to the age of discovery and to the period of colonization. The references to the
colonization period include José Arcadio’s expedition to search for the ocean, during which
he and the four men of his expedition find “an enormous Spanish galleon”566 and “a suit of
fifteenth century armor” in the jungle, miles away from the ocean. Moreover, “three colonial
coins” that are paid to Melquíades in exchange for the magnifying glass can also be taken as
a reference to this period. In this chapter, José Arcadio Buendía is depicted as obsessed with
the discoveries. It is a group of gypsies who connect Macondo to the rest of the world by
564
Bushnell, 9.
Safford and Palacios, 32.
566
García Márquez, Solitude, 12.
565
164
displaying new inventions to the inhabitants of Macondo. The leader of the gypsies,
Melquiades, introduces the magnet, a telescope, magnifying glasses, some Portuguese maps,
instruments of navigation such as the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant, an alchemy set,
and false teeth. These new inventions, being part of European knowledge and technology,
are depicted as devices of colonization. For instance, after learning how to use the
instruments of navigation, José Arcadio Buendía develops “a notion of space that allowed
him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish
relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.” He attempts to use
magnifying glasses “as a weapon of war,” prepares a manual to explain how his new weapon
is used, and decides to send it to the government “in spite of the fact that a trip to the capital
was little less than impossible at that time.”567 The distant government and capital are also
references to the colonial period of Latin America. In this period, Spain, as a metropolis, was
providing little contact even with its viceroyalties, and the communities in Latin America
were living isolated from each other.
One Hundred Years of Solitude contains attributions not only to the history of the
Spanish conquests but also to that of the British. Sir Francis Drake, an English navigator and
politician, navigated around the world in 1577 and attacked Cartagena in 1586 and Riohacha
in 1596, burning all the houses.568 Iris Zavala claims that Drake told his experiences about
Africa, where he met people trading ice to sell in markets.569 Similarly, in the novel, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía cannot forget the day when his father takes him to the circus to see the
ice. In the second chapter of the novel, there is also a direct reference to Drake. Before they
found Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula Iguarán live near Riohacha, a
town which was attacked by Francis Drake in the sixteenth century: “Sir Francis Drake had
gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw
567
García Márquez, Solitude, 2-4.
Safford and Palacios, 37.
569
Zavala, 111.
568
165
to bring to Queen Elizabeth.”570 As one of the first Spanish settlers, Úrsula’s great-greatgrandfather is introduced as an Aragonese merchant. Both Úrsula’s and José Arcadio
Buendía’s great-great-grandfathers worked as tobacco planters. Thus, Úrsula and José
Arcadio Buendía are the descendants of Spanish colonists. After murdering Prudencio
Aguilar in a duel, José Arcadio Buendía and a few friends cross the mountains of Riohacha,
making “an absurd journey.” Their stomachs have corrupted “by monkey meat and snake
stew”, their children have “sunken stomachs and languid eyes” because of hunger and
exhaustion, and they have “the look of shipwrecked people with no escape,” which are all
references to the hardships and sufferings experienced by the Spanish conquistadors during
their expeditions in Latin America. They become “the first mortals to see the western slopes
of the mountain range,” that is to say that they are the first white Europeans in the area. After
roaming the mountains for almost two years, they come to a riverside where they found
Macondo. Macondo becomes an earthly paradise for the travelers, as were the highlands
where the Muiscas lived for the Spaniards.
With all these references to the period of the Spanish colonization beginning with the
arrival of Columbus in America, García Márquez criticizes colonialism in his ironic style.
When Drake attacks Riohacha, Úrsula’s great-great-grandmother becomes so frightened that
her husband has to carry her to “a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills.”
Thus, the conquistadors are introduced as wild, aggressive invaders and pirates whereas the
colonized Amerindians are reliable and peaceful. As the descendants of the Spaniards, José
Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula are bound to each other by “a common prick of conscience” and
whenever Úrsula gets angry with her husband “she would leap back over three hundred years
of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.”571
570
571
García Márquez, Solitude, 10.
García Márquez, Solitude, 19-24.
166
In her discussion on apocalyptic historicism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Lois
Parkinson Zamora proposes that García Márquez conceives of “the American land as a
paradise now lost.”572 Her ideas are clear in the depiction of Macondo. José Arcadio Buendía
and his friends head “toward the land that no one had promised them” 573 and found
Macondo, which is introduced as a paradise but is very far from being a perfect Eden.
Macondo “represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and
that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history.”574 As an “unpromised”
land, Macondo is described in its primitive, isolated, and abandoned form: “Macondo is
surrounded by water on all sides.”575 Macondo, as a colony, is an island far from the Western
world. Because of its isolation and remoteness from Europe, the new inventions introduced
by gypsies are “new” only to the inhabitants of Macondo although this technology has
already been known by the people of the Old World: “Certain South American Indians even
now live in the Stone Age while we live in the Age of the Concorde.”576 Latin America’s
isolation from European technological and intellectual developments is well depicted when
José Arcadio Buendía discovers that “the earth is round like an orange.”577 Colonies’
underdevelopment and backwardness in relation to Europe is also evoked in his words:
“Incredible things are happening in the world […]. Right there across the river there are all
kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys.”578 José Arcadio
Buendía’s hastened “assimilation of history, which moves from the Age of Exploration as
represented by the founding of Macondo to the Age of Invention as shown by the
protagonist’s fascination with foreign technology, indicates Latin America’s struggle to
572
Zamora, The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1997), 120.
573
García Márquez, Solitude, 23.
574
Higgins, 40.
575
García Márquez, Solitude, 12.
576
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 31.
577
García Márquez, Solitude, 4.
578
García Márquez, Solitude, 8.
167
assimilate knowledge/ technology, which Europe developed over centuries.”579 Thus, the
novel demystifies Spain’s claim to have bestowed the benefits of European civilization on
America. As indicated by Higgins, the Conquest itself is satirized by “the expedition in
which the men of Macondo re-enact the ordeals of the Spanish explorers and conquistadors
in order to make contact with the civilization that Spain allegedly spread to its colonies.” 580
Consequently, One Hundred Years of Solitude conveys that Macondo/ Latin America has
become “a victim of a European dream, envisioned as an eartly paradise, populated and
exploited for its sources, and left at the mercy of other continents’ economies and whims.” 581
The Western colonization has created Macondo/ Latin America’s loneliness, its isolation, its
backwardness, its remoteness from the world. Like Macondo, Latin America is forgotten,
and moreover it has been forced to forget all about its own history.
The third chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude provides the reader with another
counter-colonialist and counter-imperialist discourse. In his discussion of One Hundred
Years of Solitude as a postmodern and postcolonial text, Dean J. Irvine considers the
insomnia plague to be a kind of allegorical narrative, and a fable. Irvine quotes from Susan
Sontag, who argues in her analysis of sociopolitical disease metaphors that, in literature,
“illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt
or unjust.”582 The metaphors in García Márquez’s novel are all connected to socio-economic,
political, and historical issues. In the fable of the insomnia plague, the central character is a
poor unsheltered orphan called Rebeca, who is a relative of Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía
while neither of them remember having such a relative, and who is thought to be a deaf-mute
until she responds to the questions of the Guajiro Indian servant Visitación asked in the
579
Jupp, 114.
Higgins, 40.
581
Lorna Robinson, “The Golden Age Myth in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Hart and Ouyang
(Woodridge: Tamesis, 2005), 86.
582
Susan Sontag, quoted in Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
580
168
Guajiro native language, who in fact knows both the Spanish and Guajiro languages. Rebeca
carries the insomnia plague to Macondo and transmits the disease to the Buendía family.
After eating Úrsula’s cookies, the Macondones are all infected with the illness. Visitación
becomes the first to recognize in Rebeca’s eyes the symptoms of the sickness and warns the
family members that the illness, in time, causes amnesia, the loss of memory. As a remedy
for the illness of unavoidable loss of memory, José Arcadio Buendía develops some tactics:
With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair,
clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the
animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassawa, caladium, banana.
Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory,
he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized
by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then
he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow
was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of
Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is a
cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk,
and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee and milk.
Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away,
momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably
when they forgot the values of the written letters.583
As understood from the last sentence of the quotation above, the insomnia plague eventually
causes “the complete erasure of linguistic signifiers and signifieds.”584 In this fable,
providing the literalization of the metaphor of plague or illness, García Márquez presents a
strong postcolonial discourse. The fable represents the power of imperialism and colonialism
583
584
García Márquez, Solitude, 47.
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
169
and their destructive effects. To consider the fable from the postcolonial point of view, it is
necessary to pay attention to the background information provided through the character
Visitación. Visitación and her brother Cataure are introduced as the members of an Indian
tribe called Guajiro. Before they came to Macondo, their tribe had also experienced the
insomnia plague, and by the threat of the plague, they were obliged to go into exile from
their “age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess.” When they recognize the
symptoms of the illness that had earlier destroyed their tribe, Cataure leaves home
immediately, but Visitación stays believing that “the lethal sickness would follow her, no
matter what, to the farthest corner of the earth.” José Arcadio Buendía does not believe in the
Indian servant’s words: “José Arcadio Buendía, dying with laughter, thought that it was just
a question of one of the many illnesses invented by the Indians’ superstitions.”585 According
to Irvine, “documentation of lethal sickness in colonial history” not only supports that
“illness is not a metaphor” and also shows that “for colonized people illness is neither a
metaphor nor a superstition.”586 The co-existence of the different perspectives of Visitación
and José Arcadio Buendía thus proves Chanady’s contention that “magical Indian mentality”
and “European rationality”587 exist together in postcolonial magical realist texts. Visitación
explains the effects of insomnia to the Buendía family as follows:
[…] the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the
impossibility of sleeping, but its inexorable evolution toward a more
critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She means that when the sick
person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his
childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and
notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the
585
García Márquez, Solitude, 43-44.
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
587
Chanady, “Magical Realism,” 23.
586
170
awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that
had no past.588
As indicated by Frantz Fanon, a well-known postcolonial theorist who attributes a
basic importance to the phenomenon of language, language is the carrier of culture. In Black
Skin, White Masks, Fanon maintains that “a man who has a language consequently possesses
the world expressed and implied by that language” and, he adds, “mastery of language
affords remarkable power.”589 Then, the quotation above, strengthening Fanon’s idea on the
relationship between culture and language, reflects the process of colonialism. The insomnia
plague becomes the symbol of “the history of European imperialism and colonialism in
which the critical manifestation of amnesia (loss of memory) affects the violent erasure and
expulsion of indigenous people and their cultures.”590 To melt the culture of the colonized in
the culture of the colonizer, the colonizer has to start with the language of the colonized, as a
result of which the culture of the colonized will be violated. Deletion of language and hence
the culture of a nation will result in losing identity and awareness of its own being. In the
third part of the novel, the inhabitants of Macondo face the danger of losing all of their
language-based knowledge, which means that they are in danger of losing their culture. In
the end, the gypsy Melquíades, whose tribe “had been wiped off the face of the earth because
they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge,”591 cures the illness by applying
magical methods. This suggests that the remedy for losing one’s culture can be found in
returning to their native origins and embracing them.
Although there are some other references to the period of colonization in the third
chapter of the novel (such as a direct reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, an English aristocrat
and explorer during the Elizabethan era), a new stage of Colombian history is introduced at
588
589
García Márquez, Solitude, 43-44.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (London: Pluto Press, 2008),
9.
590
591
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
García Márquez, Solitude, 38.
171
the end of the chapter. Following its foundation under the leadership of José Arcadio
Buendía, the self-supporting agrarian society, introduced in the first three chapters of the
novel, starts to develop with the help of scientific innovations. Scientific improvements give
way to social convolution. The provincial town changes into a regional city. Macondo enters
into a new stage in its history. It changes into a national state. It starts to attract the attention
of the politicians from the capital who want to gain its alliance. The new stage of Macondo is
marked by the arrival of the character Don Apolinar Moscote, the government magistrate.
Together with the national armed forces, Apolinar Moscote introduces “the attempted
imposition of centralized, national authority.”592 In its way to develop as a national state,
Macondo has difficult times as it enters into a long period of civil wars:
With episodes concerning magistrate Don Apolinar Moscote and the
ensuing civil wars, García Márquez telescopes two epochs: the bloody
struggles for independence from the Spanish Crown (1810-25), and
the endless strife between Liberals and Conservatives that
characterized the entire nineteenth century in virtually all the newly
founded Latin American republics.593
Colombia has experienced long-standing turbulence and rebellions. Its democracy
has never brought justice and peace to the country. Its history is defined by “epic
conflicts.”594 Since the dawn of the colonial period that lasted nearly three centuries, there
had always been many upheavals against Spanish rule in Colombia. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Antonia Nariño became one of the political precursors of the country.
Although he was “a representative of the top layer of the creole aristocracy,” he was
592
Browitt, 18.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 102.
594
Michael J. LaRosa and Germán R. Mejía, Colombia: A Concise Contemporary History (Plymouth:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 75.
593
172
certainly “ahead of most of his class in political ideas”595 and all he was thinking of was
independence. Nariño was against the Spanish viceroyalty in New Granada – the Spanish
colonial area in northern Latin America. After being released from Cartagena prison, he tried
to establish a military government. On 10 May, 1810 Cartagena in New Granada
accomplished to set up its own junta, and thus earned “the distinction of being the first
Colombian city unilaterally to sever ties with Spain.”596 In 1819, the Venezuelan-born Simón
Bolívar, known as “the Liberator,” “became the preeminent leader of the independence
movement, politically as well as military, in both Venezuela and New Granada.”597 Under
his leadership, the Republic of Colombia, as a union of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia
(including Panama at that time), was established in the territory of the Viceroyalty of New
Granada. The Congress of Cúcuta was held in 1821:“The constitution adopted in Cúcuta in
1821, which in many ways set the pattern for Colombian constitutions until the 1850s, was
clearly centralist,”598 holding the control and power in one central group. As the first
president of Colombia, Simón Bolívar was in charge of the war and military task, whereas
the New Granadan General Francisco de Paula Santander, the vice president of Colombia,
dealt with the construction of the new republic.
Colombia succeeded in its military task of ending Spanish control of
Andean South America. But once this strategic aim was achieved, the
union of Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador began to fail as a
polity. In 1826 the union entered into a prolonged political crisis –
involving concurrent, and often interconnected, conflicts between
clergy and university-educated liberal politicians, between military
officers and the same liberal civilian politicians, between the central
595
Bushnell, 34.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 19.
597
Safford and Palacios, 104.
598
Safford and Palacios, 108.
596
173
government in Bogotá and elites in Venezuela and Ecuador, and
ultimately between Bolívar and Santander and their respective
adherents. The crisis continued to 1831, by which time the Republic
of Colombia had fragmented into its original constituent parts –
Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador.599
Although the two longstanding parties of Colombia, the Liberal and Conservative
parties, were founded in the late 1840s, their origins can be found in “the developing party
divergence as a sequel to the conflict between Liberals and Boliviarians in 1826-1830.”600
The first constitution of Colombia had established a central government. However,
beginning in 1831, people who supported Santander and those supporting Bolívar started to
divide opinions on the question of federalism versus centralism: “Essentially, those who
supported Bolívar’s political philosophy were Conservatives, and those who advocated
Santander’s idea of a weaker government (called “federalism”), in which local states have
more authority, were called Liberals.”601
While differences between these two groups reflected varying political
dispositions, they also corresponded to previously established political
friendships. Conflict between the two liberal factions became more
explicit in the presidential election of 1836 and hardened in its
aftermath, in part because of election-induced antagonisms and
bitterness over subsequent distribution of political office. Finally, the
civil war of 1840-1842 brought a virtually unreconcilable antagonism
between liberal dissidents and a moderate-Bolivarian government
599
Safford and Palacios, 104.
Safford and Palacios, 134.
601
Darraj, 25-26.
600
174
party that afterward (in 1848) took the name of the Conservative
Party.602
The Liberal and Conservative parties became two of the oldest persisting political
parties not only in Colombia but also in the Americas. For this reason, it was generally
accepted that “there are five kinds of human beings, but only two kinds of political beings:
liberal and conservative.”603 However, the conflict between them never came to an end and
never provided enlightenment and democracy in Colombia. Instead, it became the primary
reason for bloodshed for centuries.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Don Apolinar Moscote, whose name is jested with
by García Márquez as a combination of a Greek name and a surname evoking “botfly,” both
represents the centralist tradition of old Spain and the advent of the republican era. With the
Spanish honorary title Don and his bureaucratic style, Apolinar Moscote is sent to Macondo
by the centralist government. He nails up the shield of the republic on the wall of his office
and sends an official document to the town-dwellers ordering to paint their houses blue – the
official color of the Conservative Party – instead of white. José Arcadio Buendía runs
counter to the magistrate’s order saying that “in this town we do not give orders with pieces
of paper” and he insists that his house “is going to be white, white, like a dove.” Before the
magistrate’s advent, the inhabitants of Macondo had always lived in peace – as indicated by
“dove,” the symbol of peace – and arranged everything “without having bothered the
government and without anyone having bothered them.” Moreover, “no one was upset that
the government had not helped.” The magistrate stays in Macondo under the protection of
“six barefoot and ragged soldiers, armed with shotguns,” who are considered “invaders” 604
by the town-dwellers. As drawn from the quotations, the arrival of the central government is
602
Safford and Palacios, 134.
Milton Puentes, quoted in Janes, “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the
Fictions of Gabriel García Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez,
ed. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1999), 129.
604
García Márquez, Solitude, 56-57.
603
175
considered a “negative arrival” because it is a government “which sent political and military
representatives to control the innocent little community.”605 Through this negative arrival
represented by the character Apolinar Moscote, García Márquez condemns the intrusion and
the autocratic and insensitive impositions of central government. As indicated by Higgins,
Reversing the conventional wisdom that has traditionally attributed
the political instability of the nineteenth century to the “barbaric”
countryside, whose backwardness and lawlessness supposedly
hindered the “civilized cities” efforts to lead the subcontinent toward
order and progress, the novel identifies government intervention in
local affairs as the origin of Macondo’s troubles. 606
Don Apolinar Moscote’s “being the appointee of a remote and shadowy government
reflects the fact that, until 1987, town mayors in Colombia were not elected locally but
assigned by Bogotá.”607 Although the magistrate works as the representative of the central
government, the remote government is not capable of sustaining even its own functionaries.
Moscote is obliged to maintain “from his scanty resources” “two policemen armed with
wooden clubs.”608 In order to gain livelihood, his daughters help the magistrate. It is also
Don Apolinar Moscote who brings Father Nicanor Reyna to Macondo in the fifth chapter of
the novel. These two characters reenact the notorious Spanish coalition between church and
state.
Although the first three chapters reflect the events during the period of colonization,
the main focus of the novel is the period after Independence. The novel dramatizes the
Colombian history through two principal events: the Thousand Days War and the Santa
Marta Massacre, in which the banana workers were murdered in Ciénaga in 1928.
605
Martin, A Life, 300.
Higgins, 41.
607
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 103.
608
García Márquez, Solitude, 61.
606
176
As explained before, the conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties
survived for a long time in Colombia. The civil war and the eternal feud between them gave
great harm to the country, dividing the families and the whole nation. During the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, these parties and their supporters have continually been divided on
political issues such as “reform or reaction, free trade or protection, separation or
conjunction of church and state.”609 According to Safford and Palacios, in addition to the
question of centralism versus federalism, the question of the influence of the Church became
one of the important problems for the two parties:
The two parties most consistently divided on attitudes toward the
power and influence of the Church, most clearly after the civil war of
1839-1842. Liberals, while often Catholic in belief and practice,
generally thought that the Church as an institution was too powerful
and
tended
to
restrain
economic
productivity
and
public
enlightenment. Most political conservatives, by contrast, came to
believe that the Church must play a central role in preserving the
social and moral order; accordingly, they were willing to concede to
the clergy a tutorial role in educating the young and guiding the poor,
less educated people. 610
Thus, for the Conservatives, the Church was an ally because of the influence of the clergy on
the people; the Conservatives used the Church for their political purposes. This provided a
considerable advantage for them because the notions of the Liberals, often imported from
abroad, were generally difficult for their less-educated countrymen to comprehend.
These church-related political and ideological differences between the two groups
gained acceleration during the 1860s and resulted in numerous civil wars in Colombia:
609
610
Wood, Gabriel García Márquez, 8.
Safford and Palacios, 156.
177
Between 1863-1876, there were approximately forty five civil wars, and between 1884-1902
(in 1884-85, 1895, 1899-1902), there were three general civil wars:611
In 1899, the two warring political factions engaged in what became
known as the War of a Thousand Days, a civil war that led to the
deaths of more than 100,000 people. The dispute began over the
falling price of coffee. The Conservatives, who were in control of the
government at the time, panicked because of the declining economy
and issued paper money that was not backed by gold. As a result, the
value of the peso decreased dramatically, forcing coffee farmers into
bankruptcy and leading the Liberals to declare war on the government.
The war raged for three years. The Liberals eventually lost, but the
two parties negotiated a settlement in 1902 that promised economic
and political reform.612
According to Darraj, although the two parties fought for years, the political and ideological
differences between them were negligible. She explains that both parties worked for the
liberation and success of Colombia. Consequently, there is no noteworthy difference
between the parties. To support her ideas, she quotes from Leslie Jermyn, who indicates that
“although their methods differed, the parties had somewhat similar goals, and people tended
to support whichever party their parents supported.”613 In his novel García Márquez is
extremely conscious of the vain Conservative-Liberal rivalry. He “plunders” the history of
Colombia and shows that “victorious federalists dismember the country, the Liberals sell the
country, the conservatives buy it.”614
611
Janes, “Liberals,” 135.
Darraj, 28.
613
Leslie Jermyn, quoted in Darraj, 26-27.
614
Janes, “Liberals,” 145.
612
178
The events told in chapters 5-9 of García Márquez’s novel correspond to the political
and military conflicts in Colombia during the late nineteenth century: the quarrels and civil
wars between the Liberals and the Conservatives and the last war of the nineteenth century,
the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), which officially “ended with two treaties, the
Treaty of Wisconsin and the Treaty of Neerlandia at which Uribe Uribe surrendered to the
Conservative government.”615 During these chapters, Aureliano Buendía rises as the main
character. At the end of the fifth chapter, Aureliano’s father-in-law, Don Apolinar Moscote,
introduces Macondo not only to “parliamentary democracy” but also to “the cynical
manipulation of democratic institutions, the first elections being rigged to ensure the victory
of the government party.”616 Although the voting seems to be unquestionably free, the
magistrate manipulates the first elections in Macondo:
At four in the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the
closing of the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box
with a label crossed by his signature. That night, while he played
dominoes with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to break the seal in
order to count the votes. There were almost as many red ballots as
blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and made up the
difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a new
label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to the capital
of the province. “The Liberals will go to war,” Aureliano said. 617
Aureliano’s clairvoyance comes true in a very short time. This manipulation leads to a chain
of civil wars in which Aureliano becomes a passionate participant on the side of the Liberal
Party and eventually turns into a legendary hero as Colonel Aureliano Buendía. As the first
person to be born in Macondo, Aureliano Buendía, with his strong sense for justice and
615
Janes, “Liberals,” 134.
Higgins, 41-42.
617
García Márquez, Solitude, 96.
616
179
deadly solitude, becomes the symbol of the war: “Colonel Aureliano Buendía embodies the
whole of Liberal history in the period. He is a synthesis of the rebellion, with its leaders, its
ideals and its failures. On the other hand, the colonel is the war.”618. Aureliano’s wars during
twenty years correspond not only to the wars of the nineteenth century but also to the twenty
years of La Violencia, a wave of violence in Colombia from the Bogotazo in 1948 to around
1964, which was also experienced by García Márquez himself.
In García Márquez’s novel, Aureliano Buendía is the the most complex and
melancholic character as well as being “the novel’s dark conscience.”619 The character
Aureliano alludes not only to García Márquez and his grandfather Colonel Nicolás Márquez,
who fought for the Liberal army in the War of a Thousand Days, but also General Rafael
Uribe Uribe, the commander of the Liberals in the same war. As suggested by Martin, García
Márquez, first of all, draws his self-portrait in this character:
[Aureliano] is born in March, like García Márquez; born, moreover,
with his eyes open, eyes which gaze around that house the moment he
emerges from the womb, as little Gabito’s were said to have done.
From early childhood he is clairvoyant, just as Gabito is reputed to be
in his family. He falls in love with a little girl (and marries her before
she reaches puberty); but after her death he is “incapable of love” and
acts only out of “sinful pride.” Though capable of great empathy and
even kindness as a young man (and though a writer of poetry – which
later embarrasses him), Aureliano is solitary egocentric and ruthless;
nothing can stand in the way of his personal ambition. 620
618
Lucila Inés Mena, quoted in Wood, “Aureliano’s Smile,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 80.
619
Wood, “Aureliano’s Smile,” 88.
620
Martin, A Life, 306-07.
180
Moreover, like García Márquez’s grandfather, the character Aureliano has the rank
“colonel.” Especially after the Treaty of Neerlandia, he spends his time in his workshop in
Macondo manufacturing little gold fish. He has seventeen sons by seventeen different
women during the war, like Colonel Márquez, who had many illegitimate children during his
life-time. Thus, through Aureliano, García Márquez both criticizes himself for his lifelong
ambitions and enlivens the memories of his grandfather. According to Wood, what makes
this character so important is Aureliano’s resemblance to General Rafael Uribe Uribe (18591914), a Colombian lawyer and general in the Liberal army. Aureliano, described as a bony
man with Tartar cheekbones, follows the model of the general not only in his physical
appearance but also in his career and power: “Uribe fought in various insurrections, all
abortive, starting as early as 1876; was elected to the House of Representatives; waged the
long war; signed the Peace of Neerlandia; was assassinated in 1914 – unlike Aureliano, who
dies quietly at home on a day when the circus comes to town.”621 Sharing Wood’s ideas,
Bell-Villada also suggests that General Uribe was the model for the character Aureliano:
Like Aureliano Buendía, Uribe Uribe was born on a rainy day, won no
military victories throughout his long career, spearheaded revolts even
when the official party line was antiwar, sparked rebellions on the
Atlantic coast when hostilities had all but ceased, was repudiated as
“irresponsible” by the Liberal directorate, traveled to Central America
in search of support from Liberal governments there, served more than
one jail sentence, was publicly paraded on the city streets during one
of his arrests, enjoyed good personal relations with a Conservative
general, and officially capitulated at the Treaty of Neerlandia (named
after a banana plantation then owned by a Dutchman). 622
621
622
Wood, “Aureliano’s Smile,” 80.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 103.
181
Wood’s and Bell-Villada’s contentions seem to be right because Aureliano, reminiscent of
General Uribe, is described in One Hundred Years of Solitude as follows:
Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and
he lost them all. […] He survived fourteen attempts on his life,
seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. […] He refused the Order
of Merit, which the President of the Republic awarded him. He rose to
be Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces, with jurisdiction
and command from one border to the other, and the man most feared
by the government, but he never let himself be photographed. He
declined the lifetime pension offered him after the war and until old
age he made his living from the little gold fishes that he manufactured
in his workshop in Macondo. Although he always fought at the head
of his men, the only wound that he received was the one he gave
himself after signing the Treaty of Neerlandia, which put an end to
almost twenty years of civil war. He shot himself in the chest with a
pistol and the bullet came out through his back without damaging any
vital organ. The only thing left of all that was a street that bore his
name in Macondo.623
Before his military career starts, Aureliano seems to have no understanding of the
political issues in Macondo. He has no idea about the distinction between the Liberals and
the Conservatives and he can never understand “how people arrived at the extreme of
waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand.” Macondo is a town with no
political passions and, for Aureliano, it is an exaggeration to bring six soldiers to the town
for the elections. He has to take some schematic lessons from his father-in-law. In the
following passage, Don Apolinar Moscote explains the differences between the Liberals and
623
García Márquez, Solitude, 103.
182
the Conservatives to Aureliano. He represents his “political” position as an orthodox one,
while he introduces the Liberals as “masons”:
The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang
priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights
of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut
the country up into a federal system that would take power away from
the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had
received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of
public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith
of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to
permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities. 624
After the rigged elections in Macondo, Aureliano comes to realize that the
Conservatives are tricky and he feels closer to the Liberals: “If I have to be something I’ll be
a Liberal.” However, Aureliano rejects the ideological fanaticism reflected through Dr.
Alirio Noguera, a terrorist, fugitive, and protestor, who carries out a campaign of
provocation claiming that the only effective way is violence and wishes to “liquidate the
functionaries of the regime along with their respective families, especially the children, in
order to exterminate Conservatism at its roots.”625 Aureliano condemns extremism claiming
that Dr. Noguera is not a Liberal but a butcher. After witnessing the violence supported by
the government during the Martial law, he starts his career. He liberates Macondo from the
terror of the garrison, and together with his twenty-one men, embarks on guerrilla warfare
joining the forces of General Victorio Medina.
In the eighth chapter of the novel, owing to the Conservative general José Raquel
Moncada’s efforts, Macondo becomes a municipality. General Moncada is a reference to an
624
625
García Márquez, Solitude, 95.
García Márquez, Solitude, 96-99.
183
historical character: the Conservative General Pedro Nel Ospina, who had been a friend of
Uribe Uribe. Moncada, the first mayor of Macondo, is introduced as an antimilitarist. He
works hard to bring peace to Macondo. Moncada wears civilian clothes. He does not want
soldiers in Macondo, thus, he introduces unarmed policemen to the town. He applies the
amnesty laws, helps not only the Conservatives but also the Liberals and thus creates an
atmosphere of peace and confidence in Macondo. People start to think that the war was “an
absurd nightmare of the past.” As a result of his efforts, his government becomes the best
Macondo has ever had. In spite of their political opposition, Aureliano and Moncada become
“great friends” and come “to think about the possibility of coordinating the popular elements
of both parties, doing away with the influence of the military men and professional
politicians, and setting up a humanitarian regime that would take the best from each
doctrine.”626
The destructive effects of power and fanaticism/ extremism are explicitly
demonstrated when Aureliano gets stuck in the same fanaticism. The emptiness and vicious
circle of the eternal war blinds his sentiments. The intoxication of power destroys his
humanity. He turns into a tyrant. During chapters 8-9, García Márquez uses Aureliano to
discuss the theme of dictatorship as well as the themes of the futility of war and the
dangerous effects of war. Dictatorship has been one of the main political problems in Latin
America: “Where other countries have their saints, martyrs, or conquistadors, we have our
dictators. I feel that the dictator is a product of ourselves, of our Caribbean culture.”627 Thus,
by the character Aureliano, García Márquez searches the psychology of a tyrant and tells
how a tyrant loses his direction step by step. In chapter eight of the novel, intoxicated by his
victories, Aureliano has General Moncada executed, forgetting their promise to humanize the
626
627
García Márquez, Solitude, 145-46.
García Márquez, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Bell-Villada, 21.
184
war. He orders that “no one should come closer than ten feet, not even Úrsula,”628 and starts
to live “in the center of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and
which only he could enter”629 and with his hand always on his pistol. As Aureliano has
ended up as bad as the military after fighting against them and hating them so much,
Moncada, just before his execution, condemns his friend, saying that “no ideal in life is
worth that much baseness” and warns his friend that he will be “the most despotic and
bloody dictator”630 in history if he goes on in this way. A second warning for Aureliano
comes from his old comrade, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez: “Watch out for your heart,
Aureliano, […] You’re rotting alive.” When Colonel Gerineldo Márquez is condemned to
death by Aureliano just because they have different ideas on peace terms, Úrsula gets mad,
swears to kill Aureliano with her own hands if he kills Márquez, and concludes “It’s the
same as if you’d been born with the tail of a pig,” which clearly demonstrates that Aureliano
has lost all direction and his dictatorship has thoroughly dehumanized him. However,
Aureliano’s conscience and strong sense of justice aid him to understand that he is “lost in
the solitude of his immense power” and “all [they are] fighting for is power.” For two years
Aureliano, “alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany
him until death,” struggles to bring the war to an end: “He was never a greater soldier than at
that time” because he fights not for “abstract ideals”, not for power, not for “slogans that
politicians could twist left and right according to the circumstances” 631 but only for regaining
his humanity.
After the independence of Latin America, the ruling élite of Colombia was largely
composed of “a neo-feudal, patriarchal, landowning oligarchy which placed a high value on
(Iberian) tradition”; however, in the nineteenth century, the landowning oligarchy started to
628
García Márquez, Solitude, 155.
García Márquez, Solitude, 165.
630
García Márquez, Solitude, 159.
631
García Márquez, Solitude, 165-70.
629
185
leave its place to “the landowning élite politically and economically inspired by European
liberalism, a class allied with the typical bourgeoisie.”632 In the episode related to another
tyrant in the novel, Arcadio Buendía, García Márquez reveals the socioeconomic structure of
the county explained above and also proves that the enmity between the Liberals and the
Conservatives is ridiculous. These opposite groups epitomize the same class interests in
Macondo:
The irony is that, despite their ideological differences, both parties are
dominated by the same privileged élite, and in practice the distinction
between them ultimately becomes blurred, just as the houses in
Macondo take on an indeterminate color as a result of being
constantly repainted red or blue according to which group is in
control. In power the Liberals commit the same abuses as the
Conservatives.633
Arcadio Buendía, Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s nephew, becomes the ruler of
Macondo while Aureliano leaves Macondo to join the guerrillas. In a short time, Arcadio
becomes the most brutal ruler that the town’s people have ever experienced. His rule during
eleven months is characterized by a general atmosphere of fear, endless decrees, and
unjustified executions. Watching the despotism of Arcadio’s rule, the Conservative Apolinar
Moscote ironically comments, “this is the Liberal paradise.”634 Furthermore, Arcadio makes
an agreement with his father, the second José Arcadio. According to the deal, Arcadio
legitimizes José Arcadio’s title to lands usurped by him, in exchange for the right to collect
taxes. This deal is a good example of the traditional pattern of oligarchic domination. Later
on, the title will also be recognized by the Conservative government letting José Arcadio “to
632
Gutiérrez Mouat, 20.
Higgins, 42.
634
García Márquez, Solitude, 105.
633
186
profit from the usurped lands.”635 During the most critical moments of the war, while dealing
with the radical reforms in Macondo, Aureliano Buendía discovers that “the Liberal
landowners, who had supported the revolution in the beginning, had made secret alliances
with the Conservative landowners in order to stop the revision of property titles.” 636 In
addition, when a commission of six lawyers, sent to Macondo by the Liberal Party, want
Aureliano to “renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of the
Liberal landowners,” to renounce “the fight against clerical influence in order to obtain the
support of the Catholic masses” and “the aim of equal rights for natural and illegitimate
children in order to preserve the integrity of the home,”637 he completely understands that
they are fighting only for power. The quotations above prove that what motivates people, no
matter whether they are Liberals or Conservatives, is not their political commitments to the
political parties but their personal and class interests. For García Márquez, this is the reason
for the failure of Macondo in the consolidation of a nation-state. He criticizes society and its
oligarchic domination and condemns the Macondones’ opportunism and fraud.
Chapters 5-9 of García Márquez’s novel reveal “the consolidation of the Colombian
nation-state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century” 638 and the difficulties experienced
during the process of consolidation. In these chapters, the novel stresses the emptiness and
meaninglessness of the war and the shortcomings of the two political parties especially
through the character Aureliano. As indicated by Wood, “Aureliano’s position is not a
political one at all, but a moral response to a political world.”639 Through this character,
García Márquez wants to discuss the futility of the war, violence, and bloodshed and to give
a moral lesson on politics. The war is reflected as a “horrible game” not to be taken very
seriously. Although he has leftish liberal ideas, García Márquez meticulously keeps his
635
García Márquez, Solitude, 131.
García Márquez, Solitude, 164.
637
García Márquez, Solitude, 167-68.
638
García Márquez, Solitude, 18.
639
Wood, “Aureliano’s Smile,” 82.
636
187
political objectivity while reflecting the enmity and conflicts between the Liberals and the
Conservatives. As discussed before, sometimes dishonest Conservatives, such as Don
Apolinar Moscote, practice electoral deception, and sometimes agitator-terrorist Liberals,
such as Alirio Noguera, teach assassination to the young as a nationalistic duty. Thus, García
Márquez demonstrates the shortcomings of both parties. The hostility between the Liberals
and the Conservatives is denounced as being absurd and meaningless because they share a
lot in common: “The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the
Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.”640 The Liberals and
Conservatives behave in the same way whenever they are in power, and they endeavor just
for power and personal interests. García Márquez, as a leftist liberal, intensely criticizes the
deficiencies of the Liberals and highlights that liberalism has failed in Macondo (in
Colombia and Latin America) because of opportunism, the lack of political consciousness,
the lack of an economic base, or of strongly-rooted liberal ethics. While the guerilla forces
struggle in “a war with no future” 641, the Liberal party leaders beg for seats in congress. In
this futile war, most people do not even know why they are fighting. This unconsciousness
gives way to an ambiguity in the behavior of the so-called Liberals and Conservatives. For
instance, when Aureliano orders the restoration of the church destroyed by the Conservative
army, Father Nicanor feels surprised: “This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ
destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt,”642 and when Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
gives her a prayer book, Amaranta thinks: “How strange men are, […] They spend their lives
fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts.”643 Moreover, showing that
“fanaticism leads extremists on both sides to forget their common humanity,”644 García
Márquez criticizes fanaticism. He also investigates the psychology of a dictator through
640
García Márquez, Solitude, 241-42.
García Márquez, Solitude, 135.
642
García Márquez, Solitude, 134.
643
García Márquez, Solitude, 162.
644
Higgins, 42.
641
188
Aureliano, considers dictatorship to be the primary cause of dehumanization, denounces
totalitarian regimes, and shows the appropriate ways to avoid dictatorship and
totalitarianism.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, according to James Higgins, “the Spanish colonial
heritage is identified as one of the principal factors in Latin America’s continuing
underdevelopment.”645 For Higgins, the most important example in the novel to prove his
contention is the character Fernanda del Carpio, whose name is a parodic echo of Bernardo
del Carpio, “the second greatest medieval Spanish hero after the Cid.”646 In the episode of
the carnival in the tenth chapter of the novel, Fernanda, Aureliano Segundo’s wife, is
introduced as the beauty queen who has been brought to Macondo “with the promise of
naming her Queen of Madagascar”:647
Fernanda was a woman who was lost in the world. She had been born
and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on
ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the
cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the
afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs,
the sun was never seen.648
Fernanda is from a gloomy and ghostly viceregal town, which seems to be Zipaquirá. With
its early-eighteenth-century cathedral and main square, Zipaquirá is a small colonial town
where García Márquez attended the Liceo. Fernanda exemplifies “the Castilian
traditionalism of the cachacos, the inhabitants of the cities of the Colombian altiplano, and,
beyond that, a whole set of values and attitudes that Latin America has inherited from
645
Higgins, 41.
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 117.
647
García Márquez, Solitude, 201.
648
García Márquez, Solitude, 205.
646
189
Spain.”649 Thus, as well as postcolonial attributions, Fernanda becomes a useful vehicle for
García Márquez to discuss the regional sentiments such as the difference between costeños
and cachacos. Cachacos, the peoples of Bogotá and neighboring areas, are “city dwellers,
recipients of the Old Spanish traditions, institutions, wealth, and culture.”650 In contrast,
costeños, a term meaning “coastals,” are the peoples of Caribbean Colombia. Costeños,
being “region-proud,” “like setting themselves off from what they see as those cold, stiff,
haughty Bogotá dwellers, whom they call cachacos.”651
As a cachaco, Fernanda del Carpio is depicted as being cold, arrogant, bigoted, and
snobbish. She had been brought up with the “delusions of grandeur” and the longing for “the
splendor of the past.” She does “her duty in a gold pot with the family crest on it” and speaks
with distinctive highland accent. She is firmly bound to her religion and old traditions. The
traditions, which are no longer followed by anyone, are strictly applied by Fernanda, “who
had inherited them from her parents and kept them defined and catalogued for every
occasion.” She never gives up “her drive to impose the customs of her ancestors” upon the
members of the Buendía family. She creates a “circle of rigidity” in the house, changing the
simplest acts of daily life into “a kind of high mass.”652 She accuses her in-laws of
misunderstanding “the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with
death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium of funeral conventions.”653 As she
cannot understand “the character of a community that had nothing to do with that of her
parents,”654 she can never incorporate into the family. Her snobbish father sends the statues
of life-size saints as Christmas gifts to Macondo. The gifts are seen as “the last remains of
649
Higgins, 41.
Pelayo, 8.
651
Martin, A Life, 18.
652
García Márquez, Solitude, 205-11.
653
García Márquez, Solitude, 276-77.
654
García Márquez, Solitude, 254.
650
190
his lordly inheritance” and, for Aureliano Segundo, as the “family cemetery.”655 As if to
prove his idea, Fernanda’s father finally sends his own corpse in a box. What all the
heirlooms sent from the highlands symbolize is, according to Higgins, “an outmoded,
traditionalist mentality that prevents Latin America from coming to terms with the modern
world.”656 Moreover, when Macondo is invaded by the lower-class nouveau-riches during
the heydays of the banana company, Fernanda looks down upon the newcomers. For her,
“proper people were those who had nothing to do with the banana company.”657 According
to Higgins, her disdain should be taken as “an attitude that echoes the response of Spanish
American intellectuals of the Arielist generation to North American expansionism.”658
The regional sentiments in Colombia are reflected through the responses of the family
members to Fernanda. Her strict traditionalism and extremism is made fun of by both her
husband and her in-laws: Colonel Aureliano Buendía protests that she is changing them into
“people of quality” and adds that “at this rate [they will] end up fighting against the
Conservative regime again, but this time to install a king in its place.” Úrsula wants her to
“sell the gold chamberpot to Colonel Aureliano Buendía so that he could convert it into little
fishes.” Amaranta uses a nonsense language – “Thifisif […] ifisif onefos ofosif thofosif
whosufu cantantant statantand thefesef smufumellu ofosif therisir owfisown shifisifit” –
when she wants to say Fernanda is “one of those people who mix up their ass and their
ashes.”659 In her four-page tirade, which is a parody of ornate Spanish rhetoric, Fernanda, as
a cachaco, grumbles that the members of the Buendía family, as costeños, have always
regarded her as “a nuisance, an old rag, a booby painted on the wall” and called her “church
mouse,” “Pharisee,” and “crafty.” She most resents that “José Arcadio Segundo said that the
damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck-up highlander, […] a
655
García Márquez, Solitude, 213.
Higgins, 41.
657
García Márquez, Solitude, 253.
658
Higgins, 41.
659
García Márquez, Solitude, 210-12.
656
191
bossy highlander, […] a highlander daughter of evil spirit of the same stripe as the
highlanders the government sent to kill workers.”660 This quotation shows how the costeños
consider the cachacos. The highlanders from the capital are conceived to be the symbols of
the Conservatives and thus, the source and initiators of social and political conflicts.
Chapters twelve to sixteen of the novel reflect the theme of proletarian struggle in
Colombia. These chapters focus on the events during the banana boom and the banana strike
in Macondo. The banana company’s oppression on Macondo and its inhabitants both
economically and politically, the strike by the workers, and the eventual massacre of workers
are firmly based on actual historical events in Colombia during 1900-1928.
The Banana Zone of Colombia is situated “south of Santa Marta, between the Ciénaga
Grande and the Magdalena River to the west, the Caribbean or Atlantic Ocean to the north,
and the great swamp and the Sierra Nevada, whose peaks are called Columbus and Bolívar,
to the east.”661 At the end of the nineteenth century, the United Fruit Company, a North
American company which was later known as Chiquita International, started to operate in
the Banana Zone. The company established banana plantations in the region and “held a
virtual monopoly over the banana trade in parts of Central and South America during the
early part of the twentieth century.”662 Although their sale to world markets was
monopolized by the United Fruit Company, many Colombian farmers were engaged in
growing bananas in the region. During the early years of the twentieth century, as claimed by
Mario Vargas Llosa, “many fortunes grew under the shade of banana trees.”663 Many places
in the Zone flourished very quickly. As a result of the booming economy, workers not only
from different parts of Colombia, but also from South America and North America, the
Caribbean, Europe, the Middle and Far East rushed into the Zone, who would later be called
660
García Márquez, Solitude, 323-24.
Martin, A Life, 19.
662
Darraj, 12.
663
Llosa, 6.
661
192
“leaf-trash” by García Márquez in his first novel Leaf Storm (1955). The Zone enjoyed
prosperity created by the banana boom. However, the UFC developed rapidly to become “a
state-in-state and the de facto power” in the Zone: “In addition to the best lands, United had
its own railroads, general stores, and telegraph systems; with its network of canals it
monopolized irrigation; and its water practices violated Colombia’s Civil Code.”664 The
workers of the UFC were unhappy “with abusive treatment by foreign management, payment
in meaningless company scrip, and subhuman living conditions that contrasted so glaringly
with the palatial luxury in which the foreign management lived.”665
The period between 1918 to 1928 is known as “heroic unionism” 666 in Colombia,
because the proletariat working in banana plantations and in railway and shipping companies
were organized into unions and frequently went on strikes demanding better working
conditions, more payment, accident insurance, and shorter working hours. In this period, the
Liberals adapted anti-imperialist policies, whereas Conservative governments were trying to
construct friendly relationship with the United States. The massacre of the banana workers of
the United Fruit Company, which is also known as the Santa Marta Massacre, in the town of
Ciénaga, thirty miles north of Garcia Marquez’s birthplace Aracataca, in December 1928
became a turning point in the history of Colombia. In October 1928, the banana workers
went on a strike declared by a union guided by the Revolutionary Socialist Party. When the
American manager of the UFC informed the capital about the strike, General Carlos Cortés
Vargas was sent to the region to provide public order by the government of Conservative
President Miguel Abadía Méndez:
On December 5, 1928, some two thousand to four thousand strikers
gathered at the railway station of Ciénaga, with the intention of
664
Bell-Villada, “Banana Strike and Military Massacre,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 133.
665
LaRosa and Mejía, 82-83.
666
Safford and Palacios, 280.
193
marching to Santa Marta. The government declared a state of siege
and imposed a curfew on the region. Troops arrived in Ciénaga with
orders to disperse the workers. At 1:30 A.M. on December 6, the army
commander read to the strikers the state of siege decree and the
curfew order and ordered them to disperse in minutes. The strikers
responded with “vivas” for Colombia, the strike, and the Colombian
army. The bloodpath that followed came to be known as the
“massacre of the banana plantations.”667
In García Márquez’s novel, as soon as the period of the civil wars comes to an end in
Macondo, the period of neocolonial domination starts. At the very beginning of the novel,
José Arcadio Buendía imagines a modern world “where all one had to do was sprinkle some
magic liquid on the ground and the plants would bear fruit whenever a man wished, and
where all manner of instruments against pain were sold at bargain prices.”668 According to
Higgins, “what he is voicing, in effect, is a constant of Latin American thought since
Independence, the aspiration to ‘modernize’ on the model of the advanced industrial nations
in order to achieve a similar level of development.”669 José Arcadio’s dream comes true with
the arrival of industrial revolution – steam power, railroad, train, electricity, cinema, radio,
cylinder phonographs, automobile and the banana company – which heralds the period of
modernization. However, modernization comes from the outside. With the rise of
modernization, Macondo is opened up to foreign capital, that is to say, to neocolonialism.
Neocolonialism, supported by Western science, eventually leads to the exploitation of the
Macondones.
Proving Jameson’s contention that “magic realism depends on a content which betrays
the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological
667
Safford and Palacios, 281.
García Márquez, Solitude, 13-14.
669
Higgins, 43.
668
194
features,”670 García Márquez’s magical realism employs “the banana plague” to be able to
criticize the modern plague of industrialization and neocolonial imperialism:
In fact, the story of the later Macondo illustrates Latin America’s
neocolonial status as an economic dependency of international capital,
particularly North American. No sooner than Macondo embarked on a
phase of autonomous economic development than it falls under the
domination of North American capital and, incorporated into the
world economy as a source of primary products, becomes subject to
cycles of boom and recession determined by the fluctuations of the
international market.671
The fable of the banana plague is introduced in the twelfth chapter of the novel. The
railroad is constructed in Macondo thanks to the efforts of Aureliano Triste, who is one of
Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s seventeen illegitimate sons. According to Aureliano Triste,
who starts an ice-production business, the railroad must be brought to Macondo “not only for
the modernization of his business but to link the town with the rest of the world.”672 The
railway, “as an effective and historically precedented vehicle for neocolonial imperialism,”
becomes “the catalyst for the banana plague.”673 The train brings the fruit company, and then
the American imperialism/ capitalism and finally the “biblical hurricane” 674 to Macondo.
One day, the train brings a new guest to town: Mr. Herbert. After eating one of the bananas
of Macondo, Mr. Herbert brings other gringos to the town. As no one can understand why
they have come to Macondo, they cause “a colossal disturbance” in town. The “tumultuous
and intemperate invasion” of Macondo by these gringos starts radical changes in Macondo.
Everything happens so fast that the town-dwellers cannot find time to think about the
670
Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 311.
Higgins, 43.
672
García Márquez, Solitude, 221.
673
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
674
García Márquez, Solitude, 416.
671
195
relation between their experiences of the civil war and this “plebeian invasion.” The invader
gringos build their own wooden houses and separate their section from Macondo by a metal
fence, as if to construct an apartheid system. Moreover, “endowed with means that had been
reserved for Divine Providence in former times, they changed the pattern of the rains,
accelerated the cycle of the harvest, and moved the river from where it had always been and
put it with its white stones and icy currents on the other side of the town, behind the
cemetery.”675 According to Dean Irvine, the invasion of Macondo by the gringos should be
considered “a recolonization of colonial space.” Irvine adds that “the invasion of Macondo,
the construction of encampments, the rerouting of the river, and the magical alteration of
meteorological and seasonal cycles thus signify the inscription of neocolonial imperialism on
an already colonial location”:
Just as the great inventions, the products of capitalist industrialization
and ideology, arrive by rail, so too do the banana company and the
banana plague, the producers and products of neocolonial imperialism
and its ideology. They invade Macondo by the same route. The
colonization of “the enchanted region,” the barrier isolating the town
from the industrial world, thus signifies the exposure of Macondo and
its inhabitants to a particular ideological strain of neocolonial
imperialism, that is, the banana plague…The invasion and settlement,
exploration and mapping, and later martial government of Macondo
by the banana company and its plebeian workers work through the
ideology and militant practice of colonial imperialism, though in the
modern guise of multinational industrial capitalism.676
675
676
García Márquez, Solitude, 227-28.
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
196
A year after the arrival of the banana company, there occur changes in the
administration system of Macondo. After the armistice of Neerlandia, Macondo has been
administrated by the Conservative mayors. However, as soon as the banana company arrives,
“the local functionaries [are] replaced by dictatorial foreigners,” and “the old policemen [are]
replaced by hired assassins with machetes.” Colonel Aureliano Buendía revolts against the
neocolonial hegemony and decides to arm his illegitimate sons to “get rid of these shitty
gringos”677 and to “start a mortal conflagration that would wipe out all vestiges of a regime
of corruption and scandal backed by the foreign invader,”678 which offers a postcolonial
resistance. However, he cannot realize his aim “for the reason that his ideological position,
as a militant civil revolutionary, is virtually powerless against the multinational and
anonymous forces backing the new colonizer, the banana company.”679 His failure arises
from the “naturalization” of “the neocolonial imperialist ideology of multinational industrial
capitalism, symbolized by the banana company”680 by the members of the Buendía family:
The banana fever had calmed down. The old inhabitants of Macondo
found themselves surrounded by newcomers and working hard to
cling to their precarious resources of times gone by, but comforted in
any case by the sense that they had survived a shipwreck. In the house
they still had guests for lunch and the old routine was never really set
up again until the banana company left years later.681
Although it seems that it is the Buendía family that naturalizes the neocolonial
ideology in their house, it is again one of the members of the same family who resists the
sociopolitical corruption and inequality suggested by the banana plague and who manages to
put an end to this notorious plague. José Arcadio Segundo, a foreman of the banana
677
García Márquez, Solitude, 237-38.
García Márquez, Solitude, 243.
679
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
680
Irvine, GALE| H1420031435.
681
García Márquez, Solitude, 252.
678
197
company, stimulates the workers of the company and becomes one of the forerunners during
the banana strike.
In the episode of the banana plague, the character Aureliano Segundo, the twin of
José Arcadio Segundo, plays a great role to explain the economic dependency of Latin
America to North America. During the banana boom, Aureliano Segundo acquires a great
wealth because of the magical fertility of his livestock. He often invites people around to his
endless parties. He and his guests fully enjoy wealth. This suggests that Macondo’s
prosperity is “due not to any real economic development” introduced by the banana
company, “but to the amazing richness of the region’s natural resources and to international
demand for those resources.”682 However, this prosperity is brought to an end by the banana
company because Aureliano Segundo loses his animals in “the banana company
hurricane.”683 It is the same hurricane unleashed by Mr. Brown, the head of the banana
company, which causes the banana production to stop in Macondo. According to Higgins,
“the extent to which the Latin American economy is manipulated by foreign capital is
indicated by the suggestion that the crisis was deliberately engineered by the company,
whose directors were so powerful that they were able to control the weather.”684 When
Aureliano Segundo starts to run a lottery to be able to earn his keep, the people of Macondo
make fun of him and call him “Mr. Divine Providence right to his face.”685 Thus, Aureliano
Segundo becomes the symbol of “Latin America, whose economic role in the world is
passively to wait for the stroke of good fortune that will bring it another period of
prosperity.”686
The effects of the banana boom are not only economical but also political. Macondo
turns into a colony whose workforce is exploited by the banana company. It starts to be
682
Higgins, 43.
García Márquez, Solitude, 331.
684
Higgins, 44.
685
García Márquez, Solitude, 351.
686
Higgins, 44.
683
198
governed by the American managers of the company guarded by hired assassins in
policemen uniforms and armed with machetes. 687 The fifteenth chapter of the novel follows
the actual events of the banana strike and the Santa Marta massacre almost day by day. It
contains specific details of the real historical event. Thus García Márquez reconstructs
history. In Macondo, the workers of the company go on a strike while the company always
evades negotiations. Both in the actual historical event and in the novel, the workers protest
awful living and working conditions and the lack of payment in money but in scrip valid
only in the company commissaries. The American manager of the company, Mr. Brown,
escapes from Macondo, as did the historical manager Thomas Bradshaw 688 in the actual
banana strike. The company men pursue many maneuvers to avoid negotiations. The
workers go to court. However, the “sleight-of-hand” lawyers prove that “the demands of the
workers lack validity because “the banana company did not have, never had had, and never
would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and
occasional basis,” as a result of which the court decides “in solemn decrees that the workers
did not exist.” To avoid the labor legislation of Colombia and tax liability, the historical UFC
hired its workers through sub-suppliers and thus seemed to keep no workers on its payroll.
As soon as the strike breaks out in Macondo, the government sends its troops and declares a
state of siege. More than three thousand people gather in front of the station in Macondo. A
lieutenant reads “Decree No. 4 of the civil and military leader of the province”, which has
been signed by General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his secretary, Major Enrique García
Isaza”689 and in which the strikers are declared a “bunch of hoodlums” and the army is
authorized to kill. As seen in the quotation, García Márquez provides a direct reference to the
historical Decree and the generals in the Santa Marta Massacre. After giving five minutes to
the crowd to withdraw, the army starts gunfire. As indicated by Bell-Villada, in the real
687
García Márquez, Solitude, 237.
Bell-Villada, “Banana Strike,” 133.
689
García Márquez, Solitude, 301-04.
688
199
historical event, “the proprietor of a nearby hotel heard someone screaming “¡AY MI
MADRE!” [a common Spanish exclamation, roughly equivalent to “Oh my God!”690], which
is repronounced as “Aaaagh Mother”691 in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many people die
in the fusillade. In the actual event, it was officially reported that “there were nine dead and
three wounded.”692 The discussion on the total number of the slaughtered people still goes
on:
On 19 May 1929 El Espectador of Bogota said there were “more than
a thousand” dead. Likewise the US representative in Bogota, Jefferson
Caffery, said in a letter dated 15 January 1929, but not released until
many years later, that, according to Thomas Bradshaw, Managing
Director of the UFC, there were “more than a thousand dead.” (In
1955 the then Vice-President of the UFC would tell a researcher that
410 were killed in the massacre and more than a thousand in the
following weeks.) The statistics are still discussed and bitterly
disputed to this day.693
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the army slays “three thousand four hundred eight” 694
people in the banana strike. This total has been taken at face value by García Márquez’s
readers. Bell-Villada states that, after the massacre, “several witnesses reported having seen
the bodies thrown into trucks, which then headed toward the sea.”695 Thus, both in the
historical event and in the novel, more than three thousand corpses are loaded into a very
long train and “thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”696 In sum, reflecting the real
690
Bell-Villada, “Banana Strike,” 134.
García Márquez, Solitude, 305.
692
Martin, A Life, 42.
693
Martin, A Life, 42.
694
García Márquez, Solitude, 335.
695
Bell-Villada, “Banana Strike,” 134.
696
García Márquez, Solitude, 307.
691
200
historical events meticulously, the episode of the banana massacre demonstrates “the process
whereby a dominant power brutalizes a subordinate and determines its identity.”697
Although José Arcadio Segundo witnesses and tells the details of “how the army had
machine-gunned more than three thousand workers penned up by the station and how they
loaded the bodies onto a two-hundred-car train and threw them into the sea,”698 he cannot
make anybody in Macondo believe himself. Everybody in Macondo, even ordinary
Macondones, deny to have witnessed such a massacre. The military also denies it “even to
the relatives of the victims” saying that “you must have been dreaming,” […] “Nothing has
happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a
happy town.”699 The announcement clearly shows “the discrepancy between ‘reality’ or
‘history’ on the one hand, and its official versions on the other.”700 The history of Macondo
is interpreted by other people, to wit, by the colonists and the Macondones are made to live
the official version of reality, to wit, “the unreality.” However, in this event, not only the
dominant power but also the Macondones are to be blamed. As drawn from the quotations,
the Macondones are depicted as deprived of their social memory. The thousands of victims
of the massacre can easily be wiped from their memory. At this point, the banana plague and
the insomnia plague are combined together in terms of their consequences: both plagues
cause the loss of memory. Moreover, the insomnia plague causes the suppression and
destruction of Indian history whereas the banana plague causes the obliteration of the
working class. Macondo is depicted as a place of forgetfulness where people can never learn
anything from their past experiences. Through the Macondones, García Márquez criticizes
697
John Krapp, “Apathy and the Politics of Identity: García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Contemporary Cultural Criticism,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel
García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude, ed. Bloom, new edition (New York: Infobase,
2009), 182.
698
García Márquez, Solitude, 348.
699
García Márquez, Solitude, 310.
700
André Brink, “Making and Unmaking. Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude,”
in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of
Solitude, ed. Bloom, new edition (New York: Infobase, 2009), 152.
201
the peoples of Latin America for their forgetfulness and their lack of historical
consciousness. He emphasizes that, because of the lack of historical consciousness, Latin
America is regarded as “an old land where nothing new takes place, and where what is
reproduced are merely the personal variants of many histories now long forgotten.”701 And
with his novel he reconstructs the lost past and hence attempts to develop not only
Colombian but Latin American historical consciousness.
Just as José Arcadio Segundo, the character Aureliano Babilonia is also important to
reflect the theme of proletarian struggle. For this reason, his arrival in Macondo is shown as
the starting point of the events that will provide its eventual collapse: “The events that would
deal Macondo its fatal blow were just showing themselves when they brought Meme
Buendía’s son home.”702 Meme’s son, Aureliano, is an illegitimate son. His father Mauricio
Babilonia, whose surname provides a reference to the corrupt ancient city, works as “an
apprentice mechanic in the banana company garage.”703 The novel provides a direct
connection between his surname and the social class he represents. As his surname suggests,
the working class starts the events that lead to the destruction of Macondo. Mauricio is
looked down upon by the aristocratic Fernanda, who prohibits her daughter Meme’s
friendship to him. As the illegitimate son of Mauricio Babilonia, Aureliano is taught by José
Arcadio Segundo, a trade union leader:
He taught little Aureliano how to read and write, initiated him in the
study of the parchments, and he inculcated him with such a personal
interpretation of what the banana company had meant to Macondo that
many years later, when Aureliano became part of the world, one
would have thought that he was telling a hallucinated version, because
701
Zavala, 119.
García Márquez, Solitude, 293.
703
García Márquez, Solitude, 285.
702
202
it was radically opposed to the false one that historians had created
and consecrated in the schoolbooks.704
As seen in the quotation, although the rain that is started by the banana company and
that lasts four years, eleven months and two days deletes all the memory and thus history,
there are still two people, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Babilonia, who remember
well what happened in the past. They keep the memory alive although no one else believes
or remembers “that Colonel Aureliano Buendía fought thirty-two civil wars and lost them
all, […] that the army hemmed in and machine-gunned three thousand workers and that their
bodies were carried off to be thrown into the sea on a train with two hundred cars.”705
In the nineteenth chapter of the novel, Aureliano Babilonia’s friendship with Álvaro,
Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel is also noteworthy. The character Gabriel directly alludes to
García Márquez himself. Among the four, Aureliano feels closer to Gabriel as he is the only
one who believes the reality of Colonel Aureliano Buendía: “Aureliano and Gabriel were
linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in and which had
affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a
world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained.”706 In his letters sent from
Barcelona, the wise Catalan, who has lost “his marvelous sense of unreality” in Europe,
advises the five friends to leave Macondo and to remember “that the past was a lie, that
memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered.”707 His words
can be taken as an encouragement for Latin Americans to understand the continent’s unreal
world whose facts have been slanted by the West.
At the end of the novel, Aureliano Babilonia, educated by José Arcadio, becomes the
one who solves the Melquíades’ parchments and learns the history of his family. He
704
García Márquez, Solitude, 348.
García Márquez, Solitude, 409.
706
García Márquez, Solitude, 390.
707
García Márquez, Solitude, 403.
705
203
deciphers “the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it,”708 which shows that
everything, the history of Macondo and his family, is anticipated from its beginning by
outside forces. As suggested by Swanson, in Macondo/ Latin America, history has become
“a process of facts replaced by myths and myths turned into facts.” The Macondones/ Latin
Americans have internalized “an essentially unreal version of their own history and identity
as dictated by […] Europe and North America and its clients in Latin America.”709 However,
the history Aureliano now learns is the true history, which is not imposed, changed, or
destroyed by anyone else. For this reason, as he deciphers the parchments, he “breaks out of
false circularities, meaningless repetitions, the prehistory before the dawn of proletarian
consciousness”710 and puts an end to the solitude of the family that has lasted a hundred
years.
As indicated by Griffin, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been considered “a work
of pessimism,” “an interpretative meditation upon the literature of the sub-continent,” and
just “an analysis of the failure of Latin-American history.”711 Consequently, García Márquez
has been accused by some left-wing critics of not providing a more positive vision of Latin
America in the novel. Although the author responded to the accusations and says that “it’s
not the job of novels to furnish solutions,”712 his novel successfully furnishes solutions
showing the right way to follow and creates an optimistic atmosphere.
One Hundred Years of Solitude offers an optimistic way to break and get out of the
vicious circle in which Macondo/ Latin America has been trapped. As their traditional
solitude results from their oligarchic egoism and their lack of solidarity, the members of the
Buendía family can find love and happiness only when they learn how to share and to make
708
García Márquez, Solitude, 416.
Swanson, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García
Márquez, ed. Swanson (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 58-59.
710
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism,” 111.
711
Griffin, 81.
712
García Márquez, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” interview with Bell-Villada, 20.
709
204
sacrifices for others. For example, Aureliano Segundo and his mistress Petra Cotes overcome
their solitude when they discover the feeling of togetherness and unity. Similarly, defeating
their solitude, the last two members of the family, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta
Úrsula, finally learn how to love. Higgins argues that “the emergence of love in the novel to
displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects the emergence of socialist values as a
political force in Latin America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order
they represent.” Higgins regards Aureliano Babilonia’s attempt to solve Melquíades’
parchments as an attempt of recovering historical consciousness:
The Buendías’ attempts to make sense of the manuscipts can be
interpreted as a metaphor of Latin American’s attempts to understand
their history, and it is no accident that it should be Aureliano who
finally succeeds where all others in the family have failed. Not only is
he one of a new breed of Buendías who have learned to love, but also
he has been educated by his uncle José Arcadio Segundo, a union
activist, who has taught him history from a working class viewpoint.
Aureliano, in other words, has broken out of the narrow perspective of
his own privileged class and developed a social awareness. That
awareness enables him to arrive at an understanding of Macondo’s
history and to see that it must culminate in a new socialist ethos that
will do away with the old oligarchic and neocolonial order. 713
Stephen Hart sees “the second surge of wind,”714 the hurricane resulted in the
destruction of the Buendía family, as a continuation of the first surge of wind created by the
banana company after the banana strike. He investigates the ending of One Hundred Years of
Solitude from a political perspective. For him, the ending condemns neocolonialism and acts
713
714
Higgins, 45.
García Márquez, Solitude, 416.
205
as a counter discourse. The hurricane at the end of the novel thus alludes to “the man-made
disaster of capitalism that wrought such havoc in Latin America when introduced by the
West, and particularly by North America.”715 Thus, apocalypse is shown as the only “logical
consequence of imperialist oppression, supported by science.”716 The collapse of Macondo
and the Macondones has started as soon as the American banana company arrives in
Macondo. Consequently, the apocalyptic ending of the novel should be recognized as not
“the end of Latin America but the end of neocolonialism and its conscious or unconscious
collaborators.”717 This ending serves as a warning to Latin America against the disastrous
effects of capitalism and neocolonialism. Thus, the collective failure in Macondo turns into
“a challenge to create a collective difference.”718 This collective difference can only be
created by realizing the real story inside the false story that has been told to Latin America so
far.
In sum, One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the optimistic atmosphere of the
1960s created by the Cuban Revolution. Cuba has been regarded as “the material conversion
of the workers’ struggle into historical reality” and the Boom movement of Latin America
itself is “a proof of the end of neocolonialism and the beginning of true liberation.”719 As a
novel of the Boom, One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly “a work of liberation.”720 It
sets Macondo up as “the space available to the liberal imagination in Latin America.”721 The
novel demystifies the myths of Latin American history and thus provides the deconstruction
of the history. Hence, it attempts to increase the self-understanding and self-awareness of
715
Hart, “García Márquez’s Short Stories,” 130.
Brian Conniff, “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One
Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A
Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 149.
717
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism,” 111.
718
Ariel Dorfman, “Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in García
Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred
Years of Solitude, ed. Bloom, new edition (New York: Infobase, 2009), 97.
719
Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism,” 112.
720
Zavala, 122.
721
Jean Franco, “Limits of the Liberal Imagination,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude: A Casebook, ed. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 103.
716
206
Latin American people. With its hopeful message, the novel is in search of a world of justice
for new generations. It serves as a counter-discourse of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Showing that Macondo/ Latin America had its best times in its precolonial period, it suggests
the causes of the collapse of the continent should be searched for in Western colonialism and
capitalism. It also proves that it will be impossible to avoid the subjugation by capitalists if
the West is followed in the interest of utility and development. The novel mirrors “the
solitude of postcolonial societies [in Latin America], whose history is as yet interpreted
through alien schemata.”722 Thus it reflects not only a strong desire for liberation but also “a
commitment to the emancipation from psychological colonialism in any form. In
passionately advocating a decolonized New World, he demythifies the myths of the old
colonial power. In doing so, […] he creates new myths which, one day, will in turn be
interpreted from the newer horizons of newer worlds.”723
After learning the history and the inescapable demise of both his family and his
class, Aureliano understands that “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not
have a second opportunity on earth.”724 The seeming pessimism in the very last sentence of
the novel certainly gives place to an optimistic postcolonial attribution in García Márquez’s
Nobel speech in 1982. In the speech, García Márquez suggests a new utopia: “A new and
sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where
love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.” 725
Changing the apocalyptic myth of the ending of his novel from the negative to the positive
722
Aizenberg, “Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in García Márquez and
Ouologuem,” PMLA 107.5 (October 1992): 1249.
723
Michael Palencia-Roth, “Prisms of Consciousness: The ‘New Worlds’ of Columbus and García
Márquez,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1999), 256.
724
García Márquez, Solitude, 417.
725
García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” 91.
207
side, he proposes that nothing is irrevocable and thus emphasizes the importance of
“historical renewal.”726
726
Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American
Fiction (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989), 51.
208
CHAPTER 3
THE FAMISHED ROAD
Nigerian Literature in English in the Last Fifty Years
During the 1960s, while Latin America, with postcolonial aims, was booming its
New Novel as a reaction to traditional European realism and in order to reestablish Latin
American identity lost through Western colonization and neocolonialism, on the African
continent, African men of letters and intellectuals were also attempting to create “an
indigenous African literary renaissance” 727 that would be instrumental in obliterating the
effects of colonialism and to increase self-identification, self-understanding and selfawareness of their formerly colonized nations in their independent countries. From the 1960s
on, Nigeria became one of the countries of the continent that brought up many intellectuals
and men of letters who opened a new era in African literature.
As a large country in West Africa, Nigeria is “one of the most populous regions on
the African continent, with over 250 ethnic groups and distinct languages.”728 Although
Nigeria’s large population is largely diverse comprising over 250 ethno-linguistic groups, the
largest and the most important ethnic groups that form the majority of the country’s
population are the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Igbo. In modern-day Nigeria, “the Hausa,
located in the northern savannas, account for roughly 21 percent of the population, while the
Yoruba, in the southwestern part of the country, make up 20 percent, and the Igbo of the
southeast 17 percent.”729 These ethnic groups and their indigenous traditions have
contributed much to shape the culture and the literature of the county. As well as the
indigenous traditions, the old colonial culture of the West has also played a crucial role in the
727
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012),
53.
728
729
Achebe, There Was a Country, 1.
Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008), 4.
209
development of contemporary Nigerian literature. Since the 1960s, Nigerian literature has
developed as a protest and propaganda against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.
As one of the most influential countries on the African continent, Nigeria is a
country with five hundred years of colonial history. After being one of the Atlantic slave
trade centers in Africa since the sixteenth century, the borders of today’s Nigeria “were
established in 1914 when the British colonial government amalgamated the northern and
southern protectorates of Nigeria to form a unified colonial state.”730 Nigeria gained its
independence from Britain on 1 October 1960. Since independence in 1960, the Nigerian
polity “has been wracked with instability” and “regional, ethnic, and religious identities have
become heavily politicized.”731 Nigeria has had to fight with the traumas of decolonization,
failing democratic experiments, social tensions, poverty, injustice, betrayal, corrupt civilian
and military governments, oppression, coups, and civil wars.
Since Nigeria’s independence, Nigerian literature, as a part of African literature that
“constantly reflects an attempt at narrating the African experience, the struggles associated
with imperialism and its relics of denigration and oppression which seem to remain visible
features of post-independence Africa,”732 has always had a socio-political and ideological
nature. As indicated by George D. Nyamndi, “African literature’s close, even organic link
with the society that generates it settles a pathfinder role on that literature: Africa goes where
its literature takes it.”733 No wonder this is also the case for Nigeria, as an African country.
Nigerian literature has been very influential to reflect the post-independence problems of the
country and its people. Thus, “sometimes more than other subjects, literature has
continuously played a decisive role in moulding and shaping the general and specific
730
Falola and Heaton, 6.
Falola and Heaton, 8.
732
Ayo Kehinde and Joy Ebong Mbipom, “Discovery, Assertion and Self-Realisation in Recent
Nigerian Migrant Feminist Fiction: The Example of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come,” African
Nebula 3 (June 2011): 62.
733
George D. Nyamndi, “Prospective Commitment in African Literature,” Nordic Journal of African
Studies 15.4 (2006): 566.
731
210
consciousness of the Nigerian society towards national development.”734 As indicated by
Tayo Awoyemi-Arayela,
Of a truth, Nigerian Literature does reflect various stages of the
development in which the Nigerian peoples have found themselves
[…]. Therefore, this genre of literature manifests the struggle of a
people whose country is still undergoing a painful transformation
from colonisation, through independence to internal wars, coups,
counter-coups, and political strife.735
In his discussion on national culture in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon
explains the duty of African intellectuals and artists. He claims that it is not enough for an
African intellectual and author to write about African revolution. An intellectual/ author
must be a part of the revolution, join his people in their attempt to adapt the revolution and
fight hand in hand with them. Fanon determines three different levels in the works of the
native writers in Africa. The first phase is defined as “the period of unqualified
assimilation.”736 In this phase, the culture of the colonialist is exactly imitated by the African
writer. The writer attempts to assimilate the dominant culture. Europe, accepted as the
mother continent, becomes the source of inspiration for him. He follows European literary
trends and movements. In the second phase, the native writer starts to feel that he has been
alienated from his own land and people. Then, he feels the necessity to save himself from the
colonialist’s culture. He tries to return to his own roots, to define himself and his own culture
and to lose himself in his own people. However, as he has developed weak relations with his
own people, he cannot completely be a part of them. For this reason, in this phase, what his
writings achieve is just to remember his nation’s past. The writers of the second phase,
734
Alexander Kure, “Literature and National Development,” JNESA 14.1 (September 2011): 81.
Taye Awoyemi-Arayela, “Nigerian Literature in English: The Journey So Far?” International
Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention 2.1 (January 2013): 30.
736
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963),
222.
735
211
which is called by Fanon “the period of creative work,” attempt to reflect their African
experiences, traditions, legends, and myths using borrowed European models. Expressing the
difficulties and agonies their people experienced, the creative writers of this phase produce
protest writing, and thus their works can be included in the “literature of just-before-thebattle.” The third phase, “the fighting phase” in Fanon’s phraseology, has been the most
important level for the development of native writing. Having lost himself in his people and
donating himself with clearly defined political and ideological orientation, the writer
attempts to “shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honored place in
his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting
literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature.”737
When examined closely, Nigerian literature follows Fanon’s parlance step by step
since the beginning of the twentieth century. While explaining the evolution of Nigerian
literature, West African history sheds light on our way. As soon as the Portuguese, the first
Europeans to arrive in West Africa, established a trading post in Benin at the end of the
fifteenth century,738 international trade relations started between the Africans and the
Europeans. After the discovery of the Americas and the establishment of plantation colonies
on the American continent, the slave trade became the most important factor to increase the
contact between Europe and West Africa. In the seventeenth century, when African slaves
started to be transported from the interior parts of Africa to the West African coasts,
Europe’s contact with West Africa increased. Slavery became the essential concept in the
history of West Africa. Thanks to the pressure from European and American liberal
abolitionists, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a decline in the West African
slave trade. However, European traders did not take their hands off Africa. After the slave
trade, they started legitimate commerce: “Often using the same storage facilities, trade
737
738
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 222-23.
Falola and Heaton, 52.
212
routes, staff, contacts, and networks, they would barter imported commodities such as guns,
ammunition, cloth, alcohol, cowries, metal currency, and beads, not for humans but for
African raw materials, including ivory, gold, timber, rubber, and palm-oil.”739 As soon as
steamer transport increased in the early 1850s, a large number of European businessmen and
missionaries arrived on the West African coast. In the second half of the nineteenth century,
Britain started to be formally involved in the Nigerian area “in the form of Christian
missionaries, trading interests, and political officials, all of whom were primarily concerned
with increasing British influence against what they saw as the nefarious activities of
indigenous rulers and other European powers, notably France and Germany.”740 Christian
missionaries, who were protected and assisted by the British political and military resources,
became the primary actors providing greater British involvement in the area. They “wanted
the areas converted to anti-slavery, to ‘legitimate’ commerce and ultimately to ideas of
Christian ‘civilization.’”741 With the help of these missionaries Britain became more
involved in the local affairs of the indigenous people of the area. Christian missionaries
started to open churches, schools, and printing presses to spread Christianity and religious
writings on the African continent: “Before the expansion of colonial education in the West
African colonies, the British left the establishment and administration of educational
institutions in the hands of Christian Missions and voluntary agencies. These agencies
established and ran their schools – mostly grammar schools and vocational institutions –
according to their own convictions or religious beliefs.”742 Most members of the first
generation of Nigerian literature, such as Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa (1903-1963), Amos
739
Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 16.
Falola and Heaton, 85.
741
Falola and Heaton, 86.
742
Obi Nwakanma, Christopher Okigbo 1930-67: Thirsting for Sunlight (Woodbridge: James Currey,
HEBN, 2010), 31-32.
740
213
Tutuola (1920-1997), Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), and Wole Soyinka (1934- ), were
products of these missionary activities in Nigeria.743
The period between the 1880s and 1890s is known as the era of so-called European
“protection,” as European countries established colonies and protectorates in Africa,
especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. The Berlin Conference, at which
European governments scrambled for Africa and portioned it among themselves, is a turning
point for West African literature. After the 1880s, especially in the area known as British
West Africa, the British government permitted élite, educated Africans to establish their own
English-language newspapers, which became useful for educated Africans to exchange their
anti-colonial ideas and to increase national consciousness in West Africa in the early
twentieth century. With the help of the English-language printing press, although the English
language has been condemned as the creator of colonial alienation744 by the Kenyan
intellectual and author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938- ), West African intellectuals had a chance
to establish a liaison not only with each other but also with anti-colonialists in India, with
pan-Africanists such as W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) and Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) in
North America and with the supporters of the Négritude movement in France. Thus, since
the 1880s, Nigerian journalists, writers, and intellectuals such as Nnamdi Azikiwe (19041996), who was a prominent figure in the development of Nigerian nationalism and the first
president of Nigeria in 1963, Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), who was a television producer,
writer, and activist, and Wole Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature and
became the first person in Africa to be so honoured, have played important roles both in the
political and literary history of Nigeria as a part of British West Africa. In the country, the
743
Newell, 17.
See Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature,” in African Literature: An
Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, 285-306 (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2011).
744
214
growth of modern creative writing has developed side by side with political activism and the
nationalist movement for independence from colonial rule.
While explaining the development of Nigerian literature in English, AwoyemiArayela notes that the birth of Nigerian literature in English and the birth of national
consciousness in Nigeria are inseparable from each other. She considers the Nigerian writer,
as well as other African writers generally, as “a product of cultural hybrids” 745 because of the
effects of European colonialism and European education imposed on African people. For
her, English literature was used as a useful device to civilize the so-called uncivilized,
savage, and inhuman African people. The colonized people were made to believe that the
colonizer’s culture and literature were superior to their own culture and literature. As a
result, the colonized started to lose confidence in their own culture and their creative impulse
within their indigenous cultural environment. After the Second World War (1939-1945), the
colonies started to demand independence from their colonial masters. As a result of such a
strong demand, nationalism started to flourish in Africa. According to E.N. Obiechina,
“nationalist movements geared towards the ending of colonial domination were […] attended
by cultural nationalism aimed at rehabilitating the autochthonous culture (or such aspects of
it that could still be rescued), and restoring the creative impulse of the peoples emerging
from colonialism.”746 This cultural phenomenon, which is also called “nativism” by
sociologists, was effective on national revival. With the growing of national consciousness in
Nigeria, the creative impulse which had been destroyed by European colonialism
commenced to develop once more. In the 1930s, the first generation of the European
university-educated Nigerian people started to return to their country from Europe after
completing their education. One of these men was Nnamdi Azikiwe. As a young Igbo man,
745
Saint Gbileeka, quoted in Awoyemi-Arayela, 30.
Emmanuel N Obiechina, “Cultural Nationalism in Modern African Creative Literature,” in African
Literature Today: A Journal of Explanatory Criticism, ed. Eldred D. Jones, No 1 (New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), 25.
746
215
Azikiwe had studied in the United States and worked as the editor of the African Morning
Post in Accra, the capital of Ghana. His journalism was a headache for the British colonial
government, especially after the publication of his article “Does the African Have a God?”
After he came to Nigeria in 1937, he established his daily newspaper the West African Pilot
in Lagos: “His momentum lent color to the nationalist struggle. He had a great message of
hope and liberty to Africans: to free themselves from the shackles of ignorance, through
education. ‘Each one train one’ became the rallying cry of the Igbo modernizing movement
in that decade.”747 As well as Azikiwe, other nationalists such as Herbert Macaulay (18641946), Dennis Osadebey (1911-1994), and Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987) also contributed
much to the growth of nationalistic movement in Nigeria:
These men felt the need for a rejuvenation and a redefinition of
cultural and ethical values of the peoples of the soon-to-be nation. One
major way was to encourage the publication of literary works. In this
wise, Azikiwe encouraged the publication of literary works in his
Daily newspaper, the West African Pilot. […] This literary activity
gave rise to the popular Onitsha Market Literature: this refers to a
number of pamphlets, books and publications in the 1950s and
1960s.748
Thus, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the boom of Onitsha market literature in Nigeria. In the
1940s, alongside Nigeria’s international and canonical works, a large body of popular
literature started to be produced in Onitsha, an Igbo market town in eastern Nigeria. In those
years there was an increase in literacy in the country, and the African-owned Englishlanguage newspapers were continually writing about Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-colonial
activities, keeping colonial India as an example for Nigeria’s political identification. As a
747
748
Nwakanma, 10.
Awoyemi-Arayela, 30.
216
result of this connection between Nigeria and India, newly educated local people of Nigeria
started to develop an interest in cheap Indian pamphlets, Indian songs, and movies. In
addition to the Indian material, British and American popular romantic magazines and Bgrade movies were also consumed by these newly educated Nigerians. The result was the
boom of Onitsha market literature. Onitsha became the trade center of West Africa by the
1950s. During the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholics had been the most effective
mission in the eastern part of the country. In the early twentieth century British regional
headquarters had been established in Onitsha: “This combination of commerce, Christianity,
and colonialism created a lucrative climate for the African printing presses which sprang up
throughout Onitsha in the 1940s and 1950s for the production of reports, greeting cards,
headed stationery, exercise books, invoice books, and pamphlets by local authors.”749 The
new Nigerian (especially Igbo) writers commenced to produce their works which were very
different from the canonical works of the internationally well-known Nigerian authors such
as Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe. This less-well-educated, Englishspeaking, money and power-seeking new generation of writers were “conscious of their
educated status and ambitious for salaried white-collar employment,” and were also “the
‘oppressed’ victims of mission schools and colonial mass-education programmes: [they
were] inspired to write by the nationalist press, which promoted the egalitarian ideal of massparticipation in the creation of the nation.”750 They were producing cheap romances,
pamphlets, and “how-to” booklets on subjects such as love, sex, marriage, harlotry, female
infidelity, alcohol, money, social behavior, modern life, and working life. The most wellknown Onitsha market literature writers were Ogali A. Ogali, Thomas Iguh, Olufela Davies,
Cyril Aririguzo, J.O. Nnadoze, and Rufus Okonkwo. Onitsha market literature, when set
against the works of cultural nationalist élite authors, was dismissed by critics as a tool for
749
750
Newell, 104.
Newell, 104.
217
creating “a new alienation” and thus “a cultural re-colonization” because of its overemphasis
on “Western modernity” and its “unquestioning promotion of European life- and love-styles
in opposition to ‘traditional’ African sexual moralities.” For this reason, the products of the
Onitsha market may be included in the first phase of Fanon’s parlance, “the period of
unqualified assimilation.” However, Stephanie Newell proposes that Onitsha market
literature was important as it represented “the non-élite man’s experience of Nigeria at a time
of immense social and economic change, a period to which Achebe and his élite peers
reacted by addressing, and often reaffirming, the status of pre-colonial chiefs over and
against the structures of colonialism and Christianity.”751 Newell adds that this literature
provided “a clear expression of ‘civil society,’” and “for its sheer democratic inclusivity and
its refusal to ‘write back’ to the metropolitan centre, this type of material therefore merits a
place beside the more canonical works of West African literature.”752
After counting several factors for the birth of Nigerian literature in English such as
colonial history, cultural nationalism, and the establishment of the University College in
Ibadan in 1948, as an external College of the University of London, Awoyemi-Arayela
studies this genre of literature under three headings: “Literary Path-Finders, Literary TrailBlazers, Radical Experimentalists.”753 In her list of literary path-finders – “the apostles” in
her terms – Amos Tutuola, with his The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), takes first place. The
publication of Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952 marks the beginning of the
“period of the creative work” in Nigeria in terms of Fanon’s parlance. In his discussion of
magical realism, Durix indicates that “from the 1960s on in formerly colonized countries
several ‘schools’ of literature emerged which attempted to combine the old realistic tradition
with elements variously referred to as the supernatural or magic.”754 In this wise, Amos
751
Newell, 110.
Newell, 123.
753
Awoyemi-Arayela, 31.
754
Durix, 102.
752
218
Tutuola, with his style very close to magical realism, can be considered a member of these
“schools” that combined foreign and local elements. According to Bruce King,
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was one of the first
novels written in English by a Nigerian. It quickly gained an
international reputation and in a sense put Nigeria on the map of world
literature. Among the reasons why it is liked abroad are its
imaginative use of tribal myths, its fresh use of English, its free
mixture of the spiritual and the human worlds. 755
In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, as well as in his later works,756 Amos Tutuola was
inspired by the first Yoruba novel Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1938; trans. The Forest
of a Thousand Daemons, 1968) by the early Yoruba-language writer Daniel Olorunfemi
Fagunwa (1903-1963).757 Like Fagunwa, Tutuola employed the oral traditions, drew from
Yoruba mythology, folktales, and legends and depended on local ethnic beliefs and
philosophy. Thus, he created moral fables in the manner of a folk artist in The Palm-Wine
Drinkard, which tells the story of a palm-wine drinker who travels to the world of the dead
to find and bring back his palm-wine tapster. The novel was written in “young English,” 758
that is to say, in “Yorubanglish” 759 in Tutuola’s own terms. As “a cultural hybrid, the child
of the clash of cultures,”760 The Palm-Wine Drinkard creates interplay of deities, spirits,
human beings and abstract notions. With the personified characters such as Death, the Skull,
755
Bruce King, ed., Introduction to Nigerian Literature (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation,
1972), 1
756
See Amos Tutuola, Yoruba Folktales (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan UP, 1986); Tutuola, Pauper,
Brawler and Slanderer (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1987), and Tutuola, The Village Witch
Doctor & Other Stories (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1990).
757
See Adeboye Babalola, “A Survey of Modern Literature in the Yoruba, Efik and Hausa
Languages,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. Bruce King, 50-63 (New York: Africana
Publishing Corporation, 1972).
758
Dylan Thomas, quoted in Francesca Rosati, “An Overview of 20th Century Anglophone Literature
in Africa,” introduction to The Quest for Democracy: Writings on Nigerian Literature in English, ed.
Francesca Rosati (Roma: Aracne, 2004), 19.
759
Tutuola, quoted in Rosati “Anglophone Literature in Africa,” 19.
760
Michael Thelwell, introduction to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Tutuola (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 187-88.
219
Drum, Song, Dance, the Water Spirit woman, Laugh, Spirit of Prey, the Faithful Mother, and
the like, the novel combines two different worlds, that is, the world of the living and the
world of the dead with no clear separation between them. According to Durix, “nationalistic
motifs and a desire to preserve their originality often leads the Africans to adopt the two
different (and, to a European, incompatible) systems of reasoning without apparent strain.” 761
Durix’s contention seems convenient to explain the condition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard,
as the novel incorporates oral traditions, fuses folklore with modern life, and reflects the
nationalistic desire of its author. Amos Tutuola explains his nationalistic aim to write The
Palm-Wine Drinkard as follows:
What was in my mind? Well. Oh…the time I wrote it, what was in my
mind was that I noticed that our young men, our young sons and
daughters did not pay much attention to our traditional things or
culture or customs. They adopted, they concentrated their minds only
on European things. They left our customs, so if I do this they may
change their mind … to remember our custom, not to leave it to die …
That was my intention. 762
Tutuola’s aim was to reestablish the lost past and to teach the traditional sensibility of the
Yoruba worldview to the younger generations of his country. When the reason for the
nationalistic tendency of leaning on the oral traditions is examined, we see that oral tradition
is a vivacious, dynamic part of West African cultures. Wendy Baker and William G.
Eggington emphasize the importance of oral tradition in literature, indicating that “it is
impossible to understand African literature without understanding their oral and cultural
traditions.”763 Supporting Baker’s and Eggington’s ideas, Luke Eyoh suggests that “oral
761
Durix, 83.
Tutuola, quoted by Thelwell, 186-87.
763
Wendy Baker and William G. Eggington, “Bilingual Creativity, Multidimensional Analysis, and
World Englishes,” World Englishes 18.3 (1999): 346.
762
220
literature of a people is intricately tied to the social, cultural, and political aspirations and
goals of the people which invariably encompass national unity and national development
attainable through peaceful co-existence.”764 For this reason, it provided great contributions
to nation-building, national unity, and national development. In Nigerian life, the function
and contribution of oral literature, oral traditions, and oral performances are undeniable:
“oral literature in Nigeria deals with certain serious issues about life, man, his relationships
with his environment and with other human beings, all of which are […] pertinent in the
society today.”765 Thus, a Nigerian author should be considered “first and foremost a
member of a community in which the oral tradition is a way of life.”766 In fact, not only
Achebe, Soyinka, and Tutuola but also ordinary people of Nigeria can be regarded as
“griots.” Griot, a French term, refers to all types of oral performers and interpreters in West
Africa such as singers, praise-singers, storytellers, drummers, dancers, oral historians, tutors,
town-criers, spokespersons, and masters of ceremonies. Griots play vital social, cultural, and
political roles in West African culture because “for centuries, oral genres have been used by
ordinary people, or ‘commoners’, in West Africa to express protests and complaints against
people in positions of power.”767 As indicated by Awoyemi-Arayela, “If ‘the pen is mightier
than the sword’ in Western Europe, the word can be the sword in West Africa.”768 Spoken
words are believed to be alive and to have the power to change the bad behavior of people,
and thus to change their lives and society. Griots, being ordinary members of their society,
have used oral genres to express their social and political ideas powerfully, to protest or
abuse people for their bad behavior, to draw attention to the aspects of the society, to make
complaints against people in power and to convey their social and political approvals,
764
Luke Eyoh, “Indigenous Oral Poetry in Nigeria as a Tool for National Unity,” J Communication
2.2 (2011): 83.
765
Eyoh, 84.
766
Awoyemi-Arayela, 30.
767
Newell, 62.
768
Newell, 63.
221
insults, or demands to the powerful figures in the society. Oral genres are still in use in West
Africa. They cannot be considered pre-colonial, pre-industrial, or non-modern. Griots
usually insert contemporary social and political affairs into their oral performances without
changing the certain structure of the oral tradition, which means that oral tradition is
continually updated with the addition of new ideas and perspectives. As oral literature is “the
true literature of Africa”769 and an essential pattern for African literary expression, it has
become unavoidable for the first generation of Nigerian writers to grow organically from
their oral tradition. They have attempted to reconnect with their oral tradition and thus, to
“griotize” their writing for political reasons: “to reject European cultural imperialism,” to
respond “to the failure of postcolonial governments to break away from the ex-colonial
culture in the years after independence,” and “to create new mythologies for postcolonial
Africa”770 by restoring old traditions. Reflecting these cultural nationalist ideas, Amos
Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard has been “apostolic as it marks the beginning of
Nigerian Literature in English.”771
If Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard can be considered to be the first novel
of Nigerian literature in English, then the second novel is People of the City (1954) by
Cyprian Ekwensi (1921-2007). Unlike Tutuola, Ekwensi, an Igbo, mostly wrote about
modern urban life in Nigeria. His works are concerned with the city life, “specifically with
the ways in which traditional values and institutions were redefined as a result of the
presence of Europeans in West Africa during the colonial period” and “with the conflicts
which the colonial presence promoted in Nigeria and the cultural, social and political
changes which resulted.”772 According to Charles Nnolim, Ekwensi was Nigeria’s first real
novelist in the European sense because he owes much to Onitsha market literature, that is, he
769
F. Abiola Irele, quoted in Newell, 66.
Newell, 67.
771
Awoyemi-Arayela, 31.
772
Douglas Killam, “Cyprian Ekwensi,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. Bruce King (New
York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), 77.
770
222
“owes his literary debts to the pulp literature of the Western world.”773 Nnolim seems right in
his contention because Ekwensi also regards himself as “a writer of popular fiction.” 774
Nnolim criticizes Ekwensi for his omission of cultural assertion or cultural nationalism in his
work, showing no attempt to restore the slanted image of Africa and the African people. For
Nnolim, Ekwensi’s main interest was Nigerian people’s lives in big cities, their problems,
inner-conflicts, shortfalls, and defeats. He developed no interest in traditional customs
regarding them as anthropological concerns. However, in the final analysis, Nnolim accepts
that Ekwensi “is the first Nigerian novelist and he might be credited with establishing the
picaresque tradition in our [Nigerian] literature – the tradition of the migrant from the village
to the city and from place to place within the city.”775 Although Amos Tutuola and Cyprian
Ekwensi seem to be extremely dissimilar authors, they share a lot in common: Both of them
are the precursors of the novel tradition in Nigerian literature. Both reflected different
aspects of Nigerian life creating their own literary structures. Both attempted to discover
what is distinctively Nigerian in Nigerian literature using the English language. Thus, both
Tutuola and Ekwensi can be considered “apostles” in modern Nigerian literature.
The last novel of the decade of the 1950s in Nigeria was Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart, which was written as a response to the Polish-English author Joseph Conrad’s
colonial work Heart of Darkness (1899). After the publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard
in 1952 and People of the City in 1954, Things Fall Apart appeared on the world scene in
1958. The real tradition of Nigerian literature in English commenced with the publication of
Things Fall Apart. In Things Fall Apart, as “Nigeria’s first “real” or indigenous novel,”
Achebe employed two of Tutuola’s techniques: “the Africanization of the English language”
and “the creative use of native myths and folklore in fiction.”776 In other words, regarding the
773
Charles E. Nnolim, Issues in African Literature (Lagos: Malthouse, 2010), 72.
Killam, 79.
775
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 73.
776
Nnolim, Approaches to the African Novel: Essays in Analysis (Lagos: Malthouse, 2010), 197.
774
223
English language as “the national language of Nigeria and of many other countries of
Africa”777 and as a language capable of carrying the weight of his African experience, 778
Achebe used the English language, embellishing it with the deliberate use of Igbo idioms,
proverbs, myths, legends, and rituals in his novel. He thus converted the tradition of novel,
as a Western genre, into African literature. Achebe was “first and foremost concerned with
cultural assertion and is a pioneer in what has come to be called cultural nationalism in
Nigerian literature.”779 His aim was to express Africa to a wide European audience as well as
to his local readers and to rehabilitate the distorted impression of Africa and the Africans.
With this aim in mind, Achebe’s novel, beginning from the pre-colonial period of Nigeria,
reflected the traditional and cultural features of the Igbo society, the efficiencies and
inefficiencies of tribal customs and values, the disastrous effects of European imperialism
and colonialism on Igbo culture and society and the inevitable deterioration of traditional
culture under the effect of European civilization. In sum, Achebe, with his novel Things Fall
Apart, “established a great tradition in the Nigerian novel – the tradition of cultural
nationalism, the tradition of ancestor worship, the tradition of great restraint and the art of
the unsaid, the tradition of delightful turns of the proverb, the tradition of architectonic and
definite concerns with form within the novel.”780 Being a member of the so-called “first
generation” of Nigerian authors, Achebe was regarded as “the best novelist in that group of
writers who at Ibadan in the fifties contrived the birth of West African literature in
777
Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Pearson Education Limited,
1994), 429.
778
Achebe, “The African Writer,” 434.
779
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 74.
780
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 75.
224
English.”781 Thus, he became “a dominant point of origin, a hyper-precursor one might say,
in whose aftermath virtually every African author self-consciously writes.”782
As indicated earlier, after the establishment and the growth of the University
College, Ibadan, which had a “special relationship with University of London, from which
students actually earned their degrees,”783 the works of the “first generation” of Nigerian
authors started to take their places both in the Nigerian and World literature. As the first
generation Nigerian authors were educated at the University College in Ibadan, the
establishment of the college was indeed a significant factor for the birth of Nigerian
literature in English:
For many years the colonial administration struggled to come to terms
with the realities of demand for higher education in the English
colonies. There was an immediate practical consideration for the
formulators of colonial policy: the two great wars in Europe in the
twentieth century had reduced the number of hands trained to run the
far-flung empire. With the increasing cost in administration of the
colonies, it was urgent to recruit a local elite who would assist in
maintaining the objectives of the empire in the colonies; a local
gentry, in other words, fashioned in the image of the English. In the
post-war years, as the reality of independence dawned, it became even
more necessary to train the indigenous elite for the administrative
services of the post-colonial state. This policy was behind the
781
John Povey, “The Novels of Chinua Achebe,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. King
(New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), 97.
782
Boehmer, “Achebe and His Influence in Some Contemporary African Writing,” Interventions 11.2
(2009): 142.
783
Nwakanma, 61.
225
founding of the Government Colleges, Yaba Higher College and
eventually University College. 784
The first generation Nigerian writers – “the trail-blazers,” to borrow AwoyemiArayela’s terminology – during the 1950s and 1960s include Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe,
Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (1930-1967), Olawale Gladstone Emmanuel Rotimi, best
known as Ola Rotimi (1938-2000), John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (1935- ), Vincent
Chukwuemeka Ike (1931- ), Elechie Amadi (1934- ), Gabriel Okara (1921- ), and Timothy
Mofolorunso Aluko, best known as T.M. Aluko (1918-2010). All these authors, except
Okara, were the products of the University College in Ibadan. After the university, most of
them continued their higher education in America or in Europe. As these American- or
European-educated authors were born and brought up “at the crossroads of culture,”785 they
were “all products of a hybrid culture: a generation uprooted early from their traditional,
indigenous cultures, and put through the elitist mill of English education.”786 These writers
were “nurtured under the pan-Nigerian idealism of the nationalist, anti-colonial
movement”787 and they played important roles in anti-colonial and nationalist struggles more
often “risking imprisonment or death at the hands of the colonial and postcolonial
regimes.”788 Their works can be included in the body of political and protest writing as they
wrote against European colonialism and European intervention in their country. For this
reason, when examined in terms of Fanon’s parlance, their political works – especially those
produced after Nigerian independence in 1960 – seem to correspond to the third phase (the
fighting phase) of African writing.
As the first generation Nigerian authors were all cultural nationalists, it was difficult
for them not to be influenced by the ideology of the Négritude movement, as “the most
784
Nwakanma, 61.
Achebe, quoted in Nwakanma, 18.
786
Nwakanma, 54.
787
Nwakanma, 84.
788
Newell, 19.
785
226
coherent, because most ideological”789 of cultural nationalistic attempts. The founders and
most important members of the movement were the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, the
Martinican Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas. Négritude, as a literary and cultural
movement developed by anti-colonial francophone black intellectuals and writers in France
in the 1930s, had been “the product of the colonial encounters between the black Africans
and the European whites” and had come in to being as “a strategic construction of native
identity to resist the colonialist ideology.”790 According to Nnolim, Négritude “tried to kill
three birds with one stone: it was at once a revolt against Europe, a search for identity, and a
celebration of [the African people’s] Africanness.”791 The ideology and aesthetics of the
movement were extremely influential in French West Africa. However, the effect of
Négritude became insignificant in British West Africa because “here British colonialism,
with its policy of indirect rule, made a far more superficial inroad into the way of life it
found there, than was the case in many other parts of Africa” 792 and it supported the
specificity of local traditions. Obiechina states that
[…] there is hardly any recognizable trace of the Negritude ideology
in English-speaking West African writing. In fact, the Negritude
ideology tends to be treated with skepticism, derision or blatant
hostility in this part of West Africa. Wole Soyinka’s statement that the
tiger does not go around proclaiming “its tigritude” any more than the
Negro should go around proclaiming his Negritude sums up the
general attitude of English-speaking West
Africans
towards
Negritude. 793
789
Obiechina, 26.
Zhaoguo Ding, “On Resistance in Anti-Colonial Marxist Writings,” Canadian Social Science 7.1
(2011): 41.
791
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 100.
792
Cooper, Magical Realism, 40.
793
Obiechina, 26.
790
227
As indicated in the above quotation, it is true that Wole Soyinka, as a remarkable
writer, playwright and poet who carried African literature to the world scene especially after
his Nobel Prize in 1986, seems to be the opponent of Négritude with his dictum, “a tiger
does not have to proclaim his tigritude.” However, his dictum declares his opposition only to
the “white-black” dialectic of the Négritude ideology. As suggested by the West African
critic, Eldred D. Jones, Soyinka may seem to be against Négritude, but his work “exhibits all
that negritude was essentially about, bar the shouting.”794 In the spirit of Négritude, Soyinka
expressed the African personality using African experience and thus showed the world that
Africa has its own unique culture that is different from Europe’s culture, and the African
people have always had their own distinct civilization. It was the case not only for Soyinka
but also for other Nigerian authors of the period. Like Soyinka, most of them made the
fullest use of traditional African culture to reflect its beauty and fruitfulness, provided the
synthesis of old and new, and revealed the authentic Nigerian personality in this synthesis. In
the final analysis, it seems that the first generation Nigerian authors did not completely reject
Négritude, but followed some aspects of its ideology. The first generation Nigerian authors
adopted a different but more balanced type of Négritude, avoiding the extreme rejection of
Europe and the European and the extreme celebration of Africa and the African. The
Nigerian type of Négritude was “a Negritude of honest soul-searching of self-criticism” in
order to prove that “the peoples of the African race are not just music and dance and rhythm
and loose walking (if they were only these and nothing else, they are nothing!), but are
people capable of objectivity, capable of intellectuality, capable of hate-blended
prejudices.”795
794
Eldred D. Jones, “The Essential Soyinka,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. King (New
York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), 113.
795
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 102.
228
The first generation Nigerian authors, while producing their political works that
“started with a search for identity and moved on to protest colonial abuses,”796 were
conscious of their duty both in the reclamation of the African story and in national
reconstruction. As proposed in the proverb quoted by Achebe that “until the lions produce
their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter,”797 the Nigerian authors
were sure that it was time for the lions to tell their own story from their own perspective.
They felt lucky, like Achebe, to take their parts in “the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who
had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession.”798 They also felt it
necessary that dedicated nationalist novelists should work as teachers in their society. They
should help their society recover from the traumatic effects of colonialism, “regain belief in
[themselves] and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.” 799
The following quotation sums up the importance and function of the Nigerian authors such
as Tutuola, Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, and many others:
[They] were all concerned with cultural assertion and were pioneers in
what we have come to regard as cultural nationalism in Nigerian
literature: in their stressing the innate dignity of the Nigerian, in their
concern with the rehabilitation of the image of the black man in
general, and the Nigerian man and woman in particular- that image
damaged and distorted by white writers. They have all established this
tradition mainly through myth-making, through the mythopoeia of
group identity and group experience, thereby transmitting culture,
pursuing an ideology of cultural renaissance, emphasizing our
communal and collective philosophy, stressing the success stories or
796
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 67.
Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 73.
798
Achebe, Home and Exile, 79.
799
Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” in African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory,
ed. Olaniyan and Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 105.
797
229
failures of communities rather than the fortunes or misfortunes of the
individual, calling attention to a rural rather than an industrial or
technological way of life that has led to a fulfilled way of existence.
They have done this by bending, twisting and proverbializing the
English language or revealing the innate wealth of our vernacular
languages. 800
The social and political events in Nigeria in the decade between 1960 and 1970 were
so significant that they gave way to the birth of a second generation of writers in the country.
When Nigeria won its independence from British colonial rule in 1960, expectations for a
new and powerful future were high. Nigeria regarded itself as a trailblazer for the other
colonized peoples in West Africa to rescue themselves from European colonial rules.
However, the country could never provide the stability and prestige it longed for because of
political corruption, bad leadership, lack of discipline, economic backwardness, tribalism,
social injustice, and military coups.801 As a result of official corruption, manipulated
elections, and ethnic inequalities in the conduct of its politics, the First Republic was
overthrown by a coup d’état on 15 January 1966, which was followed by several back-toback military coups in the same year. All this turmoil gave way to the Nigeria-Biafra War, in
which the Eastern Region, where the Igbo people live, demanded to withdraw from Nigeria
to establish an independent state called the Republic of Biafra. When Nigerian side attacked
Biafra on 6 July 1967, the bloody civil war started. The Nigeria-Biafra War, which is also
called the Nigerian Civil War, “rent the country along regional and ethnic lines, killed
between 1 and 3 million people, and nearly destroyed the fragile federal bonds that held
together the Nigerian state.”802 The civil war ended in 1970 with the defeat of the Biafran
side, which was reincorporated into Nigeria. No wonder the reflections of such a cataclysmic
800
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 229.
See Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 2005).
802
Falola and Heaton, 158.
801
230
period immediately appeared in Nigerian literature. The so-called second generation of
Nigerian authors emerged in the late 1960s. The literature these authors produced was
referred to as the “literature of disillusionment” as they “were born out of a disillusionment
of the gains of Nigerian independence” 803 in 1960. These authors include Babafemi Adeyemi
Osofican (1946- ), best known as Femi Osofisan, Festus Iyayi (1947-2013), Bode Sowande
(1948- ), Bankole Ajibabi Omotoso (1943- ), best known as Kole Omotoso, Niyi Osundare
(1947- ), Odia Ofeimun (1950- ), Olu Obafemi (1945- ), and also woman writers such as
Zulu Sofola (1938-2001), Flora Nwapa (1931-1993), and Buchi Emecheta (1944- ).
Witnessing the failure of the First Republic in saving the Nigerians from the handcuffs of
colonialism, these authors believed that Nigeria had now neo-colonialism instead of
colonialism and European-minded black politicians instead of their old European colonial
masters. In their works they reflected their loss of confidence in their postcolonial
government and their despair at the chaotic condition of the country. Criticizing the
pessimism of their precursors, as well as their overemphasis on individualism, they adopted a
collectivist ideology for salvation and growth. Such authors as Femi Osofisan, Niyi
Osundare, Bode Sowande, Kole Omotosho, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, and Olu Obafemi
“embraced Marxism and socialism in a more optimistic literature of combat and
revolution.”804 Believing that “art, as an instrument in the class struggle must be a reflection
of the social structure”805 and “artistic output must be part of social engineering,”806 this
group of intelligentsia attempted to use literature as an effective weapon to provide social
change. As well as the Marxist and socialist authors mentioned above, feminist writing also
made a strong political statement. They fought against male-chauvinism, inequality and
sexism, and tried to correct the image of African women. Certainly, the Nigerian authors
803
Awoyemi-Arayela, 33.
Newell, 23.
805
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 40.
806
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 41.
804
231
could not remain indifferent to the Nigeria-Biafra war. Many political novels were written by
the Nigerian authors to criticize war during and after the war years. These novels include The
Road to Udima (1969) by Victor Uzoma Nwankwo, A Wreath for the Maidens (1973) by
John Munonye, Never Again (1975) by Flora Nwapa, Come Thunder (1984) by Ossie
Anekwe, The Last Duty (1976) by Isidore Okpewho, Songs of Steel (1979) by Andrew
Ekwuru, and Survive the Peace (1976) by Cyprian Ekwensi.807 In the 1980s, many of the
first generation authors such as Gabriel Okara and Wole Soyinka and the second generation
authors such as Femi Osofisan and Kole Omotoso initiated the modernist trend in Nigerian
literature. Free from the influence of European modernism, which developed after the First
World War, the Nigerian “modernist” trend developed as a result of “the reversal of ethical
and moral values in our [Nigerian] body politic, with the enthronement of dishonesty, fraud,
corruption and nepotism as re-placement for age-old values. 808 Especially in the works of
Omotoso and Osofisan during the 1980s, it is possible to “enter a topsy-turvy world where
the impossible happens, where both fratricide and misgovernment are held up to ridicule by
recourse to the ludicrous and the absurd, showing through horror and shock techniques the
despair and the decadence in our body-politic.”809
Although Awoyemi-Arayela regards the second generation Nigerian authors as the
“experimentalists” in her 2013 article, the real experimental writing started in the 1980s with
the works of a new generation of authors like Ben Okri (1959- ) and Biyi Bandele-Thomas
(1967- ). The third generation Nigerian writers, rejecting traditional literary realism,
favoured the styles called “experimental” and “avant garde” in their writing. The
characteristic features of their writing were “narrative indeterminacy, non-linearity, nonrealism, linguistic experimentation with the ex-colonial language and the fragmentation of
subjectivity” and, because of these features, the literature they have produced from the 1980s
807
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 67.
Nnolim, Approaches to the African Novel, 204.
809
Nnolim, Approaches to the African Novel, 204-05.
808
232
till the present day has been variously labeled as “‘postmodernist,’ ‘postnational,’
‘transnational,’ ‘transcultural,’ ‘migrant cosmopolitan,’ ‘magical realist,’ ‘anti-realist,’‘postrealist,’ ‘avant garde,’ ‘African Absurdist.’”810 These authors separated themselves from the
goals of the first and second generation writers. As proposed by Newell, these authors
[…] moved away from discourses about national identity and
authentic “Africanness” in their work, choosing instead to develop
hybrid literary styles and to highlight themes of migration, existential
anguish, and cultural intermingling. […] however, “West Africa” is
not abandoned in this cosmopolitan literature, for the violence of
postcolonial society is powerfully fictionalized, and local acts of
compassion and humanity are promoted as models for human relations
worldwide.811
As suggested in the quotation above, the third generation authors provided continuity
with their predecessors in that their main focus became Nigeria and the postcolonial lives
and problems of the Nigerians. They foregrounded Nigeria’s political landscape which is
characterized by “government misrule and arrogance, the moral depravity of rulers, mindless
civil wars, ethno-national conflicts and the passivity of the ruled.”812 Deriving from local
literatures, they chose West African settings, characters, and themes in their works. Focusing
on the themes such as slum-life, poverty, famine, and violence, they criticized the
postcolonial governments, political corruption, dictatorship and economic failure in their
postcolonial country. Although Lilyan Kesteloot proposes that the new generation authors
810
Newell, 184.
Newell, 183.
812
Ogaga Okuyade, “Weaving Memories of Childhood: The New Nigerian Novel and the Genre of
the Bildungsroman,” Ariel 41.3&4 (2011): 138.
811
233
did not want to be regarded as “moralists, mouthpieces, catalysts of their people” 813 any
more, their politically engaged works reflected a deep moral concern.
As indicated above, the distinctive feature of the works produced after the year 1980
was a break with traditional realism. Ben Okri expresses his ideas about realism, claiming
that “I got tired of the traditional artifices and realism of the novel.”814 Although Amos
Tutuola was an author belonging to the first generation, he can be considered to be the first
writer to feel this “tiredness,” when Palm-Wine Drinkard is taken into account. With his
non-realist techniques and excellent use of Yoruba mythology, he created his own type of
magical realism. Emphasizing that Palm-Wine Drinkard was written fifteen years before the
publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Achebe proposes
“the beauty of [Tutuola’s] tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous
Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism.”815 Although Nnolim claims that Tutuola “leads
to a literary cul-de-sac for there is no writer on the Nigerian scene today who imitates or
copies him,”816 his criticism seems to be incorrect. With his magical realist style, Tutuola
shed light into the ways of the Nigerian experimentalists, including Ben Okri, and became a
great source of inspiration:
In a similar manner to Tutuola, contemporary avant garde authors
defy expectations about what “African literature” is or ought to be.
They introduce currents of indeterminacy to the recognized literary
tradition and force us to change the shape of the canon to reaccommodate Tutuola and other marginalized non-realist authors.817
While examining contemporary Nigerian fiction, Charles Nnolim suggests that the
contemporary Nigerian authors such as Maik Nwosu, Toni Kan Onwordi, Jonah Ageda,
813
Lilyan Kesteloot, quoted in Newell, 182.
Ben Okri, quoted in Newell, 185.
815
Achebe, There Was a Country, 113.
816
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 71.
817
Newell, 187.
814
234
Wale Okediran, Omo Uwaifo, Chim Newton, Fola Arthur-Worrey, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, Theodara Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, Promise Okekwe, and Bina Nengi-Ilagha, who
have produced their works between the year 2000 and the present, were also included in the
third generation of writers. According to Nnolim, “Ben Okri is the harbinger of the
contemporary Nigerian novel, the link between the old and the new” 818 and thus, the pioneer
of contemporary Nigerian authors in the twenty-first century. Chris Abani, a Nigerian author,
emphasizes the importance of Ben Okri and his oeuvre saying that “it was Ben Okri who
first articulated for my generation [the third generation] (and the one to come) how we could
begin the experiment and dialogue in what, for the first time, might be called a truly Nigerian
novel.”819 For Abani, Okri has opened new ways to the heart of Nigerian literature and
encouraged the new generation to search for its deeper literary possibilities employing their
power of imagination. Without losing a connection with the concerns such as colonialism
and neo-colonialism, Ben Okri has taught them to deal with more home-based but universal
subjects. Sharing the same ideas with Abani, Charles R. Larson also proffers that Okri has
made “quantum leaps forward” in his literary career and enlarged the possibilities of
narrative fiction at a time when most authors were “afraid to articulate matters of the soul in
public.”820
As suggested by Abani and Larson above, Ben Okri has created his own writing
style depending on imagination and spirituality and also giving a great place to morality and
politics. Seeking his inspiration in the oral Yoruba tradition – although he is a not a Yoruba
but an Urhobo, Ben Okri has become “the most brilliant example” 821 of the type of writing
introduced by his predecessors, Olorunfemi Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka:
For Bode Sowande, “Ben Okri stands on the shoulders of Fagunwa and Tutuola to extend the
818
Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 206.
Chris Abani, “Of Ancestors and Progeny: Moments in Nigerian Literature,” Black Issues Book
Review 8.6 (November/ December 2006): 24.
820
Charles R. Larson, “In Postcolonial Limbo,” Nation 262.21 (27 May 1996): 33.
821
Durix, 102.
819
235
view to horizons which never stop to move on,”822 and for Ato Quayson, Okri’s oeuvre
“operates within the same tradition of writing as Tutuola’s and Soyinka’s.”823 Thus,
following the footsteps of Fagunwa, Tutuola, and Soyinka, Okri “re-creates traditional West
African oral forms by his brave attempt to write “oraliture,” that is, through literary
strategies, to recreate orature, the performance of the oral tradition, on the printed page.” 824
Drawing from the oral tradition, Okri fuses the richly metaphorical, fantastic, and mystic
elements with realistic ones. In his books, all of which are in English, he makes much use of
Yoruba myths, folktales, and local beliefs. He focuses on the condition of post-colonial
Nigeria and reflects the country’s problems such as civil war, neo-colonialism, economic and
political corruption, social chaos, and economic desperation.
As a Nigerian-born, British-dwelling novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and
political activist, Ben Okri first started “consciously writing” 825 in 1976. He wrote his first
two novels Flowers and Shadows (published in 1980) and The Landscapes Within (published
in 1981) in the mid-to late 1970s. After the publication of his first two novels, Okri
published two short story collections: Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New
Curfew (1988). Meanwhile he continually wrote short stories, essays and poems that were
published in various journals and newspapers. To give a few examples, his short stories “In
Another Country” (1981) and “Fires Next Time Are Always Small Enough” (1983), and his
poems “I came on stage” (1980) and “For Julie” (1981) were all published in West Africa.
His essays, “Review of Amos Tutuola, The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town” (1983), “A
Saturday Service” (1988), and “Soyinka: A Personal View” (1986) were published in West
822
Bode Sowande, preface to The Quest for Democracy: Writings on Nigerian Literature in English,
ed. Francesca Rosati (Roma: Aracne, 2004), 14.
823
Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in the Work of
Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri (Oxford: James Currey and Indiana
UP, 1997), 121.
824
Arlene A. Elder, Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor & History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B.
Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera (Rochester NY: James Currey, Boydel & Brewer Ltd., 2009), 2.
825
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Jane Wilkinson, in Talking with African Writers: Interviews with
African Poets, Playwrigths & Novelists, ed. Jane Wilkinson (London: James Currey, 1992), 77.
236
Africa; “Out of Silence” (1984), “Colouring Book” (1984), and “Lagos Lament” (1986) in
New Statesman; “The Problems of Young Writers” (1978), in Daily Times.826 Okri was
awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa and the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize
for Fiction in 1987 for his novel Incidents at the Shrine, which was reissued in a revised
form under the title Dangerous Love in 1996 – Dangerous Love also brought another prize,
the Premio Palmi (Italy) to its author in 2000. Okri's short story collection, Stars of the New
Curfew was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. Although he had become a
prize-winning author by the 1990s, the real fame came to Ben Okri with the publication of
his third novel, The Famished Road, in 1991. Winning the Booker McConnell Prize for
Fiction on Tuesday, 22 October 1991, Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary
Prize in 1993, and Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) in 1994, The Famished Road
overshadowed the books that preceded it and provided the seeds for those that followed it.
Ben Okri and The Famished Road
The Famished Road, as the first novel of a cycle of that name, was published by
Jonathan Cape Ltd. in 1991. The novel was followed by Songs of Enchantment in 1993 and
Infinite Riches in 1998. Although Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches seem to be
sequels to The Famished Road as they repeat the characters, events, and themes, and their
storylines are consecutive in time, Okri has refused such generic classification, emphasizing
that “It is not a sequel. It’s a continuation of the dream.”827
As soon as The Famished Road appeared in the literary scene in 1991, it fell into a
polemical environment in which many critics attempted to allocate it to established literary
movements, trends and genres. The Famished Road has been mostly defined with national
labels as well as the theoretical categories such as post-colonialism, postmodernism and
magical realism. Some critics have also considered the novel to be a non-realist “mythopoeic
826
827
Robert Fraser, Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City (Devon, UK: Northcote House, 2002), 111-12.
Okri, quoted in Elder, 11.
237
discourse,”828 an “existentialist”829 text, “organic fantasy,”830 “shamanic realist,”831 “New
Age spiritualist,”832 and “spiritual realist”833 text. All these generalizations and
categorizations seem to disturb Ben Okri: “I never think of myself in terms of any
classification.”834 Once he warned his friend and biographer Robert Fraser saying, “For
God’s sake, don’t turn me into a post-anything.”835 Although he does not want to be labeled
especially with the terms beginning with the prefix “post,” most critics mention his name in
their discussions on magical realism, as the meeting point of post-colonialism and
postmodernism. For instance, Jennifer Wenzel suggests that
Ben Okri is the Anglophone African author most commonly
mentioned in critical discussions of magical realism as a global
literary phenomenon; Tutuola and Fagunwa are taken to be precursors
of West African magical realism who, nonetheless, lack cosmopolitan,
ironic distance from the “traditional” or “indigenous” materials that
tend to be identified as a primary source of the magic in magical
realism. 836
As proposed in Chapter I of this dissertation, hybridity should be discussed in the
first place while determining the magical realist aspects of a text. Referring to the hybrid
nature of Okri’s work, Jeremy Treglown, a British author and critic and the Chairman of the
828
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 121.
See Adnan Mahmutovic, Ways of Being Free: Authenticity and Community in Selected Works of
Rushdie, Ondaatje, and Okri (Amsterdam: Ropodi, 2012) and Adnan Mahmutovic, “History as the
Road of Existential Struggle in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1993),” Journal of Postcolonial
Cultures and Societies 1.3&4 (2010): 1-13.
830
See Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7.2 (May 2009): 275-86.
831
See Renato Oliva, “Re-Dreaming the World: Ben Okri’s Shamanic Realism,” in Coterminuos
Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti
et al., 171-96 (Amsterdam, NLD: Editions Ropodi B.V., 1999).
832
See Douglas McCabe, “Higher Realities: New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 1-21.
833
See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Spiritual Realism,” Nation 255.4 (August 1992):146-48.
834
Okri, quoted in Elder, 7.
835
Okri, quoted in Fraser, xi.
836
Jennifer Wenzel, “Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature,”
Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 456.
829
238
1991 Booker Prize judges, eulogizes Okri for his “distinctively black African way of writing
and seeing things in the mainstream of European fiction.”837 In his distinct type of magical
realism, the Nigerian Londoner Okri has constructed hybrid identities. As a result of the
circumstances of Okri’s growing up, he has had “a sense of the interpenetration of cultures,”
and in London, where he lives, he has managed to negotiate “a sense of identity in a
metropolitan diasporic environment.”838 His transnational novels reflect his diasporic
experiences, and his “educational hybridity,” that is, “his multi-cultural development as a
youth in Nigeria and England,” accounts for “his message of universal unity.”839 Okri
himself suggests that in him “Africa and Europe meet. I am a crossroads person, a child of
intersection.”840 As suggested by the author himself, his personal hybridity has had a great
influence in shaping his ideas and his work. Thus, his personal and artistic hybridity should
be taken as a useful key in understanding and analyzing his work. At this point, it is possible
to make a connection between Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. As indicated in Chapter II, García Márquez derives most of
his material from his own life and experiences, which makes it possible for his novel to be
read as a semi-autobiographical work. His artistic hybridity – that is, his combination of
myth and reality – prepares a place to exhibit and discuss the social, historical and political
problems of Colombia. Unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Famished Road cannot
be read as a semi-autobiographical novel. However, it follows the same way with García
Márquez’s work in representing the sociopolitical condition of Okri’s homeland, Nigeria and
the Nigerian nation. As suggested by Biodun Jeyifo,
837
Jeremy Treglown, quoted in Felicia Oka Moh, Ben Okri: An Introduction to His Early Fiction
(Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 2002), 14.
838
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 101.
839
Elder, 7.
840
Okri, quoted in Roy Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds,” The Guardian, Saturday, 2
August
1999,
accessed
3
February
2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/aug/21/1?INTCMP=SRCH.html.
239
Through his art and ruminations [Okri] sets down in a personal diary
[…] the disintegrative chaos in his family, the neighbourhood slum,
and the whole country. This may indeed be the quintessential
contribution of Okri’s fiction to the novelistic delineation of the
present predicament of our society; a mostly unsentimental depiction
of how the youthful generation of post-Civil War Nigeria came of age
through an embittering experience which leaves them lost and
floundering in a world they cannot comprehend. 841
Thus, it will be useful to start with short information about Ben Okri’s life story, as
has it been done with García Márquez’s in Chapter II, to prepare a sociopolitical, cultural
and historical background for the analysis of The Famished Road.
Benjamin (Ben) Okri was born in the town of Minna on the central Nigerian plateau
in the north of the country on Sunday, 15 March 1959. The year he was born was important
because it ended the last phase of the Nigerian people’s struggle to gain independence: “the
years of the immediate pre-independence decade were years of high hopes and expectations,
and the political struggle that had been conducted with an idealistic, nationalist fervor was
matched by a cultural nationalism.”842 On 1 October 1960, sixteen months and sixteen days
after Okri’s birth, British colonial rule granted self-government to Nigeria. His father and
mother were from different ethnic groups in Nigeria. His father, Silver Oghekeneshineke
Loloje Okri, was an Urhobo man and his mother Grace was a member of Mid-Western
(delta) Igbos. His father was working as a railway station clerk. One of Okri’s childhood
memories was later reflected in The Famished Road. He remembers his being lost in the
streets of Minna when he had just started walking. In The Famished Road, Azaro, the main
841
Biodun Jeyifo, quoted in Cooper, Magical Realism, 67-68.
Harry Garuba, “Ben Okri,” in Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers: Third
Series, ed. Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996), accessed 3
February 2011, GALE| H1200004198.
842
240
character, spends most of his time wandering and wondering, and the novel continuously
reflects in this state of mind of the protagonist in his quest for the highest meaning in life.
In 1961, Silver Okri, his father, left Nigeria to study law in London. Several months
later, his wife and four children, a daughter and three sons, joined him. Ben Okri was around
the age of a year and a half when the Okri family moved to London. The Okris started to live
in a suburb in north Peckham, London. Their financial condition was always bad. Ben Okri
started John Donne Primary School in September 1964, when he was five. Although he was
a member of an infant gang and a wild kid at school, his childhood years in London
influenced his spiritual development. He says “while here [in London] I lived, in spiritual
terms, on three levels. Schools and its [Christian] religious education. My parents’ [African]
traditional and religious beliefs. And then there was the world of my childhood, my reading
and thinking.”843 At John Donne School, he read Shakespeare, and the Greek and Arthurian
legends. It was also at John Donne School that Ben Okri first became acquainted with
racism. There were only two black students in the school. He started to realize they were
different from the white English students.
In July 1965, the Okri family decided to return to Nigeria when Silver Okri finished
his law school in London. Ben Okri was about seven when they settled in the Ajegunle slum
district of Lagos. Lagos was a great shock for him with its multidimensional world, but it
was also the place where Okri discovered the existence of different world views and ways of
seeing. In an interview, when Rowenna Davis asked Okri the biggest contrasts between
Nigeria and Britain that stuck him most when he was brought to Nigeria, Okri answered in
the following way:
I was struck by the vitality of Nigerian life, by the rich presence of
stories and myths, and by the multidimensional quality in the air.
There was, of course, a rich social and cultural life, but there was
843
Okri, “Mixing It,” interview with Bel Mooney, New Internationalist 370 (August 2004): 28.
241
another level as well: something semi-spiritual, semi-legendary. What
struck me about England was the order, the clarity and strength of the
society, the coherence, the logic. In Nigeria I saw something
approaching chaos, but it was richer for that. I have since found
myself in dialogue with these two poles, and have come to the
tentative conclusion that both poles need each other. Chaos needs
order, and order needs some myth to make it richer. But at the
moment the learning goes only one way. Nigeria is learning from
England, but there is a lot England can learn from Nigeria too. 844
The quotation above clearly shows that he started to formulate his ideas that would
later be a basis for his artistic hybridity. Never denying his split cultural identity, he always
tried to provide “constant harmonization and sychronisation” because “the fate of being a
child at intersection is that your life is a continual synthesis.”845
When the Okris arrived in Nigeria, the country was having bad times. The nation had
already started to fall apart. The ethnic tension and conflict reached its peak in 1967. Ben
Okri was eight when the Nigerian Civil War (the Biafran War) broke out. The hostilities
among the tribes were splitting the country down the middle and the Igbo people were being
blamed. It was the Nigerian Civil War that introduced Okri to the agonizing realities of
Nigeria that would become the main theme of his work. The Okris had to move from one
place to another to hide their Igbo mother. This early experience of a period of hiding,
repeated changes of address and the necessity of flight strengthened Okri’s consciousness of
the ethnic and political tensions in Nigeria. Although Ben Okri would never want to recollect
his terrifying memories during the war years, these memories revealed themselves in his
early works such as Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew, in which he writes
844
845
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Rowenna Davis, New Internationalist 443 (June 2011): 62.
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
242
about rivers full of swollen corpses and about civil citizens who are tortured for not speaking
the language of the enemy tribe. 846 The war, which was “a family thing,”847 taught him an
important lesson: he refused to “buy into anybody’s ideology or worldview. I can’t accept
any single creation myth. I’m entirely suspicious of majority perceptions. I know from my
own life it depends on who you are – what family, what race.”848 Another important lesson to
take for Ben Okri came from his experiences while living in the ghetto of Lagos. This
poorest part of the city became a great source of inspiration for Okri to portray urban poverty
and deprivation. Calling the ghetto-dwellers as “the great fantasists,” Okri says that “the
ghetto was the place I’ve felt at home because the terms on which everyone lives are so
transparent. There is one code. Survival – but survival with honour and style. There was an
extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left
is your belief in the imagination.”849 His father was working as a lawyer and defending the
rights of poor people, most of whom were the Okris’ neighbors:
There was a heartbreaking procession of people through our house
seeking justice. Living among the poor, I came up against murderers,
the semi-sane, people who’d had their legs chopped off in factories
and nobody would take their cases. It was a great education, and
inclined my heart towards the hard-done-by. I saw how easy it was to
trample on them, and how we carry on living as though they’re not
there. That pain never left me.850
846
See Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1991) and Okri, Stars of the New Curfew
(New York: Viking, 1988).
847
Okri, quoted in Juliet Rix, “Ben Okri: My Family Values,” The Guardian, Saturday, 26 June 2010,
accessed 3 February 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/26/ben-okri-familyvalues.html.
848
Okri, quoted in Maya Jaggi, “A Life in Writing: Free Spirit,” The Guardian, Saturday, 11 August
2007, accessed 3 February 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/11/fiction.benokri.html.
849
Okri, quoted in Fraser, 17.
850
Okri, quoted in Jaggi, “A Life in Writing.”
243
When the Biafra War broke out in 1967, Ben Okri travelled from Lagos to Sapele, a
town on the River Ethiope, to attend the Children’s Home Boarding School. From Sapele, he
was moved to Christ’s High School in Ibadan, which was relatively safe during the war. Okri
reports that “my education took place simultaneously with my relations being killed […] and
friends who one day got up in class and went out to fight the war.”851 Inevitably his
consciousness of violence and sense of loss would be reflected especially in his early work:
“you can’t write about Nigeria truthfully without a sense of violence. To be serene is to lie.
Relations in Nigeria are violent relations. It’s the way it is, for historical and all sorts of other
reasons.”852 When the War was over in 1970, Okri, then at the age of eleven, started to attend
Urhobo College in Warri. While living in such a turbulent atmosphere, Okri started to read
the books his father had brought from England. As he reveals to Jane Wilkinson, he did not
study literature at school as his primary interest was science. However, literature became his
hobby. Okri started reading folktales and myths of different cultures such as Greek myths,
Roman myths, German myths and African myths. While reading the Greek philosophers, his
father told him that Africa has got everything: “it’s got Aristotle, it’s got Plato, it’s got all
these things and more.”853 Thus, Okri learnt that “sages, old teachers, priests of our
[indigenous African] oracles, our herbalists, our village elders” who “are scattered all over
the place”854 are all African philosophers and they are as profound as the Greek and Roman
philosophers. Consequently, from an early age, he absorbed Western culture in a hybrid way,
intermingling Greek, Roman, and African myths and without separating one culture from
another: “Aladdin was as African to me as Ananse. Odysseus was just another variation of
the tortoise myth.”855 Later on, as well as Western classics he started to read from the great
African traditions, including the works of Nigerians such as Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe,
851
Okri, quoted in Fraser, 18.
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 81.
853
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 77.
854
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
855
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 78.
852
244
and Wole Soyinka, and the Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Okri’s most important influences
were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo. The influence of his mother,
Grace Okri, on his fascination with traditional African literature was undeniable as well.
Like Gabriel García Márquez’s grandmother, Okri’s mother was always telling him stories,
which was actually her way of educating her children. When they returned to their
homeland, his father, who was a devout evangelical Christian in England, returned to his
ancestors’ religion, animism, which is the “belief in the existence of living forces in all the
dimensions of material life and also within death, forces which are seen to comprise an
intricate and indivisible mosaic of the universe” and which “contests the divide between the
human and the divine, the animate and inanimate, objects and humans.”856 His father’s reconversion to animism was also influential on Okri’s understanding of Africa. It became a
“seriously revolutionary moment” in his life: “It made me see that Africa can’t be looked at
truthfully through an external ideology. You can’t wander through the marketplace without
noticing both the market women and the goddesses they believe in. […] I realised you
cannot evoke a place truly till you find a tone, a narrative, in tune with the dimensions of that
place. You can’t use Jane Austen to tell stories about Africa.857
For Okri, the education of the schools he attended in Nigeria was a “part of the
colonial legacy.”858 Thinking that neither school could satisfy his intellectual hunger, he left
school at the age of fourteen. Meanwhile, he studied to take his higher education degree
privately and to enter a Nigerian university to study natural science. He worked as a clerk in
the commercial division of ICI, which was a paint company. He had been writing since he
was eleven years old. However, he claims that he started to write “consciously” in the mid1970s after he failed to enter a university in his country. He started to write articles for the
newspapers at the time of great corruption in Nigeria. His first article was published in 1976
856
Cooper, Magical Realism, 40.
Okri, quoted in Jaggi, “A Life in Writing.”
858
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
857
245
when he was seventeen. From the very beginning, in his writing, he reflected his awareness
of social inequality and injustice in Nigeria: “out of indignation and frustration I wrote about
a social injustice.”859 In his journalism, his main topics became poverty, injustice, the
condition of ghetto-dwellers, and the indifference of the corrupt governments to the pains of
Nigerian people.
Carrying the manuscript of his first novel Flowers and Shadows with him, Okri left
his country in 1978: “I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. […] I
went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.”860 He got the chance to attend the evening
classes in Afro-Caribbean literature at Goldsmiths College. With the help of Jane Grant, his
tutor at the college, in July 1980, Flowers and Shadows was published by Longman’s
Drumbeat series, which had been publishing the books of African writers since 1979. When
his first novel was published, Okri was twenty-one years old. He won a scholarship from the
Nigerian government and started studying comparative literature at Essex University.
However, he could not finish the university, for in his second year at university his
scholarship was cancelled because of the economic crisis in Nigeria. He moved to London
and lived in the streets without any money, but he would remember the bad times with
gratitude and think that all the sufferings contributed to his being a writer. Thanks to his
experiences of anxiety, poverty, hunger, homelessness, fear, and his attempts to fight against
all the misunderstandings and racial insults, the way he saw the relations between things
started to change: “I brought with me an African consciousness and, over the years of being
here, that consciousness has been interpolated by European consciousness. I see things that I
didn’t see before.”861
859
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 78.
Okri, quoted in Fraser, 37.
861
Okri, “The Books Interview: Ben Okri,” interview with Sophie Elmhirst, New Statesman 141.5099
(2 April 2012): 41.
860
246
When Okri’s oeuvre is examined from the beginning with the present day, we see
that his artistic route evolved from “realism combined with modernist narrative methods,
through bold experimentation with oral models of storytelling, to the innovative use of
allegory.”862 Blending his African consciousness with European consciousness, in his first
two novels, Flowers and Shadows and The Landscapes Within, Okri reflected corruption and
the squalor it nurtured in Nigeria. Both novels have their roots in the realist and modernist
traditions.
From 1983 to 1985, Ben Okri worked as a broadcaster and presenter of BBC African
Service’s magazine program, Network Africa, and from 1983 to 1986, as poetry editor for the
weekly magazine West Africa. In this period, he also wrote articles for the left-wing
periodical the New Statesman about racism and the position of a minority artist in a
metropolitan and multicultural society. During the mid-1980s, Okri focused on writing his
short-story collections, Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew. Departing from
traditional realist and modernist techniques, Okri employed new fictional techniques in
them: the application of traditional African oral storytelling and the use of dreams,
metaphors, folklore-inspired figures, and some shamanistic images. These stories opened the
way for the innovative novels that came next.
While writing The Famished Road, Okri, as an African-born citizen of Europe, was
completely ready to melt his experiences of diaspora and the metropolis with his African
experiences. In The Famished Road, “the Booker Prize-winning novel of shocking power
and freshness – a modern classic,”863 Okri’s ability in traditional oral storytelling and his
spirituality reached their peak. His diaspora experiences taught him that reality was multi-
862
Magdalena Maczynska, “Ben Okri,” Magill’s Survey of World Literature, revised edition (January
2009), accessed 4 October 2012, accession number: 103331MSW12569850000255.
863
Jay Parini, “Introducing the Stoku,” The Guardian, Saturday, 25 April 2009, accessed 3 February
2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/25/tales-of-freedom-ben-okri.html.
247
layered. His aim was to “catch as many layers of reality as [he] could.”864 With his talent of
African oral storytelling, he started to investigate different layers of reality in his classic, The
Famished Road.
The publication of The Famished Road, as one of the finest African novels within
the postcolonial tradition, “may well prove as significant for the evolution of the postmodern
African novel as Mr. Achebe’s novel was for the beginning of the tradition itself, or as One
Hundred Years of Solitude was for the novel in Latin America.”865 The success of the novel
has secured Ben Okri’s reputation as a lyric, multicultural, postmodern, and postcolonial
author. As suggested by Blake G. Hobby, “the strength of the novel lay in the combining of
surreal narrative techniques, Yoruba mythology, Nigerian oral lore, and conventions of the
European novel.”866 In the novel, Okri integrates “without assimilating or prioritizing
African mythopoesis and European literary realism.”867 Hence, combining Western literary
modes “with modes of narration informed by Africa’s powerful tradition of oral and mythic
narrative,”868 he accomplishes “a new version of classical mythology.”869 Consequently,
Okri’s The Famished Road has taken its place “in the grand tradition of myth-making
exemplified in [García Márquez’s] One Hundred Years of Solitude and [Salman Rushdie’s]
Midnight’s Children although the book has a vision and voice uniquely its own.”870
In The Famished Road, Ben Okri returns to “the themes and structures of traditional
Yoruba mythology and the relatively little-known achievements of the Yoruba novel,” 871 he
864
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 82.
Henry Louis Jr. Gates, “Between the Living and the Unborn,” review of The Famished Road by
Ben Okri, The New York Times Book Review, 28 June 1992, accessed 3 February 2011, GALE|
H1420006106.
866
Blake G. Hobby, “The Famished Road by Ben Okri,” in Booker Prize Novels: 1969-2005, ed.
Merritt Moseley (Detroit: Gale, 2006), accessed 3 February 2011, GALE| H1220000941.
867
Ann-Barbara Graff, “Ben Okri,” In British Novelists Since 1960: Fourth Series, ed. Merritt
Moseley (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), accessed 3 February 2011, GALE|H1200009802.
868
Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
869
Jeremy Treglown, “Past Glories Prove Elusive,” Spectator 290.9086 (28 September 2002): 68-69.
870
Ben Brown, “Some Day Her Prince Will Come,” The Observer, Sunday, 19 August 2007, accessed
3 February 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/19/fiction.benokri.html.
871
Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
865
248
re-works and reconstructs Yoruba folktales that come together to constitute the novel’s
central action which is presented in the mythic form. The most important myth of the novel
is the myth of abiku child872 as the primary concern of the mainline narrative is the
experiences, wanderings, dreams, nightmares, emotions, and motivations of its young
protagonist, an abiku child, through whom Okri scrutinizes his Nigerian society. As one of
the famous myths of southern Nigeria, the myth of an abiku child serves as a unifying
principle in the novel. The myth helps Okri to convey his universal message. As explained
by Soyinka, an abiku is “a child which is born, dies, is born again and dies in a repetitive
cycle.” He or she is a “wanderer” child: “It is the same child who dies and returns again and
again to plague the mother.”873 In the traditional Yoruba and Ijo belief, abiku phenomenon,
as the word abiku suggests “a + bi + ku [one + born + (to) die],”874 refers to spirit-childrenborn-to-die, and many ethnic groups in Nigeria have different versions of the myth: “abiku is
called ‘aziku’ among Auchi people of Edo State […]; the Urhobo equivalent to abiku is
‘eda’; the Igbo of south-.eastern Nigeria refer to these spirit-children as ‘ogbanje’; the Ibibio
call them ‘eyen aman akpa’; and the Hausa refer to the same beings as ‘dankoma jeka
kadawo.’”875 During the 1960s, many Nigerian authors such as the Yoruba Wole Soyinka,
the Igbo Chinua Achebe, and the Ijo John Pepper Clark-Bekederimo made use of this myth
in their works. According to the myth, “abiku babies torment their mothers by being spirits
in the guise of babies, spirits who repeatedly are born, only to die and return to the spirit
world.”876 According to Fraser, “when a mother loses several babies in succession, the same
872
See McCabe, “Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku,’” Research
in African Literatures 33.1 (Spring 2002): 45-74; Christopher N. Okonkwo, “A Critical Divination:
Reading Sula as Ogbanje-Abiku,” African American Review 38.4 (2004): 651-68, and Chikwenye
Okonjo Ogunyemi, “An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas: A Pre-Text for Rereading Soyinka’s Ake and
Morrison’s Beloved,” African American Review 36.4 (2002): 663-78.
873
Wole Soyinka, quoted in Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
874
Aizenberg, “‘I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity,” World
Literature Today 73.3 (Summer 1999): 465.
875
Abiodun Adeniji, Ben Okri: The Quest for an African Utopia (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM
Verlag Dr. Müller GmbH & Co. KG, 2011), 39.
876
Cooper, Magical Realism, 68.
249
child has returned to her womb to delight and to plague her. Such ‘abiku’ children are both
honoured and feared. At birth, rituals are performed to encourage them to stay; if they die in
infancy, the corpse is scarified to discourage a reappearance.”877 Quayson gives a more
detailed explanation of abiku children:
The abiku phenomenon refers to a child in an unending cycle of
births, deaths and rebirths. […] The concept of abiku is what may be
described as a “constellar concept” because it embraces various
beliefs about predestination, reincarnation and the relationship
between the real world and that of spirits. However, in terms of the
rituals that are geared towards appeasing the abiku, the concept also
implies a belief in the inscrutability and irrationality of the Unknown.
It is of the utmost importance to be able to locate where the abiku
child hides the charms that link it to its spirit companions on the other
side for the proper rites to be carried out to snap that connection. Until
that is done, the abiku’s parents, and indeed, the community at large,
are at the mercy of the disruptive and arbitrary cycle of births, deaths
and re-births of the spirit-child. Chidi Maduka (1987) points out that
in fact the word ogbanje in the Igbo language is used to denote a
person who acts in a weird, capricious, callous and even sadistic
way. 878
The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro, one of these abiku children. Azaro is the
child protagonist of the novel. The story is told from Azaro’s perspective. Through Azaro the
narrator, Okri presents the abiku as “a distinctly African archetype, one who in his liminal
877
878
Fraser, 68.
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 122-23.
250
state would appear to be an ideal example of postcolonial duality.”879 Azaro is introduced as
an abiku child, or spirit child, who has an ambiguous existence wandering between the
realms of the living and the dead. Although he shuttles between the two realms, he seems to
fully belong to neither of them. He is destined to go through the regular cycle of birth, death
and rebirth. As “a child of miracles,”880 he breaks the pact that forces him to go back to the
spirit world, rejects his abiku destiny and prefers to remain in the realm of the living:
It may simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going.
It is terrible to forever remain in-between. It may also have been that I
wanted to taste of this world, to feel it, suffer it, know it, to love it, to
make a valuable contribution to it, and to have that sublime mood of
eternity in me as I live the life to come. But I sometimes think it was a
face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the bruised
face of the woman who would become my mother. 881
Never heeding the call and even the threats of his spirit companions, who want him
to return, he continuously and restlessly moves between the spirit and human realms. He
lives with his mother and father as the beloved only-child of the poor family in a leaky
apartment room in a slum. His father works as a day laborer, carrying huge bags of salt and
cement, and his mother as a street-seller, selling her objects of trade in the marketplace.
While wandering around, Azaro witnesses the chaotic life of his people, their struggle to
survive, their sufferings, political violence around them, and material deprivation in a rural
area near the capital city of an African country. Besides his wanderings in the world of the
living, he is always in contact with the world of the dead. He sees his spirit friends and
speaks to them. As “an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the
879
Margaret Cezair-Thompson, “Beyond the Postcolonial Novel: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and
Its ‘Abiku’ Traveller,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.2 (1996), accessed 3 February 2011,
GALE| H1100072521.
880
Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage, 1991), 10.
881
Okri, The Famished Road, 6.
251
living and the dead,”882 Azaro reflects the abiku multiplicity, as he encompasses all his past,
his present, and possible future lives within himself: “I had a clear memory of my life
stretching to other lives. There were no distinctions. Sometimes I seemed to be living several
lives at once. One lifetime flowed into the others and all of them flowed into my
childhood.”883 Moreover, he is clairvoyant having the ability of foretelling possible future
events and disasters. In the novel, Azaro functions not only as the narrator or participant in
the actions, but also as “a symbol of modern Nigeria, even of Africa as a whole.”884
The Famished Road is set at the historical moment of independence from colonial
rule of Britain and “in the shadow of the corruption, violence, bloodshed and civil war that
will plague his country over the ensuing twenty-five years.”885 According to Fraser, “in
Nigerian terms, it might be seen as taking place between late 1959 (the year of Okri’s birth)
and Independence Day in October 1960.”886 So, the novel depicts the social and political
situation of Nigeria on the brink of self-government. This historical moment reveals Okri’s
concern with the cultural and social energies freed by Nigeria’s Independence. For the
setting of the novel, Okri seems to deploy his experiences in the slum Ajegunle, where he
lived as a small boy between 1972 and 1978. Azaro and his family live in a slum resembling
Ajegunle. The people of the slum, together with Azaro’s family, continuously “suffer under
the hands of a merciless landlord, […] toil with their bodies for meager wages, and […]
know the political world as a series of intrusions, campaigns that upset their lives, literally
poison their stomachs, and leave them embittered.”887
882
Okri, The Famished Road, 558.
Okri, The Famished Road, 8.
884
Elder, 11.
885
Cooper, “Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool
Library and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999),
accessed 3 February 2011, GALE| H1100072523.
886
Fraser, 68-69.
887
Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
883
252
As a result of the myth-making tendency of popular history, like One Hundred Years
of Solitude, The Famished Road contains some biblical allusions. Sharing the same tendency
with García Márquez, Okri takes advantage of the parallelism between the mythologies of
Christianity and those of African religions and cultures because both share “the same
paradigm of supernatural power and miraculous cures and feats.”888 As the novel represents a
nation on the verge of birth, myths of origins both from African and Western cultures
become handy devices to incorporate: “These are the myths of beginnings. These are stories
and moods deep in those who are seeded in rich lands, who still believe in mysteries.”889 The
biblical attributions such as the protagonist’s nickname “Azaro,” the metaphors of road and
the flood are reinforced by immediate attributions to African mythology. At the beginning of
the novel, after his miraculous recovery, his parents name the abiku child a second time – yet
we are not informed about his real (first) name. He is named Lazaro as a nickname: “But as I
became the subject of much jest, and as many were uneasy with the connection between
Lazaro and Lazarus, Mum shortened my name to Azaro.”890 As seen in the quotation, Azaro
is the shortened form of the Biblical Lazarus, “described in St John’s gospel being raised
from the dead by Christ.”891 Azaro is “an abiku child buried as dead, then raised, like a
zombie; hence his name, Lazaro”892 refers to Lazarus. His parents change his name to evade
the echo of the tale of the biblical Lazarus:
This renaming is significant because The Famished Road is a novel of
resurrections and returns, of rebirths and cycles. After his resurrection
Azaro must face the daunting task of coming to terms with suffering.
As he and the reader come to understand, the suffering is that of
Africa; the survival of the continent, especially in a turbulent,
888
Cooper, Magical Realism, 44.
Okri, The Famished Road, 6.
890
Okri, The Famished Road, 9.
891
Fraser, 67.
892
Aizenberg, “I Walked with a Zombie,” 465.
889
253
transitional time, lies in preserving the African consciousness – the
spiritual, aesthetic, and mythic structures that connect it with its past,
bear it in the present, and afford it a future. 893
Thus, the Western intertext of biblical Lazarus is fundamental as it strengthens the allegory
of abiku and makes it easy for non-African readers to comprehend the African viewpoint.
The other significant Biblical attribution in The Famished Road is the metaphor of
the road, which also becomes the title of the book. In the opening sentences of the novel,
Azaro starts to speak with a biblical overtone, “playing upon the logocentric metaphor of
John’s Gospel”894 and draws the genesis of life on earth to riverine sources: “IN THE
BEGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the
whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”895 Reminiscent
of Macondo’s introduction as an earthly paradise in its primordial form in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, the first sentence of The Famished Road, which is uttered in “the language
of the Bible, the language of myth and creation stories,”896 gives the clues for the overall
style of the novel and reveals its mystic and mythic possibilities. Okri continuously blurs the
semantic connection between the main motifs “river” and “road” throughout the novel,
which, in effect, suggests that the clear-cut descriptions of the connection between the
physical and spiritual only transitorily exist. The title of Okri’s novel echoes Wole Soyinka’s
lyrical poem “Death in the Dawn”:
The right foot for joy, the left, dread
And the mother prayed, Child
May you never walk
893
Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
John C. Hawley, “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity,” Research in
African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 37.
895
Okri, The Famished Road, 3.
896
Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
894
254
When the road waits, famished.897
As explained by Fraser, “this much-anthologized elegy describes its author driving
through morning mists along the then narrow – and still treacherous – road between Ibadan
and Lagos in 1960. At the time of its writing Soyinka was living in Ibadan whilst directing
his Independence play A Dance of the Forest in Lagos 100 miles to the south; he had to rise
early in one city to attend rehearsals in the other.”898 In Soyinka’s poem, a mother prays that
her child may “never walk/ When the road waits, famished.” The road is depicted to be full
of dangers and it leads to death, yet it also has many wonders. Five years later, Soyinka
developed his ideas in his drama The Road. Borrowing from Soyinka’s work, Okri’s poetic
epic reveals the mystical, magical, and spiritual journey of Azaro, who “travels a road that
day by day invades the forest, brings danger to his homeland, and threatens to annihilate
African culture.”899 As opposed to Soyinka’s road, Okri’s road will not give the spirit-child
any harm: “The road will never swallow you. The river of your destiny will always
overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will
make you stronger. Success will never confuse you or scatter your spirit, but will make you
fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.”900 When Okri is asked
about the connection between Soyinka’s road and his famished road in an interview by Jane
Wilkinson, he proposes that “there is no connection. My road is quite different. My road is a
way. It’s a road that is meant to take you from one place to another, on a journey, towards a
destination.” According to Wilkinson, Okri’s road includes two processes: one is a journey
or way that take a person from one place to another and the other is a labyrinthine road that
circles around itself. Sounding a bit like Bakhtin, his road “really refers to the cycle of
897
Soyinka, quoted in Fraser, 67.
Fraser, 67.
899
Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
900
Okri, The Famished Road, 56-57.
898
255
coming and going, the abiku cycle, the road of birth and death and life.”901 The concept of
road is very flexible in the novel. In addition to the literal road, it is also represented as a
river, and a mythical giant, The King of the Road. It represents not only the spiritual journey
of the characters but also the struggles for the nation’s independence. The road metaphor is
strongly tied to the metaphor of hunger because this “famished” road is plagued by hunger
and often cruelly gulps its own people: “The road swallows people and sometimes at night
you can hear them calling for help, begging to be freed from inside its stomach.”902 Like the
road metaphor, the metaphor of hunger is also versatile. Sometimes it represents the real
hunger of poor people living in the slum, and sometimes “the greed of the powerful, the
deprivation of the powerless, and the spiritual yearning of a suffering people.”903
According to Okri, art is a sociopolitical device to provide change and improvement:
“in an atmosphere of chaos art has to disturb something.”904 Thus, The Famished Road
becomes Okri’s political agent to reflect the chaotic atmosphere of Nigeria on the eve of
independence and to reveal the chaos disturbing the country and its people. Through all its
characters – especially the spirit-child Azaro, being a symbol of Nigeria and by extension of
Africa – and volatile symbols, The Famished Road reflects appalling real-life experiences of
famine, deprivation, and social and political corruption. It deals with the challenging forces
that disturbed Nigeria before and after its birth as an independent nation. In consequence, it
exhibits Okri’s idea that Nigerian postcolonial national healing is an urgent necessity. While
crowded with myth and politics, The Famished Road foregrounds spiritual and philosophical
concerns to “redefine the world human beings inhabit and argue for increased interplay
between physical and spiritual in a modern technologized world.”905 Dedicating his novel to
all people who suffer yet always continue dreaming, and considering himself to be a
901
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 83.
Okri, The Famished Road, 142.
903
Maczynska, “Ben Okri,” 103331MSW12569850000255.
904
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 81.
905
Bill Hemminger, “The Way of the Spirit,” Research in African Literatures 32.1 (Spring 2001): 67.
902
256
“universal spiritualist,”906 Okri has several times emphasized the universal nature of The
Famished Road: “The idea of the spiritual realm is not unique to Nigeria. […] I have said
this often. I find it in many cultures. I found it in German. I find it in Irish. I find it in old
English legends. I found it in, if you like, even Greek legends. I wouldn’t have the serenity
or – or even the sustenance to struggle with so much writing it if I didn’t feel that it has this
universal connection.”907 Henry Louis Gates suggests that in The Famished Road, “Ben
Okri, by plumbing the depths of Yoruba mythology, has created a political fable about the
crisis of democracy in Africa and throughout the modern world. More than that, however, he
has ushered the African novel into its own post-modern era through a compelling extension
of traditional oral forms that uncover the future in the past.”908 To add to Gates’s words, The
Famished Road has been one of the best postcolonial and postmodern novels reflecting
Okri’s belief in art as a sociopolitical device of change and improvement by combining
African oral and European literary traditions with a humanitarian and universal vision.
The Famished Road as a Magical Realist Text
Since The Famished Road appeared in the literary scene, there have been many
attempts to categorize it in terms of current narrative traditions. Some critics have
investigated the way in which the novel employs traditional African culture and literature by
comparing it with the works of Okri’s Nigerian predecessors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka, Amos Tutuola and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, and searching for the effects of
these authors in Okri’s oeuvre.909 Some have read the novel as a postmodern and
906
Okri, quoted in Jaggi, “A Life in Writing.”
Okri, quoted in Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
908
Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
909
See Gillian Gane, “The Forest and the Road in Novels by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri,”
Alternation 14.2 (2007): 40-52; Boehmer, “Achebe and His Influence”, 141-153; Laura Murphy, “In
the Bush of Ghosts: Specters of the Slave Trade in West African Fiction,” Research in African
Literatures 38.4 (Winter 2007): 141-52, and Mounira Soliman, “From Past to Present and Future: The
Regenerative Spirit of the Abiku,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 24 (2004): 149-68.
907
257
postcolonial text.910 According to Warnes, these two groups of criticism have mutually
pointed “inwards towards Africa,” as they studied the novel in its African cultural context,
putting emphasis on African mythology and literature. A third group of critics and
academicians have emphasized the places “where Okri’s novel opens out onto global and
generic literary, cultural, ecological and geopolitical discourses” and thus, they have pointed
“outwards to the wider world.”911 This third group of criticism has considered the novel in
terms of the non-realist narrative strategies it deploys.912 Common to this group of critics and
academicians is that they carefully and strictly avoid using the term “magical realism” in
their Okri criticism. However, their definitions, explanations, and descriptions of The
Famished Road closely echo the well-known definitions of magical realism discussed in the
first chapter of this dissertation. For instance, when the following sentences from Quayson’s
much-quoted work, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, are taken into
consideration, it is clear that Quayson is actually talking about is magical realism: “esoteric
passages in the novel […] are connected to events in the putative real world of the story,”913
“the distinction between the esoteric and the real are deliberately blurred, the narrative
suggests that in its universe of discourse it is difficult to differentiate the one from the
other,”914 and “the context in which the real world and that of spirits is explored is not in an
either/ or framework […] both real world and that of spirits are rendered problematically
910
See Ogunsanwo, “Intertextuality,” 42-52; Bill Ashcroft, “Remembering the Future: Utopianism in
African Literature,” Textual Practice 23.5 (October 2009): 703-22; Mabiala Justin- Robert Kenzo,
“Religion, Hybridity, and the Construction of Reality in Postcolonial Africa,” Exchange 33.3 (2004):
244-68, and Andrew Smith, “Ben Okri and the Freedom Whose Walls Are Closing In,” Race and
Class 47.1 (July-September 2005): 1-13.
911
Warnes, 124.
912
See Quayson, Strategic Transformations; Elder, Narrative Shape-Shifting; Oluwasegun Samuel
Adegoke, The Transformation of Realism in Selected Works of Ben Okri: The Famished Road, Songs
of Enchantment and Infinite Riches (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM, 2011), and Owoeye Durojaiye
Kehinde, Reconstructing the Postcolony Through Literature of Fantasy: Fantasy Confronts Realism
in Selected Novels of Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie (Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP, 2011).
913
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 121.
914
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 136.
258
equivalent in his experience.”915 Although Quayson carefully avoids the use of the term
magical realism in Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, in his essay “Magical
Realism and the African Novel” he declares Okri as an author who has provided “the most
sophisticated expression of magical realism in African literature today.”916
While discussing The Famished Road as a magical realist text, Cooper proposes that
African writers tend to reject the label of magical realism. One reason
for this perhaps is that it implies the slavish imitation of Latin
America. It suggests a denial, in other words, of local knowledge and
beliefs, language and rhetoric; it seems to perpetuate imperialist
notions that nothing new, intellectually or spiritually, originated in
Africa. But, […] local context is of central importance in magical
realist writing. Marquez was deeply influenced by the worldviews and
ways of life of the mixed populations of African, Indian and Spanish
descent of his tropical Caribbean zone of Columbia. Salman Rushdie’s
fictions can only be partially appreciated without a deep knowledge of
India’s religions and attendant politics. Likewise, the West African
novels […] are moulded and constructed out of West African cultural
and religious heritages.917
As if he wanted to prove Cooper’s contention, Okri has many times refused to be
labeled by the term magical realism. Fraser, for instance, reports one of his memories. When
he once asked Okri his ideas about magical realism and García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude, Okri replied non-committally saying that: “It’s all right […]. But you
915
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 124.
Quayson, “Magical Realism and the African Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African
Novel, ed. F. Abiola Irele (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009), 172.
917
Cooper, Magical Realism, 37.
916
259
know what it amounts to in the end?” Fraser says that “with weary tolerance [Okri] droned
down the telephone line the quaint but repetitious melody of Ravel’s interminable Boléro.”918
Gerald Gaylard, in After Colonialism, notes that both postcolonialism and magical
realism mean “Third World postmodernism,” and “postcolonial African fiction can be
described as African postmodernism.”919 Gaylard explains the connection between Latin
American magical realism and African magical realism as follows:
Africa and South America, whilst geographically remote, have been
linked historically by the slave trade, so that many of the cultural
beliefs and practices […] have their roots in Africa. One could even
argue that Africa lurks in the background of South American magical
realism; Márquez’s fiction, for instance, has been concerned with
speaking and arguing for the hot “African” Caribbean zone of
Colombia. Moreover, the continents have suffered similarly at the
hands of colonialism, experiencing bloody decolonization struggles
and neo-colonial aftermaths and continuing to occupy low positions in
the pecking order of globalization today. These congruent postcolonial
antinomies have existed in the realm of the cultural too, so that South
American magical realism is perhaps one of the strongest literary
influences on current African writers. Both sets of writers have
responded with similar attempts at syncretism between the antinomies
extant in their societies.920
In her discussion of the comparative Latin American-African approach, Edna
Aizenberg examines The Famished Road in the context of Latin American magical realism.
918
Fraser, 9.
Gerald Gaylard, After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism (Johannesburg:
Wits UP, 2005), 36.
920
Gaylard, 172-73.
919
260
She considers magical realism archetypally and originally a Latin American form of fiction.
She argues that Latin American magical realism became the first literary mode to challenge
the hegemony of the center. It spread its effect throughout the world “by forcing the center to
imitate the periphery” and “by allowing a vibrant, innovative intertextuality of the margins –
between Latin America and Africa.” Drawing attention to the developmental history of
magical realism, Aizenberg mentions four phases of magical realism: Franz Roh’s
Magischer Realismus used to describe post-Expressionist Central European art, Alejo
Carpentier’s and Miguel Angel Asturias’s ontological magical realism developed under the
influence of, but at the same time as a reaction to the Surrealism of Andre Breton, whose
emphasis was on the unconscious and the primitive, magical realism during the Boom
movement, with García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the best example.
García Márquez’s novel gives way to the last phase of magical realism which is identified by
Aizenberg as “magical realism's international or postcolonial moment.” Aizenberg proposes
that magical realism and the Négritude movement developed from many common urges.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the forerunners of both magical realism (such as Alejo
Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias) and the Négritude movement (such as Léopold Sédar
Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas) were in dialogue with each other to find an
alternative to European literature “to vindicate pre-colonial, preindustrial societies,” “to
validate indigenous universes,” and to find solutions to the questions of cultural identity.
With these aims in mind, and expressing their longing for authentic modes of expression, the
Latin American and African intellectuals focused their attention on the indigenous cultures
of their continents to discover and assert what was unique to them. During the 1960s, to be
exact, in the period of growing cosmopolitanism, urbanization, and industrialization, García
Márquez followed the attempts of his predecessors and recreated Carpentier’s idea of the
marvelous nature of the Latin American reality. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García
Márquez, influenced by the local elements of Afro-Caribbean-coastal Colombia,
261
“Borgesianly” examines “the colonialist mental constructs” through which the West looked
down upon Latin America and its peoples by categorizing it as magical:
García Márquez manipulates the discourse of the marvelous in order
to reproduce, puncture, and overcome the unreality imposed by the
colonialist enterprise. This enterprise first read the New World
through the distorted glass of a European imperialism fed by a
medieval worldview, and it went on doing so, even though it was the
persistence of the “fabulous” stereotypes and the ongoing madness of
a colonialist history that kept Latin America “magical.” García
Márquez sharpens magical realism’s postcolonial face through the
text’s disjunctive (magical/ realist) narrative language, a language that
foregrounds the spatio-temporal discontinuities and socio-economic
deliriums resulting from colonialism. Salient examples of his
foregrounding are the magical writerly locales – the gypsy-seer
Melquíades’s room, the Catalonian’s bookshop, Gabriel’s hotel room
– all condensed postcolonial time-spaces in which the author mixes
epochs, objects, authors, languages in a provocative freewheeling that
undercuts solemnity and erodes the potency of the metropolis. 921
As seen in the quotation, Aizenberg suggests that García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude became a forerunner for the broad area of postcolonial magical realism,
which embraces miscellaneous extensive cultural ingredients and thus increases the mode’s
ability to condemn “foreign colonialisms and domestic neocolonialisms.” Aizenberg
includes Ben Okri’s work in the fourth phase of magical realism – that is, postcolonial
magical realism, claiming that in The Famished Road,
921
Aizenberg, “The Famished Road,” GALE| H1100072520.
262
[…] there is a noisy conversation among Okri, García Márquez, a
powerful Borges, a powerful Soyinka, Fagunwa, Tutuola, Achebe, and
countless more. We might say that Latin Americans helped Okri to
release energies already present in Africa and African literature, to
move traditions of contemporary African literature ahead by
combining a look homeward with a look abroad – albeit an “abroad”
not entirely unfamiliar, just as Africa was not entirely unfamiliar to
the Latin Americans. 922
Aizenberg seems correct in her discussion because, as discussed earlier, it has been
impossible for Ben Okri, as an author in whom many rivers meet, not to be influenced by his
Nigerian, European, and Latin American predecessors and contemporaries. Aizenberg’s
ideas are echoed when Alan Riach comments that The Famished Road is “Okri’s most
haunting, entertaining, and challenging work to date. It is as if Soyinka and Amos Tutuola
had coauthored a work with the South American magic realists Borges and [García]
Marquez, although there is also a singularly elegant lightness of touch and a constancy of
pace.”923
In an interview with Jean W. Ross, when he is asked the difference between Latin
American writers’ and his work, Okri claims that
The difference is this: the Latin American writers – let’s be quite
honest – are largely European Latin American writers. Their writing
has, as it were, come through the journey of symbolism, surrealism,
and then come right around to the reality of that particular place.
That’s very different from what I am saying. Whereas in Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude there’s a scene in
922
Aizenberg, “The Famished Road,” GALE| H1100072520.
Alan Riach, “Ben Okri: Overview,” in Contemporary Novelists, ed. Susan Windisch Brown, 6th
edition (New York: St. James Press, 1996), accessed 3 February 2011, GALE| H1420006102.
923
263
which the woman flies, in my book you have an effect where the kid
sees spirits. If you accept the basic premise that this kid is an abiku, a
spirit child, it’s not unnatural that he would see spirits. If all the
characters were to see spirits, that would be pushing it a bit, as far as
Western thinking is concerned. I’m looking at the world in The
Famished Road from the inside of the African world view, but without
it being codified as such. This is just the way the world is seen: the
dead are not really dead, the ancestors are still part of the living
community and there are innumerable gradations of reality, and so on.
It’s quite simple and straightforward. I’m treating it naturally. It’s a
kind of realism, but a realism with many more dimensions. 924
Okri reflects his West African world view and belief systems as “[his] own
philosophy, but part of the African aesthetic.”925 Okri proposes that his reactions are very
Nigerian. Reminiscent of the language philosophy of the Austrian-British philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Okri asserts that “words can describe – but they can also misdescribe –
reality.”926 In Nigeria, people believe that words are things. While explaining the belief in the
destructive effects of words in his country, he wants to show the cultural divide between the
understanding systems of the African and European people. Because of this difference
between their thoughts and perceptions, his work has been considered a magical realist work
by the Europeans. He explains the difference by giving the following example: “If you were
to say that tonight’s poetry reading would be a failure, I would ask you to withdraw it for
fear that saying it would make it happen. Words resonate. They are parallel to events. It is
magical thinking. Not what many critics have called magical reality. That is an exaggeration
924
Okri, “Interview with Ben Okri,” interview with Jean W. Ross, in Contemporary Authors, ed.
Donna Olendorf, 138 (Detroit MI: Gale, 1993): 337-38.
925
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
926
Fraser, 1.
264
of reality, a transformation of reality. Magical realism is (the belief) that what is perceived
and said are real things too.”927 With these words he confirms that it is impossible to consider
African thought under the light of the European laws of logic. Africa has its own ways and
must be examined in terms of these ways. In Africa, there is no clear distinction between
imagination and reality. It seems that when the Nigerian-American author of fantasy and
science-fiction Nnedi Okorafor calls Okri’s work “organic fantasy” and when the GhanaianBritish novelist and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah regards it as an example of
“spiritual realism,” in fact, they do refer to this feature of Okri’s work.
Avoiding the term magical realism, Appiah distinguishes Okri’s work from that of
Latin American authors. He proposes that “there is a difference between the ways in which
Latin American writers draw on the supernatural and the way that Okri does: For Okri, in a
curious way, the world of spirits is not metaphysical or imaginary; rather, it is more real than
the world of the everyday.”928 Similarly, Okorafor, without using the term magical realism,
attempts to prove that Okri’s work, as an organic fantasy, is different from Latin American
works. Okorafor describes organic fantasy as “fantasy fiction that emerges from the very
nature of its story.”929 Regarding her own style as organic fantasy as well, she explains that
organic fantasy “has the power to make something familiar strange,” “allows one to
experience even the most overdone ideas in fresh ways,” “blooms directly from the soil of
the real” and thus, becomes “the most accurate way of describing reality.”930 She regards
Ben Okri and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as two legendary African authors of organic fantasy.
Quoting the following passage from Okri’s Birds of heaven (1996), she shows that Africa is
a dynamic place of stories:
927
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
Appiah, 147.
929
Okorafor, 275.
930
Okorafor, 277-78.
928
265
Africa breathes stories. In Africa everything is a story, everything is a
repository of stories. Spiders, the wind, a leaf, a tree, the moon,
silence, a glance, a mysterious old man, an owl at midnight, a sign, a
white stone on a branch, a single yellow bird of omen, an inexplicable
death, an unprompted laughter, an egg by the river, are all
impregnated with stories. In Africa things are stories, they store
stories, and they yield stories at the right moment of dreaming, when
we are open to the secret of objects and moods. 931
Okorafor indicates that both Ben Okri and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o do not simply make
stuff up, or use fantasy just for the sake of fantasy in their works, which are all about Africa.
Rather, fantasy in their work “grows out of its own soil” 932 and “the magic naturally,
organically sprouted.”933 As seen in the quotations, although Okorafor does not use the term
magical realism, all her definitions about organic realism echo Faris’s definition of magical
realism: “magical realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical
elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed.”934 Moreover, Okorafor reveals
another similarity between Latin American magical realist authors and Ben Okri without
referring to magical realism. She declares Gabriel García Márquez and Isabelle Allende as
her mentors, but finds her style closer to that of Ben Okri: “Ben Okri’s stories were full of
Nigerian figures, traditions and historical elements […] And he went over the deep end when
it came to magical elements.”935 In this quotation, Okorafor, as a Nigerian author, seems to
refer to the Nigerian core in Okri’s work. It is quite normal that Okri, as an African author,
draws from the Nigerian lore whereas García Márquez, as a Latin American one, derives
from Latin American lore. As indicated in Chapter II of this study, García Márquez has
931
Okri, quoted in Okorafor, 276.
Okorafor, 277.
933
Okorafor, 284.
934
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 163.
935
Okorafor, 281.
932
266
always regarded himself as a social realist. Reminiscent of Carpentier’s idea of the
marvelous nature of the Latin American everyday reality, García Márquez insists that
Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most
extraordinary things […]. I know very ordinary people who’ve read
One Hundred Years of Solitude carefully and with a lot of pleasure,
but with no surprise at all because, when all is said and done, I’m
telling nothing that hasn’t happened in their own lives. […] There’s
not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality. 936
Unlike García Márquez, Okri does not regard himself as a social realist: “I’m not
very keen on social realism for the simple reason that the very people that you’re writing
about don’t usually want to read about their nightmare conditions.”937 However, he claims
that he has never moved away from realism, but “moved deeper into realism.” For him,
realism means “all that is there, what we see, what we don’t see, the visible, the invisible. I
think a good explanation would be what Shakespeare says in Hamlet, ‘there are more things
in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’”938
In the final analysis, it is openly seen that Okri shares many of García Márquez’s
ideas and his style although many critics have claimed the opposite. In the world view of
both authors, there is no strict separation between the real world and the other world
consisting of myth and magic. Both authors want to reflect the reality of their continents – a
reality that consists of not only everyday events but also such things as dreams, myths, all
types of beliefs, in short, what common people of their countries perceive as reality. While
reflecting this sort of reality, neither García Márquez nor Okri cares about combining what is
called fantastic or magical with the real elements. Rather, they believe that all the fantastic,
magical, and supernatural – of course, in terms of Western thought – are part of everyday
936
García Márquez, quoted in Warnes, 145.
Okri, quoted in Gaylard, 31.
938
Okri, quoted in Gaylard, 39.
937
267
reality in their countries and continents. Both authors refer to the unique feature of their own
continents: both talk about the marvellous reality of their continents, that is, Latin America
in García Márquez’s case and Africa in Okri’s. In this way, they prove that both Latin
America and Africa are inherently marvellous.
As discussed in Chapter II above, it is quite usual for Latin American narratives to
describe reality through mythology. They usually deal with history and myth. With One
Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez attempts to demystify the myths of history, to
reconstruct Latin American history as myth, and thus, to create a new Latin American myth.
Following this concern of García Márquez, Ben Okri, in The Famished Road, directly
reflects West African myths and attempts to recreate them in order to re-write histories and
re-direct people’s attitude to a specific social and cultural phenomenon. Okri avers that one
of the central themes of his novel is the suffering of the people of the African continent. To
reflect this theme, myth becomes an important instrument:
We forget the value of myth, and we forget it more when we give the
myth its name. when it is a living, sustaining thing, it’s not myth. You
give it that word – myth – when it has left that vital territory of living.
But, when it is in that territory of life, myth is what makes it possible
for those who suffer and struggle, whatever the suffering, to live and
sleep and carry on. That’s when it’s most important. So the
“famishment” has its shadow side in the book, which is joy, which is
myth, which is the spirit.939
That is to say, in The Famished Road, myth is used as a remedy for people’s
sufferings. By using the power of myths and stories, the suffering and oppressed people of
not only Africa but also the whole world can catch the chance of re-creating their economic
and socio-political conditions and re-dreaming their world in a positive way. It is necessary
939
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 85.
268
to show people “the best things the world has to offer and the best aspects of their own
mythic, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific frames.”940 However, to accomplish this, as Okri
believes, first of all, we must “unearth and destroy the myths and realities, the lies and
propaganda which have been used to oppress, enslave, incinerate, gas, torture and starve the
human beings of this planet.”941 Only when the propaganda, lies and myths of the oppressor
are demystified, it will be possible to cure the sufferings, to make people believe and trust in
themselves and thus to create a new world. As a result, the use of myth in Okri’s work
becomes a useful device to “create a counter-myth to the hegemonic narratives of the
oppressors which tend to swallow up the oppressed and confine them in their subordinate
position.”942
Thus, following the myth-making tradition of Latin American authors, especially
García Márquez, Ben Okri creates a new African myth with The Famished Road. In the
novel, Okri directly derives his material from Yoruba mythology and Nigerian oral lore.
African oral tradition becomes the most important source for his work. As suggested by
Quayson, following the tradition of Tutuola and Soyinka, Okri “produces what might be
called new mythopoeic discourse with the invocation of myths, folklore and other aspects of
indigenous beliefs” by combining them with the events in the real world of the story. For
Quayson, “Okri’s work articulates a particular perception of events in post-colonial Nigeria
that brings the literary tradition into a direct engagement with the ambit of the socio-political
while remaining steadfastly in the realm of the mythopoeic.”943 Arlene A. Elder shares
Quayson’s ideas. For her, the distinctive feature of Okri’s work is its spirituality. Because of
the spirituality and poetic diction in The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite
Riches, Elder claims “Okri is not writing novels at all, but creating mythopoetic
940
Okri, A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix, 1997), 131.
Okri, 110.
942
Adeniji, 8.
943
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 121.
941
269
narratives.”944 According to Elder, while creating his neo-myths in the language of the
colonisers, “the mythic becomes the political for [Okri], the mythmaker Okri’s true
leader.”945 Considering The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches both
spiritually and politically, Elder proposes that “Okri recreates West African myths and rituals
in order to assert traditional African cultural/ spiritual values as the only resource powerful
enough to combat modern political corruption and oppression world-wide.”946 The moral
basis in The Famished Road draws from traditional cultural ethics. Okri seeks to remind his
readers of “universal moral and political values that […] the West once shared with
traditional African cultures and that […] remain essential for human welfare.”947
As with One Hundred Years of Solitude, hybridity becomes a key word while
discussing The Famished Road as a magical realist text. Both novels perfectly satisfy this
condition of magical realism both in form and content. As mentioned earlier, hybridity in the
context of magical realism refers to the existence of two different cultural systems side by
side, to use Homi K. Bhabha’s words, in the “third space” of cultural production. Bhabha
explains the importance of hybridity as follows: “For me the importance of hybridity is not
to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to
me is the third space which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the
histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives,
which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.”948 Accordingly, it is hybridity
that creates a third space, trespasses borders and necessitates the new international
definitions of culture that never affiliates nationalism. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha
defends “an international culture based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the
944
Elder, 13.
Elder, 11.
946
Elder, 10.
947
Elder, 7.
948
Bhabha, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” interview with Jonathan Rutherford, in
Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1990), 211.
945
270
diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end
we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation,
the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.”949 According to
Bhabha, celebrating hybridity, syncretism, transformation and intermingling, “magical
realism, after the Latin American boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent
postcolonial world.”950 With their hybridity in form and content, both One Hundred Years of
Solitude and The Famished Road are the expressions of postcolonial world in Bhabha’s
sense.
Henry Louis Gates, in his review of The Famished Road, observes that
Despite the fact that the novel enjoyed the role of primogenitor among
the genres of contemporary African literature, few authors have
chosen to test the limits of the conventional “well made” realistic
novel, a form inherited from Europe. […] But in an era of literary
innovation – and grievous political disillusionment – boundaries exist
to be trespassed, conventions to be defied. So it should not be
surprising that African novelists would eventually seek to combine
Western literary antecedents with modes of narration informed by
Africa’s powerful tradition of oral and mythic narrative.951
For Gates, The Famished Road has accomplished to successfully combine Western
literary modes of narration with African oral and mythic tradition. According to Olatubosun
Ogunsanwo, the distinguishing feature of the novel is its rapid shifts from the conventional
realist descriptions to the mythopoeic descriptions of the other reality. Ogunsanwo argues
that this sort of shifts is also found in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Okri, like García Márquez, has found the methods of conventional Western realism
949
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 56.
Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation,” 6.
951
Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
950
271
insufficient to express all dimensions of the human spirit. The Famished Road, as a
postmodern text,
reveals
“a
multiplicity of
narrative dimensions
and cultural
interdiscursivity.”952 With the help of intertextuality and the intertwining narrative modes,
Okri provides the amalgamation of the spirit and mundane worlds. As a common feature of
magical realist texts, the different modes – the European realistic narrative mode and African
folkloric mythic narrative mode – co-exist without assimilating one another:
[…] there is no simple, unproblematic merging into one single
monolithic
discourse,
as
they
remain
distinct
even
while
intermingling. In other words, there is no assimilation of one narrative
mode by the other, or of one genre by the other. In short, no
centralized sameness. The narrative technique does not seek any
oppositional stance: the intertexts assume parallel status in the parodic
re-working of the narrative modes, debunking the mutual exclusivity
of center and margin. 953
Accordingly, this non-assimilationist effect prepares a new space for African
literature, subverts the adoption of the European realistic narrative mode, demanding a reconsideration of the idea of origin and dominance, and finally results in a decolonization of
African literature without totally rejecting the European mode. Regarding both One Hundred
Years of Solitude and The Famished Road as postcolonial and multicultural in form and
content, Ogunsanwo asserts that both novels are neo-traditionalist, decolonized, and
postmodernist as they are “bold re-writing and re-interpretation of the writers’ socio-cultural
past. The re-contextualization has taken place only after their colonial experience.”954 For
Ogunsanwo, Okri never simply offers a nostalgic return to old African traditions. As
represented through Azaro, the abiku child who embraces his past, present, and future lives
952
Ogunsanwo, 41.
Ogunsanwo, 45.
954
Ogunsanwo, 42.
953
272
within himself; Okri’s neo-traditional art is actually “a re-writing of the socio-cultural past in
the present in a way that demands critical re-interpretation in anticipation of the future.”955
Azaro, as an abiku child who continuously goes back and forth between the worlds
of the living and the dead, becomes the most important example and symbol of hybridity of
The Famished Road. Moreover, Azaro is the proof of the existence of magical realist vision
in the text. Azaro, who has been “caught in the middle space between the living and the
dead,”956 reminds us of Wendy Faris’s definition: “We experience the closeness or nearmerging of two realms, two worlds. […] The magical realist vision exists at the intersection
of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both
directions. Fluid boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are traced only to
be crossed.”957 The abiku child becomes the vehicle to combine the natural and the
supernatural and blur the boundaries between two worlds. The following quotation reveals
one of Azaro’s experiences with one of spirit companions:
[…] I found the three-headed spirit sitting beside me. He had never
left. He had been waiting patiently. […] Dad was on his chair,
polishing his boots. He looked at me furtively. I felt the frailty of
parents, how powerless they really are. And because Dad said nothing
to me, because he made no attempts to reach me, made no gestures
towards me, did nothing to appease me, did not even attempt a smile
at me, I listened to what the three-headed spirit was saying. “Your
parents are treating you atrociously,” he said. “Come with me. Your
companions are desperate to embrace you. There is a truly wonderful
feast awaiting your homecoming. […]” Dad got up from his chair and
stood over me. His breathing manifested itself as a heavy wind in the
955
Ogunsanwo, 45.
Okri, Songs of Enchantment (London: Random House, 1993), 258.
957
Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 172.
956
273
world in which I was travelling. […] The spirit caught me and
dragged me down to the ground. “Don’t fly away,” the spirit said. “If
you fly away I don’t know where you will land. [… ]” Dad coughed
and I tripped over a green bump on the road. We travelled on. 958
In this quotation, Azaro’s metaphysical consciousness is defined in a realistic
picture. While shuttling between two worlds, he can both talk to the three-headed spirit and
watch his father’s behaviors carefully. The quotation proves that Azaro concurrently
captures two distinct worlds. He considers that the spirit world is as real as the mundane
world. Accordingly, through the abiku child, Okri blurs and crosses the boundaries between
the living and the dead, the factual and mythical, and worldly reality and other reality.
Azaro stands in the middle space between the two worlds, and his present life
encompasses both his past and future lives. Renato Oliva, who examines Okri’s work as a
shamanic realist text drawing mostly on Yeatsian and Jungian ideas, suggests that Azaro is
represented as a shaman, “who stands on the border between the human realm and the spiritrealm, and can cross it in either direction.”959 Oliva explains that the shaman, wandering
between the two realms and accessing to the unconscious, plays a crucial social role: “the
shaman preserves a conscious memory of his descent into the under-world or of his magical
flight through the air, and on returning from his journey into the unconscious brings back
scenes from his people’s mythology, religion, and past or future history, visions which he
then passes on to the community.”960 For Oliva, shamanic realism, like magical realism,
works through dreams, hallucinations, metaphor, and prophecy, and crosses the borders
between reality and dream, conscious and unconscious. Because of its overemphasis on the
Jungian idea of collective unconscious, what is called shamanic realism in Oliva’s essay
seems to be nothing but psychic magical realism. As discussed in Chapter I above, Faris
958
Okri, The Famished Road, 374-76.
Oliva, 174.
960
Oliva, 176.
959
274
argues that the hybrid qualities of magical realism are similar to the performances of a
shaman who acts as a mediator between different worlds and as a healer.961Serving as a
shaman, a magical realist text attempts to preserve, create, or heal cultural identity in a
postcolonial nation. True to Ogunsanwo’s contentions mentioned above, then, Azaro serves
as a shaman who is concerned with the well-being of the community and offers a cultural
healing for postcolonial Nigeria.
According to Christopher Warnes, the duality of the narrator’s viewpoint can be felt
beginning from the opening paragraphs of The Famished Road. Azaro prefers to stay in the
mundane world than to go back to the spirit world. Although the boundaries between the two
worlds are blurred in the novel, it is still possible – also necessary for Warnes – to identify
the differences between them:
The spirit world is […] derived from Yoruba belief and Nigerian
literature, but the aesthetic within which it is represented is
cosmopolitan and transformative in nature. One of the more important
transformations of this nature concerns Okri’s rewriting of the abiku
myth through emphasising its similarities with myths of reincarnation,
thereby factoring a fatalistic, quasi-moral, perhaps New Age,
dimension into the abiku experience. It is useful to describe this
aesthetic as being informed by a code of the fantastic that is not
answerable to the laws of physical or empirical reality. The key trope
governing this code is metamorphosis, understood not as unilinear
transformation, but rather as a constant, unstable shifting of form and
identity that depends on processes of return and recurrence that are
never resolved in the novel. 962
961
962
Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 155.
Warnes, 135-36.
275
Warnes explains that the mundane world in the novel is ruled by “a code of natural
derived from the conventions of social realism.” In the realistic dimension of the novel,
Azaro, who is around seven years old, his mother and father, the bar-owner Madame Koto,
and the photographer are the primary characters. The geography of the realistic dimension
includes Azaro and his family’s one-room house, the compound, the road, the forest, the
marketplace, and Madame Koto’s bar. The novel tells the lives of the poor people living in a
ghetto, poverty, famine, violence, and the struggles of the slum-people against their
neighbours, landowners, employers, and politicians. Warnes’ ideas are strengthened by Jose
Santiago Fernandez Vazquez in his assertion that Okri combines social realism and myth in
his work. Considering the novel in the domain of African literature without considering the
European influences, Vazquez also indicates that Okri has accomplished a synthesis of the
two main aesthetic tendencies in postcolonial African literature: “the down-to-earth style
practised by Chinua Achebe and the mythic writing developed by Amos Tutuola and D.O.
Fagunwa.”963
As for the structure of The Famished Road, it is composed of three sections, with
each section divided into eight books and then each book divided into chapters. The total
number of episodes is seventy-eight. According to Okri, the structure of the book represents
the flow of life. Reminding us of Bakhtin’s ideas, Okri claims that “within each beginning is
an ending, and within each ending is a beginning. It’s like the process of birth and rebirth,
and it’s hard to say where it starts and where it stops. In some cases it’s actually starting and
stopping simultaneously, or it’s being lived out simultaneously.”964 The novel comprises a
cyclical narrative based on circularity and repetitions. Metaphors and paradoxes abound in it.
One of the most-used stylistic devices is oxymoron usually shaping the hybrid and
963
Jose Santiago Fernandez Vazquez, “Recharting the Geography of Genre: Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road as a Postcolonial Bildungsroman,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.2 (Fall 2002),
accessed 3 February 2011, GALE| H1100072527.
964
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 83.
276
paradoxical nature of the text. There is a repetition of words such as “puzzle,” “riddle,”
“enigma,” and “mystery” as seen in the examples: “Life is full of riddles that only the dead
can answer,”965 “THE WORLD IS full of riddles that only the dead can answer,”966 “it
lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the
dead can answer,”967 “THERE ARE MANY riddles of the dead that only the living can
answer,”968 “There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can
answer.”969 When Wilkinson, in her interview with Okri, comments that these repetitions
exemplified above seem to indicate that Okri does not want to solve any of the enigmas,
mysteries, and riddles of life, Okri answers that his novel, starting before death, “outside the
realm of birth and death,” moves and opens toward infinity refusing death. The novel reflects
a consciousness, “which is already aware of other lives behind and in front and also of
people actually living their futures in the present,”970 The following quotation from the novel
is a sufficient proof for Okri’s assertion above and also his aim of the enlightenment of the
human spirit:
Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason
why I wanted to be born – these paradoxes of things, the eternal
changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being,
of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the
challenge of giving birth to one’s true self, to one’s new spirit, till the
conditions are right for the new immutable star within one’s universe
to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to
master one’s self; the possibilities of a new pact with one’s spirit; the
965
Okri, The Famished Road, 48.
Okri, The Famished Road, 89.
967
Okri, The Famished Road, 267.
968
Okri, The Famished Road, 489.
969
Okri, The Famished Road, 559.
970
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 83.
966
277
probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no
light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete,
that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are
never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of
origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had
nothing to do with why I wanted to live. 971
While explaining time and space in The Famished Road, Elder claims that “Okri’s
world is one in which time and space encompass all experiences, and experience
encompasses all times and spaces, thus negating distinctions among past, present, and future
and so dissolving differences between corporeal and spiritual life.”972 That is why, Azaro
experiences past, present, and future simultaneously.
Like the perception of time in One Hundred Years of Solitude, time is also hybrid in
The Famished Road. Magical realist texts do not follow a linear time. As discussed by
Kumkum Sangari, time “is poised in a liminal space and in an in-between time, which
having broken out of the binary opposition between circular and linear, gives a third space
and a different time the chance to emerge.”973 Time in The Famished Road, as in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, challenges the linear time and becomes an example of “third
time.”974 The following quotation is a good example of this “third time”: Azaro’s mom tells
her story about a white man who then transforms into a black Yoruba man: “I met you five
hundred years ago,” he said. […] I said: “But I only met you two weeks ago.” “Time is not
what you think it is,” he said, smiling.”975 In this quotation, five hundred years passes in two
weeks, violating our sense of time.
971
Okri, The Famished Road, 559.
Elder, 21.
973
Sangari, 176.
974
Cooper, Magical Realism, 75.
975
Okri, The Famished Road, 554.
972
278
To explain the representation of time and temporality in the novel, it may be useful
to borrow Quayson’s expression of “reality-esoteric axis.” The events that take place in the
realistic dimension of the novel are represented in a relatively chronological order. For
instance, the lives of Azaro, his family and neighbours gradually changes. The events in their
lives are revealed in terms of conventional units of time: “Saturday morning, three days later,
I was still ill. My mouth and eyes were dry,”976 “SUNDAY BROUGHT us the secret faces of
politics,”977 or “Steadily, over days and months, the paths had been widening. […] Each day
the area seemed different.”978 The chronological sequence, usually expressed by
conventional time expressions such as days, years, and months, is continuously interrupted
by entrances into the spirit – esoteric in Quayson’s term – world. The esoteric realm in the
novel is revealed in a dreamy, hallucinatory, spiritual mode of narration. In esoteric axis,
there is a change in the time expressions. For instance, in the following quotation, while
Azaro watches the street, he enters into the esoteric realm “in the crack of a moment”:
The sun made the air and the earth shimmer and as I kept watch I
perceived, in the crack of a moment, the recurrence of things
unresolved – histories, dreams, a vanished world of great old spirits,
wild jungles, tigers with eyes of diamonds roaming the dense foliage.
I saw beings who dragged clanking chains behind them, bleeding from
their necks. I saw men and women without wings, sitting in rows,
soaring through the empty air. And I saw, flying towards me in
widening dots from the centre of the sun, birds and horses whose
wings spanned half the sky and whose feathers had the candency of
rubies. I shut my eyes; my being whirled; my head tumbled into a
well; and I only opened my eyes again, to stop the sensation of falling,
976
Okri, The Famished Road, 150.
Okri, The Famished Road, 151.
978
Okri, The Famished Road, 122.
977
279
when I heard the shattering of glass. The noise woke up the
afternoon.979
All the phenomena above are revealed to Azaro in the crack of a moment, which
introduces the reader to a different perception of temporality and proves that “behind the
objective façade of linear conventional time lies a mythical time of return, recurrence,
cyclicality.”980 This “third time” in the novel represents African mythical a-temporal
perception of time. This Yoruba time of endless repetition contains past, present, and future
within itself. The characters in the novel, as representatives of African indigenous wisdom,
are aware that “there are not any divisions in life, just a constant flow, forming and
reforming.”981 Azaro’s spirit friend, Ade, for instance, sees “the image of two thousand
years” and remembers all his reincarnations as a musician, priest, ruler of gentle people,
wicked warrior, and soldier. Furthermore, he also says that “I have seen the world, I have
seen the future. The Koran says nothing is ever finished.”982
When the perception of time in The Famished Road is compared to that in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, we see that both authors attempt to resist the linearity of the
rationalist models of European realism. With their circular, repetitive, simultaneous, and
coexistent representation of time, both novels create a “third time.” As for the difference
between the novels in terms of temporality, The Famished Road lacks the foreshadowings,
flashbacks, and zigzagging of time while One Hundred Years of Solitude shows continuous
zigzags in time, flashbacks, and flash-forwards. Moreover, in One Hundred Years of
Solitude, the view of time reflects a deep sense of nostalgia that García Márquez attempts to
demystify. In contrast, The Famished Road reflects the Yoruba mythic perception of time
while its author is never “a proponent of a romantic return to pre-colonial African
979
Okri, The Famished Road, 207.
Warnes, 137-38.
981
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 84.
982
Okri, The Famished Road, 547.
980
280
traditions.”983 In the novel, the myth of the abiku children becomes the best device to reflect
the fluidity of time and space in the Yoruba worldview.
While representing the African worldview, Ben Okri draws from African spirituality
and literary traditions. According to Cooper, this is a common case for all contemporary
African authors. Cooper explains the importance of the belief in animism in West African
magical realism. She claims that African writers frequently stick to animism and include
spirits, ancestors, and talking animals in their works to convey their politics and aesthetics.
While explaining African, especially Yoruba, animistic belief, Cooper quotes from Margaret
Thompson Drewal: “In Yoruba thought, the otherworldly domain (orun) coexists with the
phenomenal world of people, animals, plants, and things (aye). Orun includes a pantheon of
uncountable deities (orisa), the ancestors (osi, egun), and spirits both helpful and harmful.
The world and the otherworld are always in close proximity, and both human and other
spirits travel back and forth between the two.”984 Consequently, animism becomes a useful
tool especially for magical authors because it discards and resists the division between the
animate and inanimate, the living and non-living, the human and divine, the objects and
humans in African spiritual belief. Cooper’s ideas are reinforced by Harry Garuba, who
regards The Famished Road as an animist realist text. In the novel, Azaro can hear “the air
whispering, the walls talking, the chair complaining, the floor pacing, the insects
gossiping.”985 According to Garuba, animist realism is the “cultural practice of according a
physical, often animate material aspect to what others may consider an abstract idea.” For
him, animist realism is a “deep structure” which generates numerous paroles. One of these
paroles is magical realism. Thus, animist realism becomes a general term encompassing
magical realism as a sub-genre in it. According to Garuba, not only African authors but also
Latin American and Indian authors employ the animist conception of the world. Ben Okri,
983
Elder, 7.
Cooper, Magical Realism, 41.
985
Okri, The Famished Road, 25.
984
281
García Márquez, and Rushdie are examples of such authors who use the animist worldview
to transgress and transpose boundaries and identities in their works. However, Garuba
accepts that the Latin American and Indian type of animist realism is different from the
African type in that Latin American and Indian authors possess “an urban aspect (from the
perspective of the writers) and an ironizing attitude, which are not necessarily elements of
the animistic narrative or its writers.”986
Ben Okri’s work proves the accuracy of Garuba’s assertion above because The
Famished Road does not fulfill the principle of authorial irony, which is accepted by Cooper
as a key feature determining magical realism in a text. Although, at the beginning of Magical
Realism in West African Fiction, she proposes that the ironic should be regarded as a
keyword to explain the narrator’s point of view in a magical realist text, she comes to accept
that the West African authors do not have an ironic distance from the magical material in
their texts. According to Cooper, “the West African magical realists offer antinomies,
embrace hybrid transformations and, at the same time, wish to participate in the project of
national healing. In these endeavors they represent a departure from the dominant and more
familiar magical realist traditions of Latin America, but also they represent something new in
African fiction.”987 To speak with Cooper, then, by contrast to García Márquez’s tongue-incheek manner that distances him from the magical worldview represented in his novel, “the
fervour of cultural nationalism ultimately mutes the irony of”988 Ben Okri in his distinctive
type of magical realism.
Although The Famished Road and One Hundred Years of Solitude are quite different
with respect to the principle of authorial irony, they are alike when it comes to the principle
of authorial reticence. When the two novels are compared in terms of this principle, we see
986
Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/ Writing African Literature,
Culture and Society,” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 274.
987
Cooper, Magical Realism, 58.
988
Cooper, Magical Realism, 220.
282
that both novels gratify the condition of magical realism with the help of their distinctive
voice. Both novels have a naive tone of writing in which wonders are represented in a
matter-of-fact style and accepted in the same way as a child would accept them. Neither
narrator of the novels attempts to judge the accuracy of the characters’ viewpoints or the
fantastic, magical, supernatural events. As was discussed earlier, One Hundred Years of
Solitude has a wise voice – omniscient. The omniscient narrator of the novel is, to repeat
Bell-Villada, “like an African griot, or a super-narrator of folk epic and fairy tale, or an
ancient biblical scribe.”989 The events are told by this wise narrator with a childlike
fascination and with a deadpan voice. In The Famished Road, the omniscient narrator,
Azaro, is himself a child around seven years old. He observes the wonders, transformations,
and reversals around him with astonishment. As indicated by Quayson, although Azaro is a
child, more importantly a spirit child, he does not reflect child consciousness. He speaks the
language used by an adult, not a child, and thus reveals mature wisdom. 990 According to
Douglas McCabe, who regards The Famished Road as a text of New Age Spiritualism,
Azaro is “a New Age guru” reflecting “a state of heightened spiritual consciousness.”991
Needless to say, this spiritual consciousness is the wisdom of African society which Azaro
belongs to. Being a wise abiku child, all his life and actions are signed by “the love of
transformation, and the transformation of love into higher realities.”992
The Famished Road stands out for its carnivalesque spirit, as does One Hundred
Years of Solitude. To convey his message, Okri mostly relies on Bakhtinian concerns,
especially on grotesque images. First of all, the novel itself represents the flow of life as a
possibility of endless metamorphosis, progress, change, and as a continuous process of birth,
death, and rebirth reflecting a Bakhtinian grotesque image that is a phenomenon in
989
Bell-Villada, Man and His Work, 10-11.
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 125-27.
991
McCabe, “Higher Realities,” 14.
992
Okri, The Famished Road, 4.
990
283
continuous transformation. Grotesque appearances and grotesque bodies in the novel are
noteworthy. They are abnormal, gigantic, bizarre, deformed, or injured. The novel is
crowded with two-legged dogs, beautiful children with three arms, girls who had eyes on the
side of their faces, giants, and midgets. Carnivals, festivals, celebrations, parties, Madame
Koto’s bar, and the marketplace become the places hosting the gatherings of humans and
spiritual beings. In the following example, the marketplace is depicted not only as a place of
trade, but as a microcosm celebrating all types of differences:
I watched crowds of people pour into the marketplace. I watched the
chaotic movements and the wild exchanges. […] It seemed as if the
whole world was there. I saw people of all shapes and sizes,
mountainous women with faces of iroko, midgets with faces of stone,
reedy women with twins strapped to their backs, thick-set men with
bulging shoulder muscles. After a while I felt a sort of vertigo just
looking at anything that moved. […] I shut my eyes and when I
opened them again I saw people who walked backwards, a dwarf who
got about on two fingers, men upside-down with baskets of fish on
their feet, women who had breasts on their backs, babies strapped to
their chests, and beautiful children with three arms. I saw a girl
amongst them who had eyes at the side of her face, bangles of blue
copper round her neck, and who was more lovely than forest flowers. I
was so afraid that I got down from the barrel and started to move
away.993
In The Famished Road, as is the case in the above quotation, the flow of everyday
life is continuously interrupted by the grotesque appearances, turbulence, and violence
through Azaro’s dreams, hallucinations, and nightmares. He shuts his eyes and opens them
993
Okri, The Famished Road, 18-19.
284
and suddenly passes into the spirit world. While Azaro observes the life around him with his
naive perceptiveness, the wonders, transformations, and reversals represented through
carnivalesque-grotesque imagery frighten and distress him. A sense of chronic grimness,
misery, and fear is deeply felt in the novel while the characters struggle in the daily routine
of riotous experiences. Accordingly, it seems that The Famished Road does not reflect the
bright, life-affirming, life-enhancing magical side of the carnivalesque-grotesque, in contrast
to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
As mentioned earlier, in The Spirit of Carnival Danow makes a distinction between
Latin American magical realist texts and the texts of Holocaust literature. According to
Danow, carnivalesque-grotesque has two sides: a “bright, life-affirming,” life-enhancing
magical side and the “dark, death-embracing, horrific side.”994 Latin American magical
realist texts, prominently One Hundred Years of Solitude, reflect the bright, life-affirming
carnivalesque-grotesque; Holocaust literature texts reflect the darker horrific carnivalesquegrotesque as they reveal the pains and sufferings of millions of people during the Second
World War. Danow explains that “what magical realism portrays its ultimately positive,
affording a hopeful vision of life in which what might be termed fantastic is designed to
appear plausible and real. In Holocaust literature, the fantastic emerges as horrific rather than
‘magic.’”995 On the grounds of Danow’s assertions, Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia examines
the works by Rushdie and Okri. For her, Rushdie’s Shame (1983), as a postcolonial magical
realist text, has a darker horrific carnivalesque-grotesque because its main concerns are terror
and political abuse. Biscaia likens Okri’s The Famished Road to Rushdie’s Shame as the
magical realist component of The Famished Road is “accompanied by an equally increasing
sense of fear and misery.”996 However, as I will discuss in the following part in detail, The
994
Danow, 5.
Danow, 9-10.
996
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia, Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary
Excess (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, 2011), 279.
995
285
Famished Road reverses its seemingly hopeless vision with its last sentence: “A dream can
be the highest point of a life.”997 Thus, The Famished Road, with its belief in the regenerative
power of imagination” proves that it has a regenerative carnivalesque spirit, as does One
Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Famished Road: Politics, History, and Society
And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye opened,
and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the
world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant,
but it did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid.
Then my fear turned. The light went into the new eye and into my
brain and roved around my spirit and moved in my veins and
circulated in my blood and lodged itself in my heart. And my heart
burned with a searing agony, as if it were being burnt to ashes within
me. As I began to scream, the pain reached its climax and a cool
feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse journey
of the brilliant light, cooling its flaming passages, till it got back to the
centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever
imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer.998
Occupying a “third space” and reflecting a “third time,” Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road aims at seeing the world with “a third eye.” According to Cooper, seeing through the
third eye provides the ability to recognize paradoxes, to see the syncretism and kaleidoscope
of possibilities and to understand history in the language of magic and dreams. Through this
third eye, the novel becomes a device to “tell the truth, document history and capture social
997
998
Okri, The Famished Road, 574.
Okri, The Famished Road, 266-67.
286
reality.”999 The third eye enables the novel to investigate different dimensions of reality,
emphasizing the ways of historical, social, and political actions. In this way, the novel
becomes an expression of the postcolonial world in Bhabha’s sense.
Okri’s position as a postcolonial author is in accordance with Boehmer’s assertion:
Okri is “more likely to be a cultural traveler, or an ‘extra-territorial’, than a national. Excolonial by birth, ‘Third World’ in cultural interest, cosmopolitan in almost every other way,
[…] he works within the precincts of the Western metropolis while at the same time
retaining thematic and/ or political connections with a national, ethnic, or regional
background.”1000 As indicated earlier, during the 1960s and 1970s, most of West African
intellectual activity focused on local indigenous cultural and political formations to prove
and defend the validity of African culture over colonial norms. Although he does not
completely separate himself from his predecessors’ aims, Okri criticizes this kind of
postcolonial activity:
[…] there’s been too much attribution of power to the effect of
colonialism on our consciousness. Too much has been given to it.
We’ve looked too much in that direction and have forgotten about our
own aesthetic frames. Even though that was there and took place and
invaded the social structure, it’s quite possible that it didn’t invade our
spiritual and aesthetic and mythic internal structures, the way in which
we perceive the world. […] a true invasion takes place not when a
society has been taken over by another society in terms of its
infrastructure, but in terms of its mind and its dreams and its myths,
and its perception of reality. If the perception of reality has not been
fundamentally, internally altered, then the experience itself is just
999
Cooper, Magical Realism, 108.
Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 227.
1000
287
transitional. There are certain areas of the African consciousness
which will remain inviolate. Because the world-view it is that makes a
people survive. 1001
Rejecting the overemphasis on colonialism, Okri focuses his attention on certain
inviolate “areas of the African consciousness” such as the great dream capacities, the
imaginative and creative power, the elasticity of aesthetics, and the resilience of spirit in
African culture. Accordingly, for Okri, rather than getting stuck in the destructive effects of
colonialism, postcolonial studies should embrace the unaltered African consciousness and
provide better understanding of local systems of knowledge and the African perception of
reality to be able to reflect it through Africa’s “own aesthetic frames.” However, he equally
dislikes “cultural chauvinism of all kinds.”1002 Claiming that “my blood is African …but my
heart belongs to the world,”1003 he aims at “the enlightenment of the human spirit.” 1004 He
emphasizes the importance of catching universality. Okri wants African people to reconfirm
their place on the earth. They should be aware that Africa may have some failings, but it has
its own marvels. Obviously, this message is not only for African people but for all people:
Africa has gone through its own stage of civilisation a thousand years
ago and gone into a decline. It’s like Greece. Whenever I go to Greece
I’m astounded by the relationship between its great living past and
strangely denuded present. The same is true of Africa and African
culture. We have our past civilisation. Things peak at different times
for different peoples. The contemporary peakers always think that
other people never had a peak, that all they had was dark ages. 1005
1001
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 86.
Okri, quoted in Fraser, 96.
1003
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
1004
Okri, “Interview with Ben Okri,” interview with Rosemary Gray, JLS/TLW 28.4 (December
2012): 11.
1005
Okri, quoted in Hattersley, “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.”
1002
288
Comparing Africa and Greece and drawing attention to Africa’s past civilization, he
underlines the necessity for the people of the world to show respect for different cultures.
What irritates Okri most is
[…] people who only see what there appears to be; people who insist
that all there is to the world is what you can see. They perpetually
resist the possibilities of the imagination. They hold back all kinds of
progress with their limitations. These people are valuable because they
compel us to make our dreams evident, but they reduce much of the
marvel of existence – marvels increasingly revealed by science,
marvels of the spirit. They are the ones who point to Africa and say,
“Look at this mess, there is no future here.” They are the reducers of
possibilities and there are a great number of them. 1006
Okri wants to show people the possibilities of the imagination and spirituality and the
marvels of Africa. In this way, he wishes to prove that there is a good future for Africa. The
Famished Road accomplishes his aims.
Referring to Okri’s contention about the inviolate African consciousness, Hobby
proposes that “if ways of perceiving reality in Africa have not been altered by the colonizer
and if a way of perceiving reality unites Africans present, past, and future, then Okri’s work
deals with both the historical and the suprahistorical, the universal.”1007 Referring to many
references to history in The Famished Road, Wilkinson also comments that there is an
attempt in the novel to comprehend and solve history. She emphasizes that the early history
of Africa is considered to be a “weird delirium.”1008 Azaro sees the whole of African history,
and moreover, through the character Ade, the novel reflects universal history. As an answer,
Okri says: “I am very interested in history and this book is also about history. […] History is
1006
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Davis, 62.
Hobby, GALE| H1220000941.
1008
Okri, The Famished Road, 228.
1007
289
actually in the book right from the beginning. But I prefer to say suffering rather than
history.”1009
As is the case in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, history becomes
the main concern in The Famished Road. The novel reveals a different level of history: “the
whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.”1010 Okri investigates
the concept of history in terms of the inviolate areas of African consciousness. The
expression “undiscovered continent,” then, refers to the unaltered, unbroken African
consciousness. By means of magical realism, which encodes this consciousness in opposition
to Western epistemology, history is reconstructed in The Famished Road and becomes the
documentation of the African people’s sociopolitical and religious experiences.
While comparing the work of the Afro-American, 1993 Nobel Prize winner Toni
Morrison, the Trinidadian-British, 2001 Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri with
respect to their historical projects in fiction, Zhu Ying considers that these authors explore
the neglected, forgotten, misinterpreted, miswritten, buried or undocumented history of their
countries or continents to fill in the gaps in historical documents. For Ying, Morrison,
Naipaul, and Okri are “three fiction writers who have devoted themselves to mapping out an
uncharted continent of unacknowledged histories and unnoticed realities.”1011 They attempt
to rewrite the historical past and thus reinterpret the world. Ying emphasizes that Okri’s
obsession with the unaltered African consciousness drives him to the use of spiritual,
folkloric and magical realist formations in concert with social, economic, political, and
historical issues. Okri’s understanding and representation of history is linked to the African
colonial and postcolonial experience absorbed in African folkloric and mythic tradition:
“Okri has depicted a literary journey to reveal the invisible and the mythic aspects of
1009
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 86.
Okri, The Famished Road, 572.
1011
Zhu Ying, Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Tony Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri
(Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, 2006), 32.
1010
290
Nigerian history by rediscovering and rejuvenating the unnoticed but unbroken value of
West African thinking and way of life in postcolonial situations” and presented “a world of
many horizons, which celebrates life, history, and reality in an ongoing process of being
created, reinterpreted, and re-envisioned.”1012 Ying uses the term “redreaming”1013 to express
Okri’s representation of history in The Famished Road. His “redreaming” of the past is not
just for the sake of “the pastness of the past but for the need of the present which is always
on the verge of sliding into a future.”1014 Okri redreams the past to reenact and reconstruct
the reality of an historical past. The knowledge of the traumatic historical past is important
for him to take lessons for the future. He believes that history is necessary “to alter the way
in which we perceive what is valid and what is valuable, different measures and different
values.”1015 It is possible to transform the future by transforming people’s notion of the past.
Thus, in The Famished Road, described by its author as “a flow of life,” the past flows into
the present and more importantly into the future. In this way, Okri resists the imperialist
versions of history in order to “uncover the future in the past”1016 without remaining locked
in the historical framework. Through this conception of history, The Famished Road
redreams postcolonial possibilities for Nigeria. According to Margaret Cezair-Thompson,
Okri “presents the regenerative forces of replacement, rather than the debilitating colonial
legacy of displacement, and therefore moves beyond the historical catalepsy which has
marked so much of postcolonial writing.” Thus, with its distinct type of magical realism, The
Famished Road becomes “an example of decolonized fiction.” The novel offers ways “to
look beyond the postcolonial and to recognize a new direction in African literature, one
which, while recognizing historic situations, is not limited to a historic perspective.”1017
1012
Ying, 149.
Ying, 114.
1014
Ying, 134.
1015
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 87.
1016
Gates, GALE| H1420006106.
1017
Cezair-Thompson, GALE| H1100072521.
1013
291
While discussing the conception and representation of national and continental
histories reflected in the novel, it is also necessary to analyze Okri’s position in the cultural
nationalist agenda of African literature. History is reflected in an allegorical way in The
Famished Road. According to Jameson, the texts produced in third-world countries are
allegorical and should be read as “national allegories.” Jameson proposes “third-world texts
[…] necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: The story of
the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public
third-world culture and society.”1018 True to Jameson’s contention, The Famished Road may
be read as a national allegory because Nigeria is represented as an abiku child through the
character Azaro. In this sense, the novel seems to play a role in the nationalist project of
decolonization, which was enthusiastically adopted by Okri’s predecessors. However, Okri
represents a different sense of nation and nationhood in his distinct type of magical realism.
As discussed by Boehmer, during the first years of the nationalist movements in
Africa, almost all literary texts dealt with the concept of nation and attempted to describe the
distinctive characterisitcs of African nations. However, in the period following the
independence, when African nations had many problems in the formation of their nationstates, the writers gave up regarding the nation as a literal truth reflected in its real national
history. They started to investigate what constitutes the sense of a national being, that is, the
distinctive signs of a national reality. Thus, they focused their attention on “African national
coming-into-being.”1019 Their texts represented national belief and the dream of the nation in
recent neocolonial history. For Boehmer, Okri is emblematic of this new conception, because
of his attempt to represent national history not by “evocations of the actual existing nation”
but “by way of myth and fiction.” Okri’s novel reveals the disillusionment felt for
1018
Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15
(Autumn 1986): 69.
1019
Boehmer, “The Nation as Metaphor in Contemporary African Literature,” in English Studies in
Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference, ed. Robert Clark and Piero Boitani (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), 320.
292
nationalism as state ideology and shows “how nationalism as the modus operandi of
governments in many post-independence African states has generated absurd displays of
megalomania, with tragic consequences” and “the claim to national autonomy has proved to
be nothing more than a means of legitimating the abuse of state power.” In the nightmarish
atmosphere of the novel, Okri claims that national identity has become “a dilemma, an agon,
or a burlesque.”1020 While retaining the anti-colonial nationalist idea of “the liberation of the
soul of the oppressed,” Okri attempts to re-member national consciousness remembering his
nation’s past history. Redreaming national community, he provides “new and more various
possibilities of self-conception”1021 for his nation.
The Famished Road encompasses the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial
experiences of Nigeria to get a better understanding of the traumatic historical reality.
Towards the end of the novel, Azaro has a vision of African (or Nigerian) history through the
duiker’s eyes. In the vision, he sees “the forms of serene ancestors, men and women for
whom the stars were both words and gods, for whom the world and the sky and the earth
were a vast language of dreams and omens,” which clearly refers to pre-colonial times. He
considers that the African people of these earlier times “were creators first before they were
hunters” and they were dancing “in an exultation of fire and wisdom.” Azaro runs to the
Atlantic coasts, symbolizing the passage to colonial times. He sees “dense white clouds
moving like invading armies of mist and ghosts” and these white clouds, symbolizing the
white people, start to invade the continent beginning from the Atlantic coast: “The ghost
ships of centuries arrived endlessly on the shores. I saw the flotillas, the gunwales, the
spectral great ships and the dozens of rowing boats, bearing the helmeted ones, with mirrors
and guns and strange texts untouched by the salt of the Atlantic. I saw the ships and the boats
beach. The white ones, ghost forms on deep nights, stepped on our shores, and I heard the
1020
1021
Boehmer, “The Nation as Metaphor,” 322.
Boehmer, “The Nation as Metaphor,” 331.
293
earth cry.” This cry frightens Azaro. He runs through the yellow forests, which symbolize
the pre-colonial land of his ancestors and passes through “deluded generations, through
time.” Then, he starts to describe white men’s colonial activities on the continent. The white
invaders destroy the great shrines, cut enormous trees and thus kill the forest. Azaro sees that
African people grow smaller losing their ancestors’ road and losing their old philosophies.
During the colonial period, the African ways of life and African peoples had to retreat. That
is why Azaro hears that the spirits of the forest are speaking about an exile to be able to
escape from invaders. Okri truthfully describes the pre-colonial and colonial history without
focusing on the victories and failures of history. He submits history as the story of survival
because “the great spirits of the land and forest” do not decide to go into exile permanently
but temporarily. Okri admits that Western colonialism affected the social structure but could
not destroy the spiritual side of African culture. With this hopeful view-point, Okri
immediately passes to the chronicle of postcolonial times. Azaro introduces the postcolonial
period with the transformations and changes it brought to Africa. Although the country and
continent get their alleged freedom, the new age leads to disappointment. Azaro is followed
by “Hunters with new instruments of death,” which implies that black African people, as
domestic neo-colonialists, have taken the place of white invaders. Azaro remembers that
“When human beings and animals understood one another, we were all free. But now the
hunters pursued me in the duiker’s eyes.”1022 This quotation is considered a reminder and
admonition for African people, rather than a suggestion of return to pre-colonial times.
Nigerian people have forgotten the spiritual essence of their African consciousness and have
been transformed into “hunters,” that is, black colonizers supplanting the white ones. For this
reason, in the postcolonial era, it seems that not only the white colonizers but also Africans
themselves were guilty of the “hunger” of Africa.
1022
Okri, The Famished Road, 523-24.
294
In addition to the vision above, one of the stories told by Azaro’s mother well
reflects Okri’s exploration of historical reality. In the story, Azaro wants his mother to tell
him a story about white people ans she tells the following story:
When white people first came to our land, […] we had already gone to
the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come
and learn from us. My father used to tell me that we taught them how
to count. We taught them about the stars. We gave them some of our
gods. We shared our knowledge with them. We welcomed them. But
they forgot all this. They forgot many things. They forgot that we are
all brothers and sisters and that black people are the ancestors of the
human race. The second time they came they brought guns. They took
our lands, burned our gods, and they carried away many of our people
to become slaves across the sea. They are greedy. They want to own
the whole world and conquer the sun. Some of them believe they have
killed God. Some of them worship machines. They are misusing the
powers God gave all of us.1023
According to Cooper, in this story Okri represents “an Africa of the idealized
negritude tradition, a homogenous, intrinsically generous continent that shares what it has,
only afterwards to be cheated and robbed.”1024 Truly, Okri describes Africa with its
distinctive features at the beginning of the story. Africa, with its ancient wisdom and
knowledge, is depicted as superior to Europe. It is Africa that teaches its old wisdom to the
white people rather than learning from them. Okri also emphasizes the white people’s greed
and criticizes Western colonial activities, which ruined Africa and its people. However, at
the end of the story, Okri suddenly gives up his négritudien manner when Mom claims that
1023
1024
Okri, The Famished Road, 325.
Cooper, Magical Realism, 71.
295
the white people are not all bad and Azaro should learn from them. Mom also mentions her
dream in which her mother (Azaro’s grandmother) said to her that “there is a reason why the
world is round. Beauty will rule the world. Justice will rule the world.”1025 With this hopeful
dream, Okri turns his attention away from colonialism. He seems to suggest that African
people should know and evaluate their past and try to combine old African knowledge and
wisdom with the useful and advantageous side of Western science. If they can accomplish
this, there will be a hopeful future for them.
Although it contains many references to the pre-colonial and colonial periods of
Nigeria, The Famished Road is set in the pre-independence years of Nigeria, reflecting social
chaos, political confusion, and economic instability during this transitional period. Thus,
choosing the period from colonialism to postcolonial self-government as the time scheme of
the novel is of great significance. According to Guo Deyan, this period “serves as a good
temporal joint between the Nigerian past and future. It is not an exaggeration to say that all
the major troubles of Nigeria are converged at this stage.”1026 Deyan claims that Okri’s
intention was to write an epic of Nigeria and its people, as did García Márquez in One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Echoing Ying’s ideas introduced above, Deyan also emphasizes
that, unlike García Márquez, Okri’s main concern was to find solutions for the country’s
chaotic condition and show new (and also future) generations an appropriate path to follow.
As The Famished Road closely follows the historical events during the preindependence period and the years after independence, it might be useful to add a few more
details to the information about Nigeria’s sociopolitical history given at the beginning of
Chapter 3. In the decades before Nigerian Independence, three political organizations took
the responsibility for organizing the nationalist movements and determining the ways for the
decolonization of the country. As suggested by Guo Deyan, these organizations were the
1025
Okri, The Famished Road, 325.
Guo Deyan, “Trauma and History in Ben Okri’s Fiction,” Cross-Cultural Communication 8.6
(2012): 52.
1026
296
National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the Northern People’s Congress
(NPC), and the Action Group (AG). However, because of tribalism and regionalism, it was
not easy to accomplish a unified Nigeria and to prepare strong roots for decolonization
activities and successive independence. Regionalism continued the colonial concept of
federalism in the country. Deyan explains,
Motivated by regional feelings, the political parties became the
agencies of tribalism. NPC representing the northern Islamists of
Hausa-Fulani, AG the western Yoruba, and NCNC the eastern Igbo
were more and more concerned about their respective narrow gains
from independence instead of pan-Nigerian issues. While the
conservative north was worried about the domination by the more
westernized south, the minority groups within each region feared the
domination by the larger. Therefore, the move toward national
independence was delayed several times. After a series of conferences
and compromises, the 1959 general elections finally saw the coalition
of NPC and NCNC and the formation of the first government of
Nigeria with Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966) as the
Prime Minister and Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904-1996) as the GovernorGeneral.1027
As soon as Nigeria became an independent sovereign state in 1960, the first republic
was established with the coalition of the Hausa-Fulani-based party in the North, the NPC,
and the Igbo-based party in the East, the NCNC. The first government declared the first
Republic in 1963. The Yoruba-based party in the West, the AG, under the leadership of
Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987), was the opposition party and a threat for the
coalition. Awolowo and his supporters had been arrested in 1962 for attempting to challenge
1027
Deyan, 49.
297
the first government. This arrest instigated the turmoil during the decade following
Independence. Partisan and regional fights survived between 1960 and 1966: “Official
corruption, rigged elections, ethnic baiting, bullying, and thuggery dominated the conduct of
politics in the First Republic, which existed from 1960-1966.”1028 These political and social
turmoil led to three coup d’états and the 1967-1970 Civil War. Furthermore, in the period
from Independence to the 1970s, “the country’s oil revenues were squandered […]. The
soldiers came to power and proved themselves more corrupt and less efficient than the
civilians they had overthrown. […] The cities filled up and broke down. The farmlands
emptied and stopped producing. The parliament dissolved, the economy deteriorated, the
dreams disintegrated.”1029
Centering on the difficult lives of people living in a ghetto of an African city, The
Famished Road conveys this chaotic and traumatic period of Nigerian history. The novel
provides a faithful presentation of the social, economic, and political conditions of Nigeria.
The historical reality of the period characterized by “the disbanding of traditional
communities, nation building, religious and ethnic conflicts, secularization, the uneven
industrialization of a developing country, neo-imperialist exploitation of human and natural
resources”1030 is reflected throughout the novel. As suggested by Ying, this historical reality
is logged “through the re-enactment of documentary evidence and the incorporation of
indigenous African beliefs in dream, myth, and foresight.”1031 Ying also emphasizes that
history is entrenched in the destiny of a spirit-child, the folk myth of the road, and also the
photographic images provided by the character of the photographer in the novel. Ying’s
contention is correct because, to afford a view of the historical, Okri benefits from two well-
1028
Falola and Heaton, 159.
David Lamb, quoted in Ying, 117.
1030
Mahmutovic, “History as the Road of Existential Struggle,” 1.
1031
Ying, 117.
1029
298
known myths of West Africa. Throughout the novel, the history of Nigeria and Africa is
conveyed especially through the myth of the abiku child and the myth of the road.
In The Famished Road, Azaro, the abiku child, has the central role because of his
inbetween position between two different worlds. Throughout the novel, Azaro’s hybridity
becomes “a perfect metaphor for postcolonialism’s dualistic anomie.”1032 Moreover, Azaro
has supreme importance for Okri’s sociopolitical discussion. Azaro’s existence and his life
become instrumental to represent the traumatic story of an African nation that is by
implication the Nigerian nation. According to Derek Wright, Azaro’s perplexing and
ambiguous ontological condition denotes “the postcolonial nation state in its chaotic passage
from colonialism to independence,”1033 and thus Azaro becomes the symbol of “arrested
political maturity, unfulfilled potential, and premature failure.”1034 Felicia Oka Moh also
supports Wright’s ideas, claiming that the political history of Nigeria and the Nigerian nation
is represented through Azaro’s continuous births and deaths. Moh emphasizes that “Azaro is
on his fifth round to the earth; a parallel to the five eras of government in Nigeria: Colonial,
first Republic, Military Rule, second Republic, Military Rule.”1035
As well as all other spirit children in the land of the beginnings, Azaro enters into a
vicious circle of coming and going, of birth and death. He introduces the abiku children as
“those of us who lingered in the world, seduced by the annunciation of wonderful events,
went through life with beautiful and fated eyes, carrying within us the music of a lovely and
tragic mythology. Our mouths utter obscure prophecies. Our minds are invaded by images of
the future. We are the strange ones, with half of our beings always in the spirit world.” 1036
Although the grotesque imagery in the quotation represents a certain hopefulness for the
1032
Aizenberg, “I Walked with a Zombie,” 465.
Derek Wright, “Pre- and Post-Modernity in Recent West African Fiction,” Commonwealth Essays
and Studies 21.2 (1999): 6.
1034
Wright, 15.
1035
Moh, 90.
1036
Okri, The Famished Road, 4-5.
1033
299
future, hopeful events are always delayed in the world of the living. The hope of the abiku
children represents the hopeful situation in Nigeria on the brink of self-government. In 1960,
when Nigeria gained its independence from the British government, the Nigerian people
were full of hope for their future. The nationalists, represented as “the people in Masks” in
the novel, were trying to realize “the original dream of making Nigeria a great nation,” 1037
believing that the road of building their nation was their “soul.” However, their hope led to
disillusionment in the years following Independence because of “governmental
incompetence, public insecurity and institutionalised corruption. Not only was the well-being
of people not guaranteed, but the multi-ethnic country was also unable to satisfy the need for
a national identity.”1038 For Azaro, “being born was a shock from which I never
recovered.”1039 Similarly, for Nigeria the nominal national independence became a great
shock still affecting the country. Thus, like the abiku children who are always in the process
of becoming, Nigeria was trapped in its history. It failed in its endless attempts to become a
self-confident, self-governing state.
According to Quayson, the animist realism of The Famished Road produces “a
quasi-religious attitude towards reality,” and in the mythopoeisis of indigenous culture
“myths harbour an implicit moralism necessary for the socialization of the community.” 1040
Sharing Quayson’s idea, Abiodun Adeniji argues that through the myth of the abiku, Okri
wishes to criticize the established order in Nigerian society, its chaos and foulness, which
have been distinguishing features of the society from independence to the present day.
Underlining the high infant mortality in Nigeria, Adeniji discusses how myth attracts
attention to the unhealthy living and environmental conditions especially in the rural areas
and urban slums and ghettos of the country. At the political level, Okri draws attention to
1037
Moh, 74.
Biscaia, 295.
1039
Okri, The Famished Road, 8.
1040
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 149.
1038
300
poverty, tyranny, and injustice in the country through this myth. He condemns politicians for
their irresponsibility, callousness, and apathy toward people’s sufferings and poverty.
Politicians fail in their work as the leaders and pathfinders of the society because of their
attempts at self-aggrandizement. For Adeniji, Okri’s message is brief and to the point:
“Nigeria can be the Utopia of the people’s dreams if the leaders are responsible and the
followers are proactive.”1041
Ade, Azaro’s abiku friend, is another symbol of Nigeria or even Africa. Ade is
introduced as the son of a carpenter. His family is large, with his father’s two wives and ten
children. They live in one room near Azaro’s one-room house. Like Azaro’s family, his
family is also poor. However, unlike Azaro’s, his parents are uncaring and aloof, frequently
beating Ade. He is completely different from Azaro in that he adheres to the pact of the
abiku children. He is eager to return to the world of the Unborn. Azaro explains the
difference between himself and Ade:
I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the
earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit
again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of
limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is
so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the
stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth’s boundaries than
to be free in infinity. 1042
The quotation reveals that Azaro and Ade represent two different visions of Nigeria:
Ade embodies the actual Nigeria, “a country unloved, torn apart and driven to despair,”
while Azaro represents “a country which still finds in itself the drive to carry on through the
1041
1042
Adeniji, 42.
Okri, The Famished Road, 558-59.
301
dreariest adversity.” Through Azaro, Okri proposes that “the country can emerge into
harmony if people can remember their roots and keep the faith.”1043
At the end of The Famished Road, like Azaro and his spirit companions, the
Nigerian nation is directly represented as an abiku nation: “all nations are children; […] ours
too was an abiku nation, a spirit-child nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each
birth come blood and betrayals, and the child of our will [the Nigerian nation] refuses to stay
till we have made propitious sacrifice and displayed our serious intent to bear the weight of a
unique destiny.”1044 Azaro’s parents made many sacrifices to keep their son in the world of
the Living although they were very poor and could hardly afford these sacrifices. To keep
the Nigerian nation alive, it is necessary to make sacrifices. This idea is made clear through
Ade’s prophecy. When his time to go back to the spirit world approaches, Ade foretells a
future of endless cycles, which is full of suffering, ugliness, blindness, coups, wars, famine,
new disasters, and hunger. Although his prophecy is a story of survivals and sufferings, he
adds that suffering African people will always realize “the great meaning of struggle and
hope.” He advises Azaro not to fear and not to feel hopeless in the face of all these
sufferings, disasters, and wars as he will always have something to struggle for. While his
voice trembles, Ade concludes that “our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it
keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong.”1045 Like
Azaro, who has chosen “the liberty of limitations” and remains alive, Nigeria will also be a
resilient abiku if it can surpass its history and chaotic present. This can only be accomplished
by the assistance of the Nigerian people. They must eradicate their apathy toward the evil
condition of their country, evaluate their history consciously, and prepare themselves to
make propitious sacrifices for their country. Only in this way can they carry the weight of
their destiny. For Okri, hope must go on in spite of all sufferings:
1043
Biscaia, 297.
Okri, The Famished Road, 567.
1045
Okri, The Famished Road, 547.
1044
302
Africa has an incredible capacity to not die and not be destroyed.
Unlike China that was always unified and had this great wall to
prevent invasion, Africa had no great wall, yet it manages to remain
unique. It’s things like that, the resilience of the spirit, the great
dreaming capacities, the imaginative frames that are visible in art, an
art that has not remotely been understood. All these things are within
the terrain of the book. But they’re not different things. It’s just one
subject I’m addressing: the famished road. 1046
As the quotation above reveals, the myth of abiku children gives way to the myth of
the road in The Famished Road. The road has multiple meanings as mentioned earlier. In
some places, the road may be read as a symbol of the last two hundred years of African
history and in some others, it seems to symbolize Nigerian history before and after
colonization, that is, beginning from pre-colonial times until the present day. If Azaro and
Ade are the representatives of modern Nigeria in the process of becoming an autonomous
nation state, then the road represents the country’s struggle and quest to be born and to exist.
Azaro restlessly crisscrosses between forest and Madame Koto’s bar, between bush and
road, and between the land of dreams and his home. He continuously gets lost and rushes to
find the way to his home. Rather than the forest, bush, and bar, the road frightens him: “My
head boiled with hallucinations. […] The road was the worst hallucination of them all,
leading towards home and then away from it, without end, with too many signs, and no
directions. The road became my torment, my aimless pilgrimage, and I found myself merely
walking to discover where all the roads lead to, where they end.”1047
In the first sentence of the novel, the road is represented as originated from a river,
which symbolizes the life-giving power of water. As the river with its invigorating nature has
1046
1047
Okri, “Ben Okri,” interview with Wilkinson, 87.
Okri, The Famished Road, 135.
303
lost its origin and is transformed into the road, the road is always hungry. At the beginning of
the novel, the road is introduced in its pre-colonial condition. It is connected to the ancient
world of the spirits. Azaro’s father tells him that Azaro’s grandfather was the “head-priest of
our shrine, Priest of the God of Roads. Anyone who wants a special sacrifice for their
journeys, undertakings, births, funerals, whatever, goes to him. All human beings travel the
same road.” As seen in the quotation, the road is connected to traditional beliefs.With the
help of the story of the road, Azaro’s father attributes power to traditional African values
during the pre-colonial period and describes old African people as powerful spirits. The
attributions to the past values give way to criticism of society: “We are forgetting these
powers. Now, all the power that people have is selfishness, money, and politics” and “the
only power poor people have is their hunger.”1048 Dad also tells the story of the King of the
Road in traditional story-telling manner. Reminiscent of the myths of origins, the story is set
in the old days of Azaro’s “great-great-great grandfather.” The King of the Road is
introduced as a terrible greedy giant and monster of the Forest. The giant is in the habit of
eating whatever he finds strange. When human beings destroy the Forest, the giant cannot
find anything to eat and he changes from the forest to the roads. He has such a huge stomach
that it seems impossible to feed him: “people believed that he had lived for thousands of
years and that nothing could kill him and that he could never die.”1049 According to Moh, the
hunger of the King of the Road symbolizes that the rulers of Africa, both the African
notables and the white colonizers, are greedy “monsters and oppressors.” Thus, the road
represents “the Nigerian nation which has unjust predatory rulers.”1050 However, as the
Forest is the symbol of the pre-colonial Africa and the giant is linked to the Forest, it seems
impossible to readily connect the hunger of the King of the Road to colonialism. Rather,
Okri seems to rfer to the ancient and universal greed of human beings which cannot be
1048
Okri, The Famished Road, 83-84.
Okri, The Famished Road, 299.
1050
Moh, 73.
1049
304
confined only to the greed of the local and foreign rulers of Africa. The King of the Road
eats himself up at the end of the story, which presents a warning for people against the
danger of universal greediness:
What had happened was that the King of the Road had become part of
all the roads in this world. He is still hungry, and he will always be
hungry. This is why there are so many accidents in the world. And to
this day some people still put a small amount of food on the road
before they travel, so that the King of the Road will eat their sacrifice
and let them travel safely. But some of our wise people say that there
are other reasons. Some say people make sacrifices to the road to
remember that the monster is still there and that he can rise at any time
and start to eat up human beings again. Others say that it is a form of
prayer that his type should never come back again to terrify our lives.
That is why a small boy like you must be very careful how you
wander about in this world. 1051
Following the model of traditional myths and folk tales, the story Dad tells aims at
teaching a moral lesson and warning against possible danger. It reflects the power of African
traditions and African wisdom and the power of the past. It suggests the correct paths to
follow. Azaro grows up listening to folk-tales and songs from his parents: “Mum told me
stories of aquamarine beginnings. […] I listened to the wisdom of the old songs which Dad
rendered in his cracked fighting voice. Mesmerized by the cobalt shadows, the paradoxical
ultramarine air, and the silver glances of the dead, I listened to the hard images of joy. I
listened also to the songs of work and harvest and the secrets of heroes.”1052 As indicated by
Cooper, the stories, proverbs, myths, and folk-tales to which Azaro listens in his childhood
1051
1052
Okri, The Famished Road, 301.
Okri, The Famished Road, 214-15.
305
“discourage change, foster purity in aquamarine origins and work against newness entering
the world.”1053 At the beginning of the novel, the myth of the road is used to prove the value
of old habits, traditions, and wisdom of African culture. It seems not to refer to colonialism
and contemporary politics and politicians.
Towards the end of The Famished Road, Okri uses the myth of the road to represent
Africa and Nigeria. In one of his visions, while Azaro is travelling on “the wind of amnesia”
together with the three-headed spirit, he sees a beautiful jeweled road being built by people
having masks instead of faces. Although the road has been built by these people for two
thousand years, it is only two feet long. The people do not know that they will never be able
to finish the road. The moment they finish it, they will all perish. The road is “their soul, the
soul of their history.”1054 Whenever a generation ruins the road, a new generation tries to
remake it. When Azaro asks the reason, the three-headed spirit explains,
“Because each new generation begins with nothing and with
everything. They know all the earlier mistakes. They may not know
that they know, but they do. They know the early plans, the original
intentions, the earliest dreams. Each generation has to reconnect the
origins for themselves. They tend to become a little wiser, but don’t
go very far. It is possible that they now travel slower, and will make
bigger, better mistakes. That is how they are as a people. They have an
infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles. Nothing can destroy them
except themselves and they will never finish the road that is their soul
and they do not know it.”
“So why don’t you tell them?”
1053
1054
Cooper, Magical Realism, 70.
Okri, The Famished Road, 380.
306
“Because they have the great curse of forgetfulness. They are deaf to
the things they need to know the most.”1055
In this way, Okri epitomizes two hundred years of recorded African history. Reminding the
readers of the mythological character Sisyphus, who was condemned to eternally roll his
rock uphill just to watch it roll back down at the end of each day, African people are
condemned to construct their history just to see that they endeavor in vain. They have to
struggle in vain because their history has been wounded by many years of “enslavement by
African notables, colonialism by Western imperialist adventurers and neo-colonialism by the
new African oppressors.”1056 Moreover, as indicated by Moh, “long periods of colonization
by African notables and the white colonizers have left the citizens with a slave mentality
which shuns positive remedial action.”1057 Because of the disastrous consequences of
enslavement, Western colonialism, domestic neo-colonialism, and more importantly the
African slave mentality created by these causes, the road of the African people cannot be
completed. The incomplete road may also refer to the failure of African nations in nationbuilding. As indicated by Frantz Fanon, getting independence from colonial rule is one thing,
but providing national liberation is another. 1058 After their independence from Western
colonialism, most African countries have fallen short of constructing a national
consciousness and national liberation, and achieving social justice, technological
development, economic growth, and political egalitarianism. They have been shaken by
many political conflicts, civil wars, coup d’états, counter-coups, man-made and natural
disasters. While most of these debacles are the result of the intrusion of outside forces, the
African people are not blameless, either. Okri puts half the blame on them, considering that
1055
Okri, The Famished Road, 379.
Adeniji, 67.
1057
Moh, 73.
1058
See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 148-49.
1056
307
“the road was young but its hunger was old. And its hunger had been reopened.”1059 As seen
in the myth of the King of the Road, the exploitation of the continent has also come from
inside. Beginning from pre-colonial times, the African notables exploited the resources of
Africa while the common people watched. The masses have been “deaf to the truth,”1060
resisting anybody who wants to show the correct way. They believe they will receive no
answer if they question their lives, poverty, and oppressed conditions: “why is life like this,
eh?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Some people have too much and their dogs eat better food than we do,
while we suffer and keep quiet until the day we die.’ ‘And even if we don’t keep quiet who
will listen to us, eh?’ ‘God,’ one of them said. The rest of them were silent.”1061 Okri
criticizes the masses through the character Dad, who accuses people saying that “our road is
hungry” because “We [Africans] have no desire to change things!” 1062 He also criticizes the
people of the ghetto “for not taking care of their environment, for their lazy attitude towards
the world, for their almost inhuman delight in their own poverty.”1063 The masses, together
with the African politicians and neo-colonists, are always doing great damage to Africa:
“Too many roads! Things are CHANGING TOO FAST! No new WILL. COWARDICE
everywhere! SELFISHNESS is EATING UP the WORLD. THEY ARE DESTROYING
AFRICA! They are DESTROYING the WORLD and the HOME and the SHRINES and the
GODS! THEY are DESTROYING LOVE TOO.”1064 Furthermore, Okri accuses the masses
of their forgetfulness and lack of historical consciousness, as does García Márquez with the
Macondones. As well as the whole Africa, Nigeria is depicted as a place of forgetfulness,
like the Macondo/ Latin America of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although the African
people know their earlier mistakes, they never learn anything from their past experiences.
1059
Okri, The Famished Road, 484.
Okri, The Famished Road, 382.
1061
Okri, The Famished Road, 323.
1062
Okri, The Famished Road, 517.
1063
Okri, The Famished Road, 479.
1064
Okri, The Famished Road, 437.
1060
308
That is why they advance slower and make bigger mistakes. This criticism is repeated in
many other parts of The Famished Road. For instance, the people of the ghetto quickly forget
the malfeasance of the two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor:
“people had forgotten, and those that hadn’t merely shrugged and said that it was all such a
long time ago, that things were too complicated for such memories, and besides the party had
new leaders.”1065 Alongside his criticism, Okri tries to demonstrate to the masses what
should be done. Dad urges people “to lift themselves up by their thoughts. ‘THINK
DIFFERENTLY,’ he shouted, ‘AND YOU WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.’ No one heard
him. ‘REMEMBER HOW FREE YOU ARE,’ he bellowed, ‘AND YOU WILL
TRANSFORM YOUR HUNGER INTO POWER!”1066 For Dad, the people can obtain the
power and knowledge they need from the African wisdom, traditions, and philosophy. Only
if they correctly follow the old ways can they satisfy their insatiability and open the
complicated roads of the future: “My wife and my son, listen to me. In my sleep I saw many
wonderful things. Our ancestors taught me many philosophies. My father, Priest of Roads,
appeared to me and said I should keep my door open. My heart must be open. My life must
be open. Our road must be open. A road that is open is never hungry.”1067
In addition to representing African history, the incomplete road may also be read as
the symbol of the Nigerian history of nation-building from pre-independence to the present
day. The violent history of Nigeria is characterized by the attempts of nation-construction,
dissolution
of
traditional
communities,
social
and
political
conflicts,
irregular
industrialization and mechanization, and neo-imperialist exploitation of the country. During
the years just before Independence, like many other African societies, the Nigerian society
was on the way of being “the bizarre product of both new and old, tradition and burgeoning
1065
Okri, The Famished Road, 443.
Okri, The Famished Road, 479.
1067
Okri, The Famished Road, 517.
1066
309
change.”1068 In other words, Nigeria was “one of the unevenly developed places of the world
that spawn magical realism both as a technique and as a way of looking at life.”1069 The
urban and rural areas of Nigeria were developing following different ways. The working
class and peasants were cognizant that the well-off, élite British leadership had given its
place to a Nigerian bourgeoisie that “did not share their values or views on future
prosperity.”1070 In the place of the British colonial rule, the new Nigerian bourgeoisie
survived the “centralized despotism”1071 in Nigeria.
According to Mahmood Mamdani, colonial occupation is the key concept to
understand African history. Both French direct colonial rule and British indirect colonial rule
were despotic throughout the continent after the Scramble for Africa. Decentralized
despotism, which is described by Mamdani as “the colonial state” of British indirect rule,
created a “bifurcated” world. It produced two different groups of people in Africa: citizens
and subjects. Subject populations were placed under state-appointed Native Authorities,
separating them in terms of ethnic origin, tradition, and custom while a civil society was
formed by the modern laws of the state:
This divided world is inhabited by subjects on one side and citizens on
the other; their life is regulated by customary law on one side and
modern law on the other; their beliefs are dismissed as pagan on this
side but bear the status of religion on the other; the stylized moments
in their day-to-day lives are considered ritual on this side and culture
on the other; their creative activity is considered crafts on this side and
glorified as the arts on the other; their verbal communication is
demeaned as vernacular chatter on this side but elevated as linguistic
1068
Cooper, Magical Realism, 80.
Cooper, “Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities,” GALE| H1100072523.
1070
Falola and Heaton, 157.
1071
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996), 26.
1069
310
discourse on the other; in sum, the world of the “savages” barricaded,
in deed as in word, from the world of the “civilized.”1072
This bifurcated world was similar to the apartheid system in South Africa. Therefore,
Mamdani considers that decentralized despotism, the colonial state form, was the basic form
of the apartheid state. During decolonization activities, decentralized despotism changed into
a centralized despotism because the newly-independent African states reorganized
“decentralized power” in order to “unify the nation through a reform that tended to
centralization” instead of dismantling “despotism through a democratic reform.”1073 The
despotism of the civilian regimes was supplanted by military regimes, especially after
Independence. The distinction between rural and urban dwellers continued. In the new cities,
a civil society of nationals, demanding their rights as citizens, struggled against the racial
divisions imposed by the decentralized power while the subject populations, especially the
rural residents, were debarred from the state.
The Famished Road reflects the condition of Nigeria from the perspective of the
subject people living in a city slum. In the depiction of a subject population, the novel
follows the model of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which allegorically presents the history
of the Colombian nation state – although Colombia is never named – through the founding,
development, and decline of Macondo. In The Famished Road a new bourgeois nation-state
powerfully integrates Azaro’s slum through the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor,
the riots between the political thugs and the slum people, the forthcoming elections, the
arrival of Western technology and capitalism symbolized by electricity, automobiles, and
heavy machinery, and the arrival of road construction firms of the white people. Similarly, in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, we have Macondo and the Macondones who introduce a
bourgeois nation-state through the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, the magistrate
1072
1073
Mamdani, 61.
Mamdani, 25.
311
appointed by the government, the rigged elections, the civil war, the arrival of the railroad,
and the banana company. The Famished Road reflects post-Independence disillusionment
with nationalism and shows the reason why Nigeria failed in its attempts to become an
autonomous nation-state. One Hundred Years of Solitude reveals why Macondo/ Colombia
failed in the consolidation of a nation-state in the late nineteenth century.
Azaro, his parents, and all the other people of the ghetto continuously struggle to
find their ways on the complex and mysterious roads. What defines the life of the poor slum
people is “chaos, filth, destitution, and despair.”1074 Their slum, with its terrible living
conditions and unhealthy environment, is representative of the slums and ghettos in rural
Nigeria. The people live in wretched houses. In Azaro’s home, for instance, there were “the
cracks in the walls, the holes in the zinc ceiling, the cobwebs, the smells of earth and garri,
the cigarette and mosquito coil smoke.”1075 Rats, ants, wall-geckos and lizards swarm on the
rough floor and walls. Azaro comments that “the poor also belong to one country.”1076 Their
surroundings are also very poor. The compound where Azaro’s family and neighbors live is
filthy and lacking in basic facilities. The crowded families are crammed into one-room
houses of the compound and share only one toilet and bathroom. They have no electricity.
They use candles in their one-room house. Kerosene lamps lighten their streets at nights. The
garbage and gutter smell terrible. The houses are covered with dust and dirt:
As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun,
with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted
veins pumping on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling
that there was no escape from the hard things of this world.
Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted
zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, the little girls
1074
Deyan, 50.
Okri, The Famished Road, 39.
1076
Okri, The Famished Road, 40.
1075
312
naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-cans, the little boys
jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air
vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the filthy
gutters. The sun bared the reality of our lives and everything was so
harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one
another or for anything at all.1077
The harsh scene of the slum frightens Azaro and makes him despair. The faces of the
compound people are stamped with hardship, “with their hunger, their pain,” and “with the
facts of their lives.”1078 It seems to Azaro their lives “kept turning on the same axis of
anguish.”1079
In their postcolonial worlds, Azaro’s society develops unevenly as a result of the
haphazard encountering with “Western capitalism, technology, and education.”1080 In terms
of global dependency theories, “the underdevelopment of third world nations is, to a great
extent, a structural consequence of the global capitalism enforced by Western countries and
agencies.”1081 Western capitalism and money have negative effects on sociopolitical life in
Azaro’s slum. Adoration of money changes the people and becomes the cause of their
slyness and hypocrisy. The subject people of the slum suffer from the despotism of their
avaricious landlord. The landlord often turns up demanding an increase in the recently
increased rent. The difficult life conditions of the compound people make them greedy for
money. Azaro’s father takes out loan from his neighbors to pay his debts. The creditors
always disturb Azaro’s parents to demand their money back. They invade Azaro’s home,
threaten him and his mother, damage the room and steal their things. Dad condemns the
1077
Okri, The Famished Road, 189.
Okri, The Famished Road, 254.
1079
Okri, The Famished Road, 322.
1080
Cooper, Magical Realism, 15.
1081
Vazquez, GALE| H1100072527.
1078
313
creditors saying that “they are RATS COWARDS THIEVES AND ROGUES.” The
creditors can do anything for money: “Money will kill you,” 1082 cries Dad in despair.
Being born on the edge of Independence, Azaro is aware that their country has
entered into a process of great changes and transformations. He knows that the Nigerian
people “were in the divide between past and future. A new cycle had begun, an old one was
being brought to a pitch.”1083 Azaro wanders through the forest, watches the men felling
trees, the companies building houses and roads, the workers being carried to the city center
by buses, and the men working like slaves and carrying monstrous bags of salt, garri, and
cement. He continuously observes the changes around himself. As with the Macondo of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, Azaro’s slum is introduced to Western capitalism and
technology, which opens the gates for the period of neocolonial domination. In One Hundred
Years of Solitude, the arrival of industrial revolution symbolized by railroad, train,
electricity, cinema, telephone, radio, automobile, and the banana boom symbolizes the
period of modernization. Similarly, in The Famished Road, modernization comes from the
outside, with the construction of roads and new buildings by means of heavy machinery, the
arrival of electricity, electric lamps, gramophone, and automobile.
In The Invention of Africa, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe describes modernity as “an
illusion of development.”1084 Okri seems to underline this illusion in his novel. According to
Bill Hemminger, Okri challenges “the myth of the modern world of technological
development” because “the serendipitous paving of roads across ancient rainforests
contributes neither to modernity nor to development.”1085 As in the banana strike of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, modernity causes many social upheavals such as the strike of the
road-construction workers. In the strike scene, Azaro watches the workers protesting against
1082
Okri, The Famished Road, 114-15.
Okri, The Famished Road, 256.
1084
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988), 5.
1085
Hemminger, 76.
1083
314
the white engineers and employers who do not pay their wages. Okri juxtaposes the chaos
created by the antagonists and protesters with the refreshing and peaceful atmosphere of the
forest in the same scene. 1086 Similarly, in another scene which describes the flood, the white
overseer and three of his workers who erupt in the forest to construct a road are swallowed
by the flood. The flood changes the road into a primeval mud. Thus, the forest, as the symbol
of ancient traditions, takes its revenge upon the modernity provided by Western technology
and science. In these two scenes it seems that Okri refers to the conflict between African
traditions and Western modernity, and he recommends a return to the pre-colonial past by
showing the negative side of Western modernity, technology, and progress. Nonetheless, as
indicated by Vazquez, Okri never adopts “a naïve nativism” in The Famished Road, putting
the traditions of pre-colonial past against Western technology. Okri refuses “to set up a
Manichaean distinction between technological progress and traditional values.”1087 For
Vazquez, Okri’s refusal is clearly seen at the beginning of the flood scene where the forest
takes its revenge from the white man by using Western technology of photography. In its
treatment of modernity borrowed from the West, The Famished Road goes far beyond
García Márquez’s novel, which demonstrates the dangers of the adoption of Western values
and ideology just for the sake of utility and development. To construct a healthy and wealthy
future for new generations, Okri suggests that it is necessary to learn from the Western
people. The appropriate combination of knowledge of Western innovations, technology, and
science and the unaltered indigenous consciousness can provide a good future not only for
Nigeria but also for all other postcolonial countries of the world.
It is possible to find the reflections of this idea in some other episodes in the novel.
The best example is the following story told by Mom to Azaro and Ade. This complicated
story is concerned with the presence of Whites in Nigeria/ Africa. On a sunny and hot day,
1086
1087
Okri, The Famished Road, 280.
Vazquez, GALE| H1100072527.
315
Mom comes to a crossroad between the bush, representing the old African culture, and the
road, representing Western culture while she is selling her provisions. At the crossroad, she
meets a tortoise coming out of the bush. The tortoise, as “the archetypal character of the oral
tales of old”1088 and the symbol of the old African wisdom, talks to her, but she does not
reveal to Azaro and Ade what it has told her. She goes on telling about the white man with
blue sunglasses she meets in the city on another sunny day. The white man wants her to tell
him how to get out of Africa and offers his blue sunglasses in exchange. Mom tells him that
he can never find his way out of Africa unless he knows what the tortoise has told her. In the
story, Mom’s desire to take the white man’s sunglasses is the symbol of “an
acknowledgement that the white man has something of value to exchange for her knowledge,
for African wisdom, for the words of the tortoise, archetypal character of the oral tales of
old,” and the sunglasses become “the masks of old syncretized with the changes brought by
whites and by colonialism.”1089 Thus, as in the episode above, Okri suggests a combination
of Western innovation and technology – symbolized by the sunglasses; and African wisdom
– symbolized by the tortoise coming out of the bush, rather than the unquestioning imitation
of Western values, traditions, and culture. For Okri, old traditions should be transformed by
new Western and African technology to suit modern purposes.
Mom’s story conveys Okri’s universal message about humanity as well as his
message about the use of modern Western technology in combination with African
traditions. When Mom gets the white man’s sunglasses that protect her eyes from dust and
sunlight, the man tells her his story: “He had been here for ten years. For seven of those
years he was an important man in the government. Then all the Independence trouble started
and for three years he tried to leave but kept failing.” After telling his story, he says that “the
1088
1089
Cooper, Magical Realism, 72.
Cooper, Magical Realism, 72.
316
only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you.”1090 Here, Okri seems to focus on
the greed of the colonizer for Africa. He emphasizes that “the perpetrators of colonialism are
its own victims in that they have to live with physical, cultural, and emotional detachment
from homeland and to undergo the trial of foreign climate and the torture of conscience.” 1091
In the continuation of her story, Mom meets a “strange Yoruba man” in the market two
weeks later. The Yoruba man is, in fact, the white man who has given Mom the blue
sunglasses. He explains that he has “discovered the road.” His story is as follows:
“When I left you,” he began, “I became feverish in the head and later
in a fit of fury over a small thing I killed my African servant. They
arrested me. I sat in a cell. Then they released me because I was a
white man. Then I began to wander about the city naked. Everyone
stared at me. They were shocked to see a mad white man in Africa.
Then a strange little African child took to following me around. He
was my only friend. All my white colleagues had deserted me. Then
one day my head cleared. Five hundred years had gone past. The only
way to get out of Africa was to become an African.”1092
As soon as he understands the fact that he can escape from Africa only if he becomes
an African, he changes his way of life and returns to his homeland, England. After leading a
happy and successful life till the age of seventy, he dies to be reborn. In his second life he
becomes a Yoruba businessman. Here, changing the white man to a black man, Okri blurs
the boundaries between black and white, the colonized and the colonizer. Only by way of
empathy for others can the white man change his present and future lives. He regains his
humanity only by understanding the value of African ways of life and being a friend of
1090
Okri, The Famished Road, 553.
Deyan, 51.
1092
Okri, The Famished Road, 554.
1091
317
African people. The road he discovered thus becomes the road to the liberation of human
beings for the sake of universal humanity.
The Famished Road reflects the chaotic social and political atmosphere of Nigeria
between 1959 and 1960. Independence in 1960 was welcomed with great hopes and
expectations in the country. Dad expresses the hopes for independence, saying that “Birth
brings glory.”1093 However, because of the neocolonial political struggles and political
corruption that have long survived in the country, the people of the slum start to believe that
“this Independence has brought only trouble.”1094 The novel represents the quarrels of The
Part of the Rich and the Party of the Poor to be able to win the forthcoming elections. The
struggle between the two parties of the novel echoes that of the three major parties (NPC,
NCNC and AG) of Nigeria during 1959 and 1960. During these years, the political parties
were divided by region with each party working for the interests of its own region and
struggling to obtain power within the electoral system. They were spending all their energy
to win the upcoming elections. Instead of the white colonizers, the country now had
domestic neocolonialists for whom “the enemy to fight was no longer the colonial
government, which had indicated strong signs of dismantling itself, but fellow
Nigerians.”1095 The political gains, rigged elections, ethnic baiting, oppression, and violent
acts of political thugs became the major factors preventing Nigeria in its attempts to be a
unified self-governing nation-state. Similar to the real political events of the country, in The
Famished Road, the two parties struggle for power. They seem to be divided both by
economics and region. Domestic neocolonialists, who are symbolized by the new brand of
politicians, party chiefs, power merchants, warlords, and political thugs, continuously
oppress the slum people who become poorer and poorer. The lives of the subject people of
the slum are made more complicated by politics. Like the Liberal and Conservative parties of
1093
Okri, The Famished Road, 396.
Okri, The Famished Road, 199.
1095
Falola, quoted in Deyan, 50.
1094
318
Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor
in The Famished Road fetter the country in its attempts to become a nation state. Neither of
the parties can bring democracy. Like Macondo, Azaro’s slum starts to attract the attention
of the politicians from the capital who want to gain its allegiance. Vying for public support,
the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor propagandize the slum and try to persuade
people to vote for their party in the upcoming elections. “The thugs and warriors of grassrooted politics”1096 start to “spoil everything with politics.”1097 They violently and brutally
threaten the people of the slum. If people do not agree to vote for their party, they take their
revenge in various ways. For instance, Dad, as the supporter of the Party of the Poor, is
forced to carry the heaviest load, and Mom is not permitted to sell her provisions in the
market:
Mum went on being harassed at the market. When she moved her stall
to another part of the market the thugs would turn up, posing as
potential customers. They pestered her and tipped over her things and
took her goods without paying. Then they would denounce her,
making the most outrageous accusations, and those who wanted to
buy provisions from her went somewhere else. Mum came home
without selling much. She made very little money. 1098
While trying to gain the support of the slum dwellers, the politicians and thugs of the
Party of the Rich come to the slum in an open-backed van with a megaphone. They give
exuberant promises and draw “future visions of extravagant prosperity.” However, the
inhabitants of the compound are skeptical about their political rant. They are aware that the
politicians have come to deceive them. All the politicians want is their money:
1096
Okri, The Famished Road, 492.
Okri, The Famished Road, 96.
1098
Okri, The Famished Road, 219.
1097
319
“VOTE FOR US. WE ARE THE PARTY OF THE RICH, FRIENDS
OF THE POOR...”
“The poor have no friends,” someone in the crowd said.
“Only rats.”
“IF YOU VOTE FOR US...”
“...we are finished,” someone added.
“...WE WILL FEED YOUR CHILDREN...”
“...lies.”
“...AND WE WILL BRING YOU GOOD ROADS...”
“...which the rain will turn into gutters!”
“...AND WE WILL BRING ELECTRICITY...”
“...so you can see better how to rob us!
“...AND WE WILL BUILD SCHOOLS...”
“...to teach illiteracy!”
“...AND HOSPITALS. WE WILL MAKE YOU RICH LIKE US.
THERE IS PLENTY FOR EVERYBODY. PLENTY OF FOOD.
PLENTY OF POWER. VOTE FOR UNITY AND POWER! […]
AND TO PROVE TO YOU THAT WE ARE NOT EMPTY WORDS
BRING YOUR CHILDREN TO US. WE ARE GIVING AWAY
FREE MILK! YES, FREE MILK FROM US, COURTESY OF OUR
GREAT PARTY!”1099
The sour powdered-milk that was distributed as a bribe by the thugs of the Party of
the Rich poisons the people of the compound and causes a mass illness, which suggests that
if the masses continue to believe in the bad politicians, they will always be open to
exploitation. As with the Liberal and Conservative parties in One Hundred Years of Solitude,
1099
Okri, The Famished Road, 145.
320
there seems to be no noteworthy difference between the Party of the Rich and the Party of
the Poor in The Famished Road. As suggested by Hemminger, both The Party of the Rich
and the Party of the Poor “bring additional pain and privation to the ghetto – never any good.
Each party defines the amelioration of citizen life in terms of material goods; each party
thinly disguises its pandering for votes and profit.”1100 The representation of the political
parties underlines the miserable insufficiency of politics to handle real human concerns.
Represented as the equally corrupt mirror of the Party of the Rich, the Party of the
Poor is no better than the other party. The politicians of the Party of the Poor are as apathetic
towards the people’s hunger and destitution as those of the Party of the Rich. They also come
to the compound with loudspeakers and leaflets, shout slogans, make many promises and say
that they will never poison the people. As soon as the Party of the Poor leaves, “the van of
bad politics” returns, blaming the Party of the Poor for the rotten milk. However, the speech
of the spokesman of the Party of the Rich reveals the lies of the party: “WE ARE YOUR
FRIENDS. WE WILL BRING YOU ELECTRICITY AND BAD ROADS, NOT GOOD
MILK, I MEAN GOOD ROADS, NOT BAD MILK.”1101 The people of the slum accuse the
bad politicians of being thieves, poisoners, and murderers. There starts strife between the
oppressed people of the slum and the political thugs. The scenes depicting political agitation
and political strife between the thugs of the two parties and between the thugs and the slum
people become common throughout the novel. The thugs of two opposite parties fight in the
streets without knowing why they are fighting. None of the promises given by the politicians
is ever kept. The elections and the great public meeting that the parties plan to hold are
always delayed. By way of these political events, Okri demonstrates the political vice,
corruption, and hypocrisy that penetrates the whole country. He satirizes the old “armed
robbers,” like the Green Leopard, who have changed into “a proper party man, rehabilitated
1100
1101
Hemminger, 73.
Okri, The Famished Road, 180.
321
into the mould of bouncer, bodyguard, and canvasser of votes” 1102 after Independence. Even
after torturing and killing people, these “proper” bouncers, thugs, and bodyguards, in spite of
“the animal expression in their eyes,” look like “modern businessmen, contractors, exporters,
politicians” and walk with “the dignity of honourable crooks.”1103 Okri is skeptical about
political power. For him, political or economic power becomes “a weapon of intimidation
and harassment.”1104 He criticizes politics through the new brand of politicians, political
thugs, bouncers and sycophants. As with the character Colonel Aureliano Buendía of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, the intoxication of power separates these people from their
humanity. They turn into neocolonial tyrants. Okri considers them as “the madmen of our
history” and the initiators of a “crazy war.”1105 Okri’s warning for men of power is also
contained in the episode where the thugs and bouncers whip the inhabitants and the gypsies,
including all women and children, who want to join the big party held in Madame Koto’s
bar. When the thugs and bouncers, who have been transformed into men of power by way of
political enthusiasm, whip the innocent people, in fact, they “whip themselves into future
eras.”1106 Believing that whatever is done at present is actually done for the future, he warns
these men of power. They should be conscious of their significant role in the construction of
the future of the nation.
While describing political corruption and chaos, Okri uses Jeremiah the
photographer as the symbol of “political consciousness.”1107 According to Cooper, Okri
constructs a new myth by the use of this character. His name, Jeremiah, is a reference to “the
seventh-century BC prophet who attempted to warn his fellow-Jews against moral
1102
Okri, The Famished Road, 449-50.
Okri, The Famished Road, 256-57.
1104
Moh, 100.
1105
Okri, The Famished Road, 226.
1106
Okri, The Famished Road, 518.
1107
Deyan, 50.
1103
322
decay.”1108 Thus, the messianic legend of Jeremiah provides social and political moral
lessons in the novel. By using his camera, the photographer tries to help the subject people of
the slum. Azaro attributes some magical powers to the photographer and his camera. For
him, the photographer uses his “mystery-making” camera “as if he were a magician.” 1109 He
kills all the rats in Azaro’s house with his “powerful medicine” and “secret charms.” The
photographer explains to Azaro that the rats resemble bad politicians: the rats “are never
satisfied. They are like bad politicians and imperialists and rich people. […] They eat up
property. They eat up everything in sight. And one day when they are very hungry they will
eat us up.”1110
The photographer with his camera is always ready to take pictures of every event in
the slum, whether a celebration, a party, a riot, or a strife. He is a “constant witness of the
misery, squalor, and political violence of urban life.”1111 On “the Day of the Politicians’
Milk,” “the intrepid photographer” appears with his camera and takes pictures of “the
miserable landlord,” “the surging crowd,” “the thugs flexing their muscles,” “the milk-heaps
and vomit outside the houses,” “sick children, men in contorted forms of agony, women in
attitudes of hungry outrage.”1112 When the slum dwellers revolt against the party men, burn
the van of the party, and in return the party thugs beat the people, the photographer
frenziedly records every moment. However, as in the episode of banana plague in One
Hundred Years of Solitude in which the neocolonial imperialists, the government, and the
military try to obliterate the memory of the massacre of three thousand people, in The
Famished Road, the thugs try to obliterate the epidemic of rotten milk. To be able to delete
the memory of their evil acts, the thugs pursue the photographer, who has recorded every
1108
Cooper, “Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities,” GALE| H1100072523.
Okri, The Famished Road, 56.
1110
Okri, The Famished Road, 271-72.
1111
John Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue: An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction (London:
Macmillan, 1998), 98.
1112
Okri, The Famished Road, 147-56.
1109
323
minute of “the Day of the Politicians’ Milk” with his camera. The photographer is taken to
prison and harassed badly by the police. After he is released, he returns to the slum as a
mythical hero: “Prison seemed to have changed him and he went around with a strange new
air of myth about him, as if he had conceived heroic roles for himself during the short time
he had been away. When he arrived the street gathered outside his room to give him a hero’s
welcome.”1113 His mythical fame strengthens when the slum dwellers see their pictures taken
by the photographer on the front page of a national newspaper. He declares himself “an
International Photographer.”1114 He falls foul with the political thugs because he has taken
pictures of “thugs beating up market women,” “the leader of the Party of Bad Milk from odd
angles that made his face seem bloated, his eyes bulbous, his mouth greedy,” and “politicians
being stoned at a rally, he caught their panic, their cowardice, and their humiliation.” 1115 He
runs away from the three thugs who want to kill him and starts to live as if he were an
outlaw, appearing only at night from time to time. To sum up, throughout the novel, the
photographer plays a messianic role of protecting the oppressed people from the evils of the
neocolonialist élite by way of his camera.
As explained in Chapter I, Hegerfeldt regards magical realist texts as the examples
of historiographic metafiction. The magical realist texts deal with “rewritings of official
versions of history, playfully offering alternate accounts.”1116 True to Hegerfeldt’s
contention, both One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road are historiographic
metafictions, for both novels investigate historiography’s claim to objectivity. In One
Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez represents the difference between reality
(history) and official versions of reality through the episode of banana plague, in which the
people of Macondo are forced to live the official version of reality written by the
1113
Okri, The Famished Road, 183.
Okri, The Famished Road, 185.
1115
Okri, The Famished Road, 188-89.
1116
Hegerfeldt, 63.
1114
324
neocolonialists. Okri does the same in The Famished Road through the photographer and his
camera. He emphasizes the importance of recording historical reality through the eyes of
first-hand witnesses. To avoid interpretation by others, it is necessary for nations to
document their own reality (history). Recording history is necessary to provide historical
consciousness. That is why Azaro feels sorry when the photographer does not appear
anywhere on the night when the thugs attack the slum people to take revenge for their revolt.
For Azaro, to record the events with the photographer’s magic instrument means to make
them real. Because of the absence of the photographer and his camera, Azaro describes the
night as “a night without memory”:1117
[…] because the photographer hadn’t been there to record what had
happened that night, nothing of the events appeared in the newspapers.
It was as if the events were never real. They assumed the status of
rumour. […] After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals
fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us
began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had
collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night. 1118
As well as being the representative of political and historical consciousness, the
photographer is used by Okri to emphasize his ideas on the necessity of acquiring global
understanding. The photographer challenges tradition, travels the roads of the world, and
attempts to understand foreign viewpoints. He develops his global understanding in this way.
Like the character Gabriel, as the representative of García Márquez himself in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, the photographer seems to allude to Ben Okri. By way of this character,
Okri emphasizes that reality is multidimensional and it is necessary to catch as many
1117
1118
Okri, The Famished Road, 211.
Okri, The Famished Road, 214.
325
different layers of reality as possible. His recommendation for African people is that they
have to learn to think in a way that considers different points of view.
In The Famished Road Okri shows how bad politics creates an unbridgeable gap
between rich and poor. The obstructive political system deprives the masses of the wealth
they created. Okri underlines the social injustice. Because of bad politics, Nigeria has turned
to a “land suffocating with plenitude while the majority starved.”1119 In the country, while
the poor suffer terribly, the rich have everything and their dogs eat better food than the poor.
The rich, in search of power and money, oppress and torment the poor. The landlord’s
attitudes toward the people of the compound exemplify the oppression of the poor by the
rich. The landlord and his thugs threaten Azaro’s parents, saying that they will have to find
another accommodation if they don’t vote for his party man in the forthcoming elections:
“There’s power and there’s power: anyone who looks for my trouble will get enough trouble
for life. I am a peaceful man but the person who spoils my peace will find that I am a LION.
I am an ELEPHANT. My THUNDER will strike them. And on top of that I will send my
boys to beat them up!”1120 Dad refuses to vote for the Party of the Rich: “Even God can’t tell
us who to vote for.”1121 To take his revenge, the landlord increases the family’s rent. They
become the only ones in the compound to suffer such an increment. In such a chaotic and
wretched sociopolitical environment, it seems impossible to remain chaste and virtuous. Dad
shouts in anger that “they make [the poor people] commit murder” and “they force a man to
become an armed robber.”1122
In Okri’s social and political criticism, two oppositional characters, Madame Koto
and Dad carry the supreme importance. While Madame Koto adopts capitalism and
represents the destructive embodiment of power, Dad becomes the symbol of social justice
1119
Okri, The Famished Road, 396.
Okri, The Famished Road, 232.
1121
Okri, The Famished Road, 237.
1122
Okri, The Famished Road, 275-76.
1120
326
and espouses socialism. Madame Koto has a great capacity for both good and evil. She is the
owner of a local bar selling palm-wine and hot pepper soup. At the beginning of the novel,
she has good qualities. She protects Azaro, believing that he brings good luck to her and her
bar; she offers to pay for Azaro’s school fees; she becomes the only creditor who does not
demand her money back from Azaro’s parents by way of violence and threat; she heals
Azaro’s mother by preparing a magical medicine. Koto, a witch, has a spiritual potency with
magical powers. After beating up a man who is nuisance to other customers, she turns into a
legend in the slum. Her bar is a place where Azaro first gets acquainted with the political
problems of the country. The bar is always full of the oddest people – the bizarre, the drunk,
the mad, the suffering, and the magical. These people feverishly argue among themselves
about politics. Azaro learns especially through the woman customers of the bar a lot about
“the talk of Independence, about how the white men treated [the Nigerian people], about
political parties and tribal divisions” and “the forthcoming elections and about the thugs and
violence, the people of different parties killed in skirmishes deep in the country.” 1123
However, as the story progresses, Madame Koto starts to go mad with “Money. Politics.
Customers. People.”1124 Madame Koto supports the Party of the Rich. Turning into a
sycophant of the power-mongers, she gets richer and richer. She becomes the first and the
only person in the ghetto to have electric lamps, a gramophone, and an automobile. These
modern facilities are arranged only for her by her political and neocolonial associates. She
makes many changes in her shabby traditional bar. Her bar now has a signboard having a
painting of a large-breasted mermaid serving drinks, multicolored plastic trailings at the
doorway, the curtain strips, new benches, new tables with plastic coverings, and a Coca-Cola
poster on the wall depicting a half-naked white woman with big breasts,1125 all of which are
the symbols of foreign capitalism. She organizes social activities in the bar which, in turn,
1123
Okri, The Famished Road, 90.
Okri, The Famished Road, 498.
1125
Okri, The Famished Road, 240-50.
1124
327
becomes a center for political meetings of the neocolonial power-mongers such as “the
politicians and chiefs, the power merchants, the cultists, paid supporters, thugs.”1126
Consequently, the bar becomes a hybrid place combining the spiritual and the human, the
spiritual and the political, the ancient and the modern. It is, therefore, the symbol of the
historical changes and transformations.
Although Nigeria gained its political independence from British colonial rule in
1960, it was still a dependent country economically. Falola and Heaton explain that
The country [Nigeria] continued to be reliant on export agriculture for
the majority of its revenues, and European firms continued to control
the export economy. Very little industrial development had been
undertaken, and the industry that did exist was still largely owned by
European companies. Nigeria’s political independence was therefore
coupled with a continuing economic dependence, as the country was
reliant on European knowledge, connections, and technologies and on
international market conditions.1127
Through the character Madame Koto, Okri emphasizes the fact that Nigeria’s
economy is still dependent to the West and manipulated by foreign capital. While depicting
this character, Okri seems to follow García Márquez’s technique in the representation of
Aureliano Segundo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both Aureliano Segundo and
Madame Koto are represented by their gargantuan appetites and grotesque obesity. While
Aureliano Segundo, who acquires a great wealth because of his livestock and loses it in the
banana company hurricane, symbolizes Latin America’s economic dependency on North
America, Madame Koto, who gains her wealth through her alliance to neocolonial and
political powers, refers to Nigeria’s economic dependency on the West. Madame Koto
1126
1127
Okri, The Famished Road, 526.
Falola and Heaton, 157.
328
becomes Okri’s device to describe the condition of Nigeria as a “neocolonial state in the grip
of a fierce power struggle”1128 and to show the corrupting impacts of Western capitalism,
wealth, and power.
To represent Madame Koto’s moral and spiritual deterioration, Okri makes use of
the bodily grotesque. As Madame Koto progresses financially and politically, she becomes
fatter and fatter physically: “The deeper Madame Koto becomes embroiled in seedy business
dealings [e.g., prostitution] and shady political entities [e.g., the Party of the Rich), the more
bloated and handicapped by grotesqueries she becomes, a process culminating in her
becoming pregnant with vicious abiku triplets.”1129 For Cooper, Koto’s swollen grotesque
body is a “metaphor for the evil forces being born with the new nation's independence.” 1130
The social inequality in the country is also emphasized by Madame Koto’s growing frame.
While she gets larger and fatter, the poor of the slum get poorer and thinner. Towards the end
of the novel, she becomes so fat that the door of the bar is broken and widened to
accommodate her gigantic body. She begins “to resemble a great old chief from ancient
times, a reincarnation of splendour and power and clannish might”; that is, she resembles the
King of the Road who swallows his own people to satisfy his hunger. Like the King of the
Road, Madame Koto has to eat people and drink “human blood to lengthen her life.”1131 With
this allusion, Okri puts her into the rank of self-seeking, predatory, apathetic leaders of the
country. Like the rulers, leaders, and politicians, Koto looks after her own benefit and loses
her humanity. Thinking only of herself, she can never bring peace and security to the
oppressed people of the slum. Through Koto, as a political and economic gargantuan, Okri
criticizes not only the rulers and politicians but also the newly-born bourgeoisie of Nigeria.
As well as the politicians, the bourgeoning bourgeoisie are stripped of their humanity while
1128
Garuba, “Ben Okri,” GALE| H1200004198.
McCabe, “Higher Realities,” 15.
1130
Cooper, “Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities,” GALE| H1100072523.
1131
Okri, The Famished Road, 428.
1129
329
running after money and power. They are the main factors that contribute to the failure of
Nigeria as an independent nation state.
In addition to Madame Koto, Azaro’s father, simply known as Dad, is an important
character through whom Okri constructs his social and political criticism. With his
intellectual and ethical courage, he is the vehicle of a strong human lesson in the novel.
Although like Madame Koto, he experiences many transformations, he is introduced as an
oppositional character. As he opposes all corrupt neocolonial forces of the emerging state,
resists the system, and fights for injustice, he becomes the symbol of revolution and
socialism.
At the beginning of the novel, Dad is introduced as a load-carrier and an old boxer
known as Black Tyger. As claimed by Fraser, the “carrier” is an archetypal character in West
African literature. This character has been used to play the role of a scapegoat for the
people’s bad luck and adversities. Moreover, the name Black Tyger has many literary
reverberations. First, it echoes the English poet William Blake’s well-known poem “The
Tyger” published in the collection Songs of Experience in 1794:
TYGER, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?1132
As Blake’s poem reveals the September massacres in Paris in late summer 1792 during the
French Revolution, which was a wave of revolutionary mob violence deeply affecting France
and then the whole Europe, Dad’s nickname “Black Tyger” indicates a similar sociopolitical
disturbance in the history of West Africa. Accordingly, Dad represents West African
“history in making.”1133 Moreover, as Fraser puts it, Black Tyger echoes Wole Soyinka’s
1132
1133
William Blake, quoted in Fraser, 74.
Fraser, 74.
330
well-known dictum that “a tiger does not have to proclaim his tigritude.” In this sense, Dad
becomes “the rippling embodiment of active ‘tigritude’ or tygritude” while his wife, Azaro’s
Mom, provides a parallel female essence, a “femitude”1134 in The Famished Road. Through
his Mom and Dad, Azaro learns how the people of the slum become the victims of
sociopolitical and economic powers on the threshold of the Independence of Nigeria. While
Mom demonstrates the invisible strength and off-stage role played by African women during
the times of economic, social, and political crisis, Dad represents the visible strength and onstage role that should be played by African men.
In A Way of Being Free, Okri explains his ideas about the importance of having a
questing spirit and acquiring the power of redreaming in the face of the dangerous effects of
colonialism:
The real quarrel of the oppressed is not with the oppressors. The real
truth they have to face is the truth about themselves. Hope and striving
have magic in them. Those who have much to strive for, much to
resolve and overcome and redream, may well be luckier than they
think. The struggle is the life. And there is something awesomely
beautiful and history-making about those who have set out to climb
the seven mountains of their predicaments toward the new destinies
that lie beyond, with the star of hope above their heads. For in their
patience and in their egalitarian triumph they can teach us all how to
live and how to love again and could well make it possible for us all to
create the beginnings of the first true universal civilization in the
history of recorded and unrecorded time. 1135
1134
1135
Fraser, 77.
Okri, A Way of Being Free, 133.
331
In The Famished Road, Dad becomes the primary character to avert Okri’s
contention introduced in the above quotation. It is Dad who carries “the world on [his]
head”1136 like the mythological Atlas, who constantly struggles to change not only his own
but also his family’s and slum people’s bad destiny, who never gives up striving in spite of
ungratefulness of the people around him, and who, in this way, accomplishes to redream the
universe and rewrites the history of recorded and unrecorded time of his own people. That is
why, in The Famished Road, Dad is constructed around the myths of quest, transformation,
and destiny.1137
At the beginning of the novel, Dad is represented as the person from whom Azaro
learns all traditional stories, which symbolizes that he functions as the representative of older
generations. For Azaro, Dad becomes an excellent “cultural exemplar.”1138 Azaro respects
Dad, because he sees that Dad is conscious of what is happening around him. Dad can
comprehend the world and act on the basis of information he deduces from his experiences.
As a member of the older generation, he is aware of the transformations his country
experiences. He is also conscious that in the face of changes and transformations, the old
gods and ancestors do nothing and keep their silence. He attempts to warn Azaro and Mom
against the forthcoming dangers: “We have entered a new age. We must be prepared. There
are strange bombs in the world. Great powers in space are fighting to control our destiny.
Machines and poisons and selfish dreams will eat us up. People who look like human beings
are not human beings. Strange people are amongst us. We must be careful.”1139 As Dad
develops deeper understanding of the sufferings around him, his character becomes
spiritually enriched. The Famished Road reflects the record of Dad’s “coming-to-terms with
the indignity of his poverty and the poverty of his work (as menial laborer), his coming-to-
1136
Okri, The Famished Road, 72.
Adeniji, 53-81.
1138
Charles B Guignon, “Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, ed. Guignon (London: Cambridge UP, 1993), 235.
1139
Okri, The Famished Road, 571.
1137
332
action and maturation as a human and as a member of a community of people.”1140 As Dad
more and more realizes his own human potential and the futility of his struggles as a load
carrier, he transforms himself from a load-carrier to a champion boxer, and then to a political
revolutionist and social force. Although he starts boxing and his political life in order to earn
money, his transformation does not resemble that of Madame Koto. He is never selfish.
Unlike Madame Koto, Dad completely knows that his salvation depends on the salvation of
other people in the ghetto. He is conscious that not only himself and his family but also all
ghetto dwellers experience the same difficulties and sufferings. However, he is also
conscious of his ability to fight determinedly against the forces of oppression, to attract
public attention, and to invigorate public opinion, and more importantly to have the power of
dreaming a good future for his people. While trying to extricate himself and his family from
the poverty of the ghetto, he wants social justice for all the other oppressed poor people of
the slum. Dad, as an idealistic young revolutionary, strongly believes that people can change
their bad luck by continually fighting on behalf of justice. Thus, he develops his own
“prophetic and humanist mode of understanding the world.”1141
As a boxer who fights for oppressed people, Dad experiences many transformations,
deaths, and resurrections. While fighting against his enemies – whether Yellow Jaguar,
Green Leopard, the man in white (the Fighting Ghost), or the corrupt party thugs – Dad
constantly comes face to face with death but manages to survive. Like Azaro’s regular cycle
of birth, death, and rebirth, Dad’s cycle of deaths and resurrections symbolizes resurrected
Nigeria/ Africa and its struggle during its transition from slavery to freedom. Like Azaro and
Dad, Nigeria/ Africa has managed to survive and has challenged colonialism. The spirit of
Yellow Jaguar becomes Dad’s first enemy. Yellow Jaguar, who used to be a dreadful boxer
before his death three years ago, comes from the world of the dead in human shape to fight
1140
1141
Hemminger, 70.
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 143.
333
against Dad. Dad defeats the spirit of Yellow Jaguar. After his “epic battle with Yellow
Jaguar,”1142 Dad reveals Okri’s message through the myth of transformation when he claims,
“Maybe you have to overcome things first in the spirit world, before you can do it in this
world.”1143 According to Adeniji, the defeat of Yellow Jaguar is important in Okri’s
representation of the myth of transformation. Through this myth Okri suggests that
Africans need to grapple with the past before they can transform their
harrowing present into a blissful future. […] This is the mythical view
of African advancement because it integrates the living, the dead, the
unborn and the gods in an unbroken cycle towards success. […]
Africans will begin to conquer the neocolonialism spearheaded by
vapid post-independence African leaders only after they have
mastered their past, and reconciled themselves with their ancestors,
the dead.1144
After the defeat of Yellow Jaguar, Dad enters into a state of shock and develops a
kind of madness. He starts to define his social role in terms of violence and strength. He
grows self-centered and starts to boast of his invincibility. It is with his encountering Green
Leopard that Dad “enters into a phase of idealism in which he desires to create a socialist
utopia.”1145 Although Dad’s imaginings are presented in an ironic way, Okri mentions
serious projects. Dad starts to be a Don Quixote of the ghetto, as is José Aureliano Buendía
of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his socialist utopia, Dad imagines a
country that will overcome poverty, tyranny, and political corruption, provide economic
wealth and equal rights to all citizens no matter what their race, ethnicity, sex, color, or
social status, educate all of them equally, and bring freedom and prosperity not only to its
1142
Okri, The Famished Road, 414.
Okri, The Famished Road, 416.
1144
Adeniji, 55.
1145
Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 142.
1143
334
citizens but also to all people of the world. For him, in such a country, it will be easier for
people to develop a social, political, and environmental consciousness:
He astonished us with the crankiness of his thinking. He conjured an
image of a country in which he was invisible ruler and in which
everyone would have the highest education, in which everyone must
learn music and mathematics and at least five world languages, and in
which every citizen must be completely aware of what is going on in
the world, be versed in tribal, national, continental, and international
events, history, poetry, and science; in which wizards, witches,
herbalists and priests of secret religions would be professors at
universities; in which bus drivers, cart-pullers, and market women
would be lecturers, while still retaining their normal jobs; in which
children would be teachers and adults pupils; in which delegations
from all the poor people would have regular meetings with the Head
of State; and in which there would be elections when there were more
than five spontaneous riots in any given year.1146
The new idealism to which Dad devotes himself leads him into political life.
Although he used to hate politics, he now regards politics as a useful device to accomplish
his socialist utopia. In a short time he goes mad with politics. He starts to see himself as an
invisible Head of State. He suggests that Madame Koto’s prostitutes should protest to the
Colonial Administration. He decides to start his own party which will be supported by
beggars and prostitutes. He plans to build roads for the ghetto, houses and schools for
beggars, and to teach them how to work. He wants the beggars and the slum dwellers to clear
up the rubbish along the streets of the ghetto, claiming that “we have to clear garbage from
1146
Okri, The Famished Road, 468.
335
our street before we clear it from our minds.”1147 Okri connects the rubbish along the streets
of the slum to the mental rubbish that obstructs Nigeria’s/ Africa’s potential development.
According to Aizenberg, Okri wants to show that Dad’s imaginings represent “magical
realism’s utopian impulse, the desire for a space in which a just society might be articulated
through an amalgam of old and new strengths.”1148
Dad is Okri’s device to criticize all evils, not only in Nigerian society but also in the
world. It is Dad who criticizes the Western world for preying on black people, for
manipulating the history and achievements of the African people, and for letting them drown
in poverty, famine, drought, divisiveness, and the blood of war. It is Dad who criticizes “the
divisions in [Nigerian] society, the lack of unity” and “the widening pit between those who
have and those who don’t.” It is Dad who sees the wars, economic boom, and emergence of
tyrants in advance while he redreams the world at the end of the novel.1149 It is Dad who
criticizes the soldiers “for carrying guns, for always having weapons, and for their
arrogance,” all the thugs for “terrorising people,” and both political parties “for poisoning the
minds of the people.”1150 It is Dad who criticizes all politicians for being “corruptible,”
“blind to our future,” “greedy,” “deaf to the cries of the people,”1151 for having stony hearts
and shortsighted dreams of power, for keeping their people illiterate and for telling lies. It is
also Dad who condemns the self-seeking attitudes of the people of the slum. Through the
character Dad, Okri puts most of the blame on the people of the nation: Dad “blamed [the
people of the nation] for not thinking for themselves, he lashed out at their sheep-like
philosophy, their tribal mentality, their swallowing of lies, their tolerance of tyranny, their
eternal silence in the face of suffering. He complained bitterly that people in the world
1147
Okri, The Famished Road, 470.
Aizenberg, “The Famished Road,” GALE| H1100072520.
1149
Okri, The Famished Road, 564-65.
1150
Okri, The Famished Road, 480.
1151
Okri, The Famished Road, 564.
1148
336
refused to learn how to see properly and think clearly.”1152 Dad is aware that, to achieve his
socialist utopia, people of the nation first of all should overcome the poverty of their will and
that they should educate themselves. The formation of a new society requires the creation of
new citizens who have accomplished self-actualization, self-realization, magical perception,
and introspection. People can change their destiny by redreaming the world: “God is hungry
for us to grow. […] We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves
differently. We are freer than we think. […] We can redream this world and make the dream
real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. […] our hunger can change the world,
make it better, sweeter.”1153
To sum up, Okri carries his novel from the chaotic condition of post-independence
Nigeria to hopeful dreams of the future, especially through the character Dad at the end of
the novel. Dad’s oration at the novel’s conclusion presents Okri’s vision of Africa. In his
utopian vision, Okri not only writes about the corruption of the present system in Nigeria but
also scrutinizes the concept of history in terms of the inviolate areas of African
consciousness. The remedy he proposes for the chaos of post-independence Nigeria is
“redreaming.” As has he done with the other characters in the novel, Okri suggests that
Nigeria, like Dad, will be resurrected. However, to provide resurrection, it is necessary that
the people of the nation should learn to think differently and to look at their country, to
Africa and to the world, with new eyes. To emphasize the importance of spirituality, magical
perception, and introspection, Okri makes Dad travel in the spiritual world during his
convalescence period after his last physical confrontation with the Fighting Ghost. In his
distinct type of magical realism in which he combines and blurs the material and the spiritual
realms, Okri thus reflects his desire for a just country that will rise on the shoulders of
African culture and provide a perfect mixture of old and new ways.
1152
1153
Okri, The Famished Road, 480.
Okri, The Famished Road, 571-72.
337
CONCLUSION
The task of this study has been to compare Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967) and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) with respect to their
narrative mode of magical realism, regarding it as a sociopolitical weapon to be used in
postcolonial literature. My task has first and foremost required a detailed analysis of magical
realism. Accordingly, the thesis scrutinizes the so-called subversive power of magical
realism to determine the ways, in which the mode operates to combat imperial and colonial
discourses, as well as social, political, and cultural degeneration and corruption that result
from longstanding Western imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation.
Magical realism, as its oxymoronic title offers, is a literary narrative mode that
combines two codes of binary oppositions, namely the real and the fantastic/ magical, in a
process of founding equivalence between them. In magical realist texts, the codes of the real
and the fantastic/ magical are juxtaposed, and the ontological status of these oppositions is
kept equal in a realistic environment. In this definition, the real refers to anything belonging
to or reflecting Western rationalism and empiricism, whereas the fantastic/ magical refers to
anything that challenges empiricism and rationality, such as myths, legends, superstitions,
dreams, and local and religious beliefs. The fantastic/ magical constitutes “the irreducible
element of magic” – in Faris’s words – that exists and sticks out in each magical realist text
and that belongs to a non-Western culture as opposed to the rationality of Western culture.
Magical realist writing provides continuous shifts from the real to the magical and vice
versa. By swinging back and forth between them, it attempts to blur the distinction, to
demolish the boundary, and to solve the antinomy between the binary oppositions.
To be able to solve the antinomy between the real and the magical, magical realism
applies the artistic technique of defamiliarization: it naturalizes the fantastic/ magical
elements and denaturalizes those of the real in a text. Magical realist texts treat the magical
in a specific way, which is another common feature of such texts. The magical is presented
338
as though it was quite commonplace and matter-of-course. Even the most fantastical events
are narrated in a matter-of-fact voice and with a child-like fascination so as not to create a
sense of surprise on the reader. As a result of this process, whatever is magical or fantastic in
the text is seen as part of reality, which in turn breaks the hierarchy between the real and the
magical and provides equal representation of the codes.
Authorial reticence and authorial irony are two other vital criteria providing
defamiliarization and thus determining the very nature of magical realism in texts. In
addition to the use of deadpan voice, the narrator keeps his reticence and avoids passing
judgment on the magical events being narrated. Authorial irony is also a code word, referring
to the author’s point of view. Authors of magical realist texts must adopt an ironic distance
from the magical worldview they introduce in the text. With its combative and rebellious
nature, irony becomes helpful to provide the credibility of the magical. The characteristics of
magical realism mentioned up to this point are primarily useful to provide the collision of
two seemingly opposite worldviews: Western and non-Western. Consequently, by the help
of these features, the mode blurs the binaries of modern thinking and resists Western
rationalism and realism exposing their limitations and ethical failings. These characteristics
foster the concept of a multifaceted reality, and show how any single reality is no more
valuable than the others, in order to create alternative worlds in which multiple and
incompatible viewpoints commingle and thus destroy the monopoly of the powerful center.
Ignoring conventional realism and its techniques, magical realist authors make use of
postmodernist techniques including irony, parody, disruption, and pastiche to invite Western
appropriation and challenge imperialism. Their attempts lead them to the implementation of
Bakhtin’s deliberations about the “carnivalesque-grotesque” and grotesque realism in their
texts. Today, a vast majority of literary critics agree that magical realist narratives have a
carnivalesque spirit both on the level of plot and language. Through the use of magic, the
improbable, the blasphemous, exaggeration, narrative gigantism, and hyperbolic and
339
excessive images and themes, magical realism carries the spirit of joyful carnivals of the
Middle Ages into the language of literature. Like the nonofficial, anti-feudal,
extraecclesiastical, and extrapolitical carnivals, magical realist texts are antibureaucratic.
They are against all types of norms, dogmas, fixed values, fundamentalism, established
social and political order, violence, prohibitions and limitations, purity, racism and ethnicity.
With their carnivalesque spirit, magical realist texts attempt to fight against structures of
power, to transgress boundaries, to unveil human truth and to free the human mind from all
restrictions. Like medieval carnivals, magical realism is in pursuit of liberty. To fight for
freedom, it becomes a free weapon in the hands of authors.
The deep analysis of the mode in the first part of the study thus reveals that it is by
virtue of all the characteristics of magical realism mentioned above that the mode gains its
power of subversion and transgression. That is, by solving the antinomy between the magical
and the real, which have come to be understood as indigenous and foreign/ colonial, precapitalist and capitalist, non-Western and Western cultures or worldviews, magical realist
texts can accomplish the subversion of the Western mind-set. Such subversion implies a
“decolonizing movement” that is explained as “cultural hybridity” by Homi Bhabha. As
hybridity is the key concept in the construction of international culture based on the diversity
of cultures/ multiculturalism, magical realism, with its hybrid nature and its power of
subversion and transgression, has always been a powerful device in postcolonial studies. It
has been used to respond to epistemic violence – to borrow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
words – and the “othering” processes of the Western culture. In addition, magical realism in
its postcolonial forms, no matter where it is used and in what type it appears, has been a
marvelous means of cultural, social, historical, and political correction and enhancement,
especially in postcolonial communities and countries.
The analysis in the first part of my study also reveals that Latin America is the
unavoidable starting point for magical realism. The investigation of The Codex
340
Chimalpopoca (the mythology of the Aztecs) and The Popol Vuh (the mythology of the
Maya) show us that both texts aim at postcolonial resistance against the hegemony of the
West in the sixteenth century. With their amalgamation of two different cultures, these
mythologies can be accepted as the first examples of magical realist fiction. Hence, although
the term magical realism was coined by European critics and men of letters, magical realism
as a mode of narrative fiction originated in Latin America as a postcolonial response. Alejo
Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso, which has come to be known as magical realism, is
something inherent in Latin America as the birth-place of this mode of narrative fiction.
Nevertheless, it is of course impossible to confine the use of magical realism only to Latin
America. After “booming” magical realism during the 1960s, Latin American literature has
spread its influence all over the world. Today, magical realism proves to be a universal code
being used by authors from both Western and non-Western cultures.
As the history of colonialism and the slave trade has always provided a close
connection between Africa and Latin America, the influence of Latin American literature on
postcolonial African authors is undeniable. Postcolonial magical realism that was developed
by Latin American authors has inspired many contemporary African authors and shown
them how to release the energies inherent in African literature to fight against colonialism
and domestic neocolonialism. My study suggests that Ben Okri, although he himself fiercely
rejects to be labeled by the term magical realism, is an author who has been influenced by
Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism and his masterpiece One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
The second and third chapters of the dissertation contain the analysis of Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road in
terms of the general characteristics of magical realism. Considering that each text can be best
understood in its own cultural, political, and historical context, I examine each novel
separately to provide clarity and better understanding. The analysis in these chapters proves
341
that both García Márquez and Ben Okri apply magical realism in their works in their own
distinct styles. In addition to slight differences, there are important affinities between One
Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road, not only in terms of the mode of fiction
but also in terms of thematic concerns and narrative strategy.
Both One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road are perhaps the best
examples of magical realist fiction. Through their narrative mode, both novels are devices of
subversion and transgression in the cultures in which they were produced. In terms of mode,
both novels satisfy the conditions of magical realism. Both novels stand out for their hybrid
and multicultural nature. They skillfully combine the real with the magical, drawing from
both oral and written traditions. In both novels, Western literary traditions are used
effectively along with oral traditions of Latin America and Africa. The combination of nonEuropean and European literary traditions through a humanitarian and universal vision has
turned the novels into sociopolitical devices convenient not only for challenging the whole
rationalist cultural tradition of the West, but also for providing change, correction, and
improvement of their non-European cultures.
In García Márquez’s case, One Hundred Years of Solitude blends Colombian folk
elements and oral story-telling with Euro-American modernist methods that the author of the
novel has inspired from such well-known writers as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and
Franz Kafka. García Márquez has many times indicated that he has derived his material
especially from pre-Columbian indigenous, African and Spanish-Galician lore and cultures,
the combination of which constitutes the culture of Caribbean-coastal Colombia. Mythic
truths, folk wisdom, local lore, and ancient belief systems of people living on the coastal part
of the country are well reflected in the novel. Remaining loyal to the cultural features of his
native Colombia/ Latin America, García Márquez attempts to decode Latin American culture
and identity and to establish an autonomous Latin American consciousness. Similarly to
García Márquez, Ben Okri derives his material directly from the culture of his native
342
Nigeria/ West Africa. He blends Yoruba mythology and West African oral lore with
conventional European realism without prioritizing any of them. Okri, using the English
language and experimental techniques, reflects Yoruba myths, folktales, local lore, and
beliefs in The Famished Road. He follows in the footsteps of not only the first generation of
West African and Nigerian authors but also Latin American ones. Thus, an energizing
conversation among Ben Okri, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel
Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Olorunfemi Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua
Achebe embellishes The Famished Road from beginning to end. By combining African,
Latin American, and European narrative techniques, Okri tries to capture “inviolate” areas of
the African consciousness, such as great imaginative capacity, creative power, elasticity of
aesthetics, and the resilience of spirit in African culture.
Satisfying the definitive condition of magical realism, both One Hundred Years of
Solitude and The Famished Road interweave magic with real experience in a realistic
atmosphere. Neither strand disturbs the ontological status of the other: that is, the magical
and the real constantly support and strengthen each other. The magical becomes believable
as it is presented as if it were all matter-of-fact. The magical elements in One Hundred Years
of Solitude and The Famished Road are in agreement with the cultural beliefs and values of
the countries and continents in which these texts were produced. Thus, magic reality in both
texts is inherent in the myths: it is not created by imagination. For this reason, magical
realism of both texts can be included in the typologies of the mode such as ontological,
mythic/ folkloric, and anthropological magical realism.
In The Famished Road Ben Okri follows the myth-making tradition of Latin American
narratives, most of which deal especially with history and myth. The analysis in the second
part of the study reveals that García Márquez’s novel is not solely about history and myth.
Through his novel, García Márquez tries to demystify the myths of history so as to give way
to a self-definition of Latin America. Thus, he reconstructs Latin American history as myth.
343
Following García Márquez’s concern, Ben Okri directly depends on West African myths in
The Famished Road. Taking advantage of potent oral and mythic narrative tradition of
Africa, Okri reworks and reconstructs Yoruba folktales and myths in order to rewrite and
reinterpret African histories distorted and misinterpreted by the West for centuries. In One
Hundred Years of Solitude the theme of solitude stands for the solitude of Latin America.
Latin America’s solitude and its isolation from the rest of the world have been created by
Western imperialism, colonialism, racism, and neocolonialism, all of which are reasons of
suffering and dispossession of African people in The Famished Road. For Okri as for García
Márquez, myth can be used as a remedy for people’s suffering, solitude, and deprivation. To
be able to heal pains and sufferings and to offer a better world for oppressed people it is
necessary to demystify the lies, myths, and propaganda of the oppressor. With this aim in
mind, both Okri and García Márquez create new mythologies, new counter-myths of their
own countries and continents to fight against hegemonic Western narratives. As modern neomyths, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road primarily rely on local
cultural values. However, both novels express the universal through the local. In their
modern myths, both authors rewrite histories to liberate the human mind with a universalist
vision. One Hundred Years of Solitude can be considered a “spiral of circles” – in Mario
Vargas Llosa’s words – that symbolize, first, García Márquez’s family; second, Aracataca;
third, Colombia; fourth, Latin America; and finally, humanity. Like One Hundred Years of
Solitude, The Famished Road can also be considered a spiral of circles allegorizing first,
Ajegunle, a slum of Lagos where Okri grew up; second, Nigeria; third, Africa; and finally,
humanity.
In the interface of myth and realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude and The
Famished Road, the mythic becomes political for both authors. Both novels not only
challenge and subvert the systems that emphasize Western superiority but also provide
sociopolitical criticism. García Márquez and Okri, both being against oppression and
344
exploitation, are interested in the sociopolitical problems of their countries and side
politically with the oppressed. García Márquez, as a writer with leftish liberal ideas, has
several times indicated that he writes about the everyday reality of his country and continent.
That is why he calls himself a social realist rather than a magical realist. As for Okri, he
regards himself as a realist – rather than a social or magical realist – because in his writing
he draws on spiritualism and African religious beliefs such as animism, shamanism, and
ancestor-worship as salient parts of his own philosophy. He considers the problems of his
native Nigeria and West Africa eyeing directly from the inside of the African world-view.
The ubiquitous spirituality and animistic and shamanistic viewpoints set The Famished Road
apart from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In their sociopolitical criticism both novels rely on Rabelaisian aesthetics and
Bakthinian concerns. As both novels are deeply rooted in commonsense folk wisdom and
political radicalism, it is possible to consider them to be significant examples of grotesque
magical realism. Thanks to all carnivalesque-grotesque features, a strong regenerative
carnivalesque spirit is felt throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished
Road. Both texts reflect a general worldview in popular carnival forms. They are close to
folk culture and create a sense of fiesta with their carnivals, circuses, marketplaces, and
meeting-places that are usually metaphors of a world upside down, and they forcefully call
for a reordered and altered world. They mirror a dualistic worldview and destroy the
boundaries between the living and the dead, the official and unofficial. They abolish
hierarchy and violate taboos. Accordingly, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The
Famished Road fight against sociopolitical conditions with their carnivalesque spirit.
However, both novels reflect the carnivalesque spirit in their own way. One Hundred Years
of Solitude lacks a serious tone, but always avoids being vulgar, trivial, or excessively
sentimental. Owing to its author’s strong sense of humour and irony, it reflects the bright,
life-affirming, life-enhancing magical side of the carnivalesque-grotesque. By contrast, The
345
Famished Road reflects a sense of chronic grimness, misery, and fear throughout as the
characters struggle in the daily routine of riotous experience. The novel seems to reflect dark
and dreadful side of magical realism. Africa, as being the most and worst-exploited continent
of the world, has always had a “darker” history than Latin America, which may be a reason
for the difference in tone.
Depicting the history and the mythical viewpoints of rural people living in the
fictional town of Macondo, One Hundred Years of Solitude expresses the cultural experience
of a community in the margins. In The Famished Road, Okri scrutinizes his post-colonial
Nigerian society through the Yoruba myth of the abiku child – a child in a vicious circle of
births, deaths, and rebirths. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the fictional town of
Macondo represents García Márquez’s hometown Aracataca and by extension Colombia and
all of Latin America. Similarly, in Okri’s The Famished Road, the abiku child Azaro
becomes the symbol of Nigeria and by extension the whole African continent. While
Macondo’s foundation, development, and destruction allegorizes the foundation,
development, and finally deterioration and destruction of the Colombian nation state, the
Nigerian nation state, symbolized as an abiku nation, is investigated on the brink of Nigeria’s
Independence in 1960. As both novels focus on their nation states allegorically, both are
“national allegories” in Fredrick Jameson’s terms. However, both novels resist cultural and
national chauvinism.
In both One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road, the political
functions as an organizing principle. Both García Márquez and Okri write about the
sociopolitical condition of their countries and continents in their own experience and in their
own way. Reflecting the optimistic atmosphere in the wake of The Cuban Revolution, One
Hundred Years of Solitude aims at sociopolitical redemption from neocolonialism,
militarism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, and fanaticism. Using real-life historical material,
the novel mirrors five hundred years of Latin American history. It contains a good deal of
346
information about the age of exploration and invention, the early process of colonization and
settlement of Latin America, the hardships Colombia faced in the period after Independence,
the political and military conflicts during the late nineteenth century, the bloody civil wars
including the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902) as the last civil war between the two
longstanding parties of Colombia, the Liberal and Conservative parties, and the Santa Marta
Massacre in which the banana workers were murdered in Ciénaga in 1928. The turbulent
atmosphere in the novel echoes the turbulent condition of the country during La Violencia,
which followed the Bogotazo in 1948 and lasted till around 1964. Through all these actual
historical and political events, the novel tries to analyze the failure of Latin-American
history. It proves that the unreality of Latin America is a lie imposed by Western
colonialism. Latin America has been a victim of a European dream. The destiny of the
continent was predetermined by European rationality, science, technology, imperialism,
capitalism, and colonialism. Thus, One Hundred Years of Solitude denounces colonialism,
neocolonialism, militarism, and dictatorship. However, the failure of the continent is not
merely the result of foreign colonialism and neocolonialism. Emphasizing the theme of
solitude as opposed to solidarity, García Márquez puts half of the blame on the Latin
American people. He criticizes them for their oligarchic egoism, for their opportunism, and
for their lack of historical consciousness. As a solution, he suggests that the Latin American
people should reevaluate and understand their past, develop a social awareness, learn how to
share and make sacrifices for others, and comprehend the importance of solidarity and
collaboration.
Similarly to One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Famished Road aims at
sociopolitical redemption for its formerly colonized and newly independent nation. Like One
Hundred Years of Solitude, The Famished Road teems with politics and history. The novel
reveals the condition of Nigeria on the brink of Independence from the colonial rule of
Britain. It reflects the disillusionment felt for nationalism as a state ideology and the
347
country’s problems such as neo-colonialism, economic and political corruption, social chaos,
and economic desperation. Through the chaotic, social, and political situation of the country
on the threshold of self-government, the novel also anticipates the Nigerian Civil War (the
Biafran War) between 1967 and 1970. In his own distinctively African way of writing, Okri
rejects over-emphasis on the effects of colonialism. Instead, he prefers to focus on
“inviolate” African consciousness that has remained untouched and unbroken in spiritual,
aesthetic, and mythic internal structures of West African culture. He affirms that traditional
African cultural and spiritual values are powerful devices to fight against modern political
corruption and oppression. Nigerian people have forgotten the spiritual essence of their
African consciousness and have been transformed into black colonizers taking the place of
their former white colonizers. For this reason, in the postcolonial era, not only the white
colonizers but also the African people themselves are guilty of the “hunger” of Africa. Okri
accuses individuals – not only African rulers and politicians but also ordinary people – of
their forgetfulness, blindness, and moral cowardice. As a solution, Okri suggests that each
individual should learn to think differently and discover the possibilities of imagination and
spirituality. By thinking differently individuals can change their society and provide
Nigerian postcolonial national healing.
The analysis of the novels has revealed that politics is closely linked to the concept of
history in both novels. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez uses the actual
historical events and attempts to reconstruct history by showing that in Latin America,
history has become a process in which facts have been changed by myths and, in return,
myths transformed into facts. The Latin Americans have internalized an unreal version of
their own history and identity imposed by the West. García Márquez proves the insufficiency
and inefficiency of official historiography to provide the understanding of history of Latin
America. As for Okri, he follows quite a different way in his understanding and
representation of history in The Famished Road. His representation of history is based on his
348
conception of “inviolate” African consciousness. He makes use of African myths to reveal
the mythic and spiritual aspects of African history and to rediscover the unbroken value of
West African thinking. Okri “redreams” the past to take lessons for the future. For him, to
transform people’s notion of the past means to transform their future. His idea echoes the
following Oromo proverb: “By remembering the past, the future is remembered.”1154 Thus,
Okri tries to uncover the future hidden in the past without remaining locked in the historical
framework. Through this conception of history, The Famished Road redreams postcolonial
possibilities for Nigeria. Because of their rejection of official historiography, their emphasis
on recording history and their attempts of writing alternative versions of history, both novels
can be regarded as examples of historiographic metafiction.
In the final analysis, it is magical realism that enables One Hundred Years of Solitude
and The Famished Road to see with a “third eye” in Okri’s terms. Through their third eye,
both novels gain the power to see the truth, reevaluate history and capture social, political
and historical reality. Their hybrid, multicultural, subversive, and transgressive mode is the
only source that changes both texts into works of liberation. By way of their magical realism,
both One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Famished Road prove to be the language par
excellence of not only their own but also all emergent postcolonial societies, in Bhabha’s
sense.
1154
Quoted in Patrick Ibekwe, ed., Wit and Wisdom of Africa: Proverbs from Africa and the
Caribbean (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press INC, 1998), 124.
349
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abani, Chris. “Of Ancestors and Progeny: Moments in Nigerian Literature.” Black Issues
Book Review 8.6 (November/ December 2006): 24-25.
Achebe, Chinua. There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. New York: Penguin
Press, 2012.
–––––. “The Novelist as Teacher.” In African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, 103-06. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2011.
–––––. The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 2005.
–––––. Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.
–––––. “The African Writer and the English Language.” In Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 428-34.
London: Pearson Education Limited, 1994.
Adegoke, Oluwasegun Samuel. The Transformation of Realism in Selected Works of Ben
Okri: The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. Saarbrücken,
Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller GmbH & Co. KG, 2011.
Adeniji, Abiodun. Ben Okri: The Quest for an African Utopia. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM
Verlag Dr. Müller GmbH & Co. KG, 2011.
Aizenberg, Edna. “‘I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial
Hybridity.” World Literature Today 73.3 (Summer 1999): 461-66. Accessed 3
February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1100072522.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072522&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
–––––. “The Famished Road: Magical Realism and the Search for Social Equity.” Yearbook
of Comparative and General Literature 43 (1995): 25-30. Accessed 3 February
2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1100072520.
350
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072520&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
–––––. “Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in García Márquez and
Ouologuem.” PMLA 107.5 (October 1992): 1235-52. Accessed 13 November 2012.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/462877.
Aldea, Eva. Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial
Literature. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, the MPG Books
Group, 2011.
Allende Isabel. “The Shaman and the Infidel.” Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell. New
Perspectives Quarterly 8.1 (1991): 54-58. Accessed 3 February 2011.
http://marilynberlinsnell.com/profiles/Allende.p1.jpeg.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Spiritual Realism.” Nation 255.4 (August 1992):146-48.
Aristotle. On the Art of Poetry. Translated by Ingram Bywater. Los Angeles: Indo-European
Publishing, 2011.
Ashcroft, Bill. “Remembering the Future: Utopianism in African Literature.” Textual
Practice 23.5 (October 2009): 703-22.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts.
London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005.
–––––, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
Award Ceremony Speech. Presentation Speech by Lars Gyllensten (1982). Accessed 7
January 2013.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/presentationspeech.html.
Awoyemi-Arayela, Taye. “Nigerian Literature in English: The Journey So Far?”
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention 2.1 (January
2013): 29-36. Accessed 7 April 2013. ISSN [Online] 2319-7722. www.ijhssi.org.
351
Babalola, Adeboye. “A Survey of Modern Literature in the Yoruba, Efik and Hausa
Languages.” In Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited by Bruce King, 50-63.
New York, NY: Africana Publishing Corporation, University of Lagos and Evans
Brothers Limited, 1972.
Baker, Wendy and William G. Eggington. “Bilingual Creativity, Multidimensional Analysis,
and World Englishes.” World Englishes 18.3 (1999): 343-57.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Bell, Ian A. “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Overview.” In Reference Guide to World
Literature, edited by Lesley Henderson, Second Edition. New York: St. James Press,
1995. Accessed 6 October 2010. Gale Document No: GALE|H1420003149.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420003149&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Bell-Villada, Gene H. “History of Macondo.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude, edited by Harold Bloom,
New Edition, 39-62. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
–––––, ed. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
–––––. Introduction to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A
Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 3-16. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
–––––. “Banana Strike and Military Massacre.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 127-38. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
–––––. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1990.
352
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004.
–––––. “Narrating the Nation.” Introduction to Nation and Narration, edited by Homi
Bhabha, 1-8. London: Routledge, 2000.
–––––. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Interview with Jonathan
Rutherford. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan
Rutherford, 207-21. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.
Bierhorst, John, trans. History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca.
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992.
Biscaia, Maria Sofia Pimentel. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary
Excess. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, 2011.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s
One-Hundred Years of Solitude. New Edition. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing,
2009.
–––––, ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez. Updated Edition. New
York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2007.
–––––, ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez. New York, NY:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Boehmer, Elleke. “Achebe and His Influence in Some Contemporary African Writing.”
Interventions 11.2 (2009): 141-53.
–––––. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Second Edition. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
–––––. “The Nation as Metaphor in Contemporary African Literature.” In English Studies in
Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference, edited by Robert Clark and
Piero Boitani, 320-31. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Boccia, Michael. “Magical Realism: The Multicultural Literature.” Popular Culture Review
5.2 (1994): 21-31.
353
Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. New Critical Idiom Series. New York, NY:
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005.
Brink, André. “Making and Unmaking. Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of
Solitude.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s
One-Hundred Years of Solitude, edited by Harold Bloom, New Edition, 147-68. New
York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Browitt, Jeff. “Tropics of Tragedy: the Caribbean in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude.” Shibboleths: A Journal of Comparative Theory 2.1 (2007): 16-33.
Brown, Ben. “Some Day Her Prince Will Come.” The Observer, Sunday, 19 August 2007.
Accessed 3 February 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/19/fiction.benokri
Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1993.
Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Translated by Harriet de Onís. New York,
NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
–––––. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” Translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois
Parkinson Zamora. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 75-88. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
–––––. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” Translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois
Parkinson Zamora. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 89-108. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
354
Cezair-Thompson, Margaret. “Beyond the Postcolonial Novel: Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road and Its ‘Abiku’ Traveller.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.2 (1996):
33-45. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1100072521.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072521&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. “The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: SelfAffirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms.” In Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris,
125-44. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
–––––. “Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy.” PhD
diss., The University of Alberta, 1982. Accessed 8 September 2012. ProQuest
http://search.proquest.com/pqdtft/docview/89152508/fulltextPDF/139010C29B43C3
3A2F/1?accountid=15819.
Christenson, Allen J, trans. Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya People. Electronic
version of original 2003 publication, Wesoweb, 2007. Accessed: 6 October 2010.
www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf
Conniff, Brian. “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse
in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 139-52. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London
and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004.
–––––. “Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool
Library and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature
34.1 (1999): 135-57. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE|
H1100072523.
355
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072523&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Fourth
Edition. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1999.
Danow, David K. The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. Lexington,
Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
Danticat, Edwidge. Introduction to The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier, trans.
Harriet de Onís, vii-xii. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Darraj, Susan Muaddi. The Great Hispanic Heritage: Gabriel García Márquez. New York,
NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006.
Delay, Florence and Jacqueline de Labriolle. “Is García Márquez the Colombian Faulkner?”
In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s OneHundred Years of Solitude, edited by Harold Bloom, New Edition, 127-46. New
York NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne. “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations
on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English.” In Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris,
249-63. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Deyan, Guo. “Trauma and History in Ben Okri’s Fiction.” Cross-Cultural Communication,
8.6 (2012): 48-55. Accessed 3 February 2011. ISSN [Online] 1923-6700.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.ccc.1923670020120806.1127.
http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc/article/view/j.ccc.1923670020120806.1127.
D’haen, Theo L. “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers.” In
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora
and Wendy B. Faris, 191-208. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
1995.
356
Ding, Zhaoguo. “On Resistance in Anti-Colonial Marxist Writings.” Canadian Social
Science 7.1 (2011): 38-48.
Dorfman, Ariel. “Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in
García Márquez.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel García
Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude, edited by Harold Bloom, New Edition,
81-98. New York NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic
Realism. London: MacMillan Press, 1998.
Elder, Arlene A. Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor & History in the Fiction of Ben
Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera. Rochester NY: James Currey, Boydel &
Brewer Ltd., 2009.
Eyoh, Luke. “Indigenous Oral Poetry in Nigeria as a Tool for National Unity.” J
Communication 2.2 (2011): 83-91.
Falola, Toyin and Matthew M. Heaton. A History of Nigeria. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markman. London:
Pluto Press, 2008.
–––––. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove
Press, 1963.
Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of
Narrative. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.
–––––. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” In Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy
B. Faris, 163-90. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
357
Flores, Angel. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” In Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris,
109-17. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Past-On Stories: History and the Magical Real, Morrison and
Allende on Call.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 285-303. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
Fuentes, Carlos. “García Márquez: On Second Reading.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 25-31.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Franco, Jean. “Limits of the Liberal Imagination.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 91-107.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Fraser, Robert. Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City. Devon, UK: Northcote House
Publishers Ltd. in association with the British Council, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin
and Michael Ryan, 418-30. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004.
Galens, David, ed. Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and
Criticism on Literary Movements. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2002.
Gane, Gillian. “The Forest and the Road in Novels by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri.”
Alternation 14.2 (2007): 40-52. Accessed 3 February 2011. ISSN [Online] 10231757.
Ganguly, S.P. “Reality as Second Creation in the Latin American Novels: Marquez and His
Cosmovision.” In Garcia Marquez and Latin America, edited by Alok Bhalla, 16981. London: Oriental UP, 1987.
358
García Márquez, Gabriel. “Interview with Gabriel García Márquez.” Interview with Rita
Guibert. In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by
Harold Bloom, Updated Edition, 7-32. New York NY: Infobase Publishing, 2007.
–––––. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York, NY:
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.
–––––. Living to Tell the Tale. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Vintage
International, 2004.
–––––. “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez.” Interview with Gene H. BellVillada, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook,
edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 17-24. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
–––––. “The Solitude of Latin America.” Nobel Lecture 1982. Translated by Marina
Castañeda, In Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, edited by Julio
Ortega, 87-91. Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1988.
Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/ Writing African
Literature, Culture and Society.” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 261-85.
–––––. “Ben Okri.” In Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers: Third
Series, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,
1996. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1200004198.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1200004198&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Between the Living and the Unborn.” Review of The Famished
Road, by Ben Okri. The New York Times Book Review, 28 June 1992. Accessed 3
February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1420006106.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420006106&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
359
Gaylard, Gerald. After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism.
Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2005.
González, Aníbal. “The Ends of the Text: Journalism in the Fiction of Gabriel García
Márquez.” In Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, edited by Julio
Ortega, 61-73. Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1988.
González-Echevarría, Roberto. “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive.” In
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom,
107-23. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
–––––. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Gott, Richard. Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt. New York: Verso
Books, 2011.
Graff, Ann-Barbara. “Ben Okri.” In British Novelists Since 1960: Fourth Series, edited by
Merritt Moseley. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale
Document No: GALE|H1200009802.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1200009802&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Griffin, Clive. “The Humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Gabriel García
Márquez: New Readings, edited by Bernard McGuirk and Richard Carwell, 81-94.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Guenther, Irene. “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar
Republic.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 33-73. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
360
Guignon, Charles B. “Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles B. Guignon, 215-39. London:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo. “The Economy of the Narrative Sign in No One Writes to the
Colonel and In Evil Hour.” In Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction,
edited by Julio Ortega, 17-33. Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1988.
Hamilton, Carole. “Overview of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Literature of
Developing Nations for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on
Literature of Developing Nations, edited by Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L.
LaBlanc, and Ira Mark Milne, Vol. 2, Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Accessed 6
October
2010.
Gale
Document
No:
GALE|
H1420031434.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420031434&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Harmon, William and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1996.
Hart, Stephen M. “García Márquez’s Short Stories.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Philip Swanson, 129-43. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
–––––. “Magical Realism: Style and Substance.” Introduction to A Companion to Magical
Realism, edited by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, 1-13. Woodridge,
Suffolk: Tamesis, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2005.
–––––. “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicised Ghosts in One Hundred Years of
Solitude, The House of Spirits, and Beloved.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American
Studies 9.2 (2003): 115-23. Accessed 3 February 2011. ISSN [Online] 1469-9524.
doi: 10.1080/1470184032000171759.
361
Hart, Stephen M. and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. A Companion to Magical Realism.
Woodridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2005.
Hattersley, Roy. “Ben Okri: A Man in Two Minds.” The Guardian, Saturday, 2 August
1999. Accessed 3 February 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/aug/21/1?INTCMP=SRCH.
Hawley, John C. “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity.” Research
in African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 30-39. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale
Document No: GALE| H1100072518.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072518&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Hemminger, Bill. “The Way of the Spirit.” Research in African Literatures 32.1 (Spring
2001): 66-82. Accessed: 3 February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE|
H1100072524.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072524&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Hegerfeldt, Anne C. Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary
Fiction from Britain. New York NY: Rodopi B.V, 2005.
Higgins, James. “Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad.” In Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. BellVillada, 33-51. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hoad, T.F., ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
Hobby, Blake G. “The Famished Road by Ben Okri.” In Booker Prize Novels: 1969-2005,
edited by Merritt Moseley. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale
Document No: GALE| H1220000941.
362
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1220000941&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Circling the Downspout of Empire.” In The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 130-35. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Ibekwe, Patrick, ed. Wit and Wisdom of Africa: Proverbs from Africa and the Caribbean.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press INC, 1998.
Irele, F. Abiola, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Irvine, Dean J. “Fables of the Plague Years: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Magic
Realism in Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude].” ARIEL 29.4
(October 1998): 53-80. Accessed 29 September 2010. Gale Document No: GALE|
H1420031435.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420031435&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge, 2003.
Jaggi, Maya. “A Life in Writing: Free Spirit.” The Guardian, Saturday, 11 August 2007.
Accessed 3 February 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/11/fiction.benokri.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991.
–––––. “On Magical Realism in Film.” Critical Inquiry 12.2 (Winter, 1986): 301-25.
Accessed 8 August 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476.
–––––. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15
(Autumn 1986): 65-88. Accessed 4 October 2010.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/466493.
363
Janes, Regina. “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of
Gabriel García Márquez.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García
Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 125-46. New York, NY: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1999.
–––––. “Alejo Carpentier: Overview.” In Reference Guide to World Literature, edited by
Lesley Henderson, Second Edition, New York: St. James Press, 1995. Accessed 31
January 2012. Gale Document No: GALE| H1420001424.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420001424&v=2.1&u=dumlu&it
=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Jones, Eldred D. “The Essential Soyinka.” In Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited by
Bruce King, 113-34. New York, NY: Africana Publishing Corporation, University of
Lagos and Evans Brothers Limited, 1972.
–––––, ed. African Literature Today: A Journal of Explanatory Criticism. Numbers 1,2,3,4
with Index. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, Heinemann Educational
Books Ltd., 1972.
Jupp, James C. “The Necessity of the Literary Tradition: Gabriel García Márquez’s OneHundred Years of Solitude.” The English Journal: Our History, Ourselves 89.3
(January 2000): 113-15. Accessed 13 August 2012.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/822107.
Kehinde, Ayo and Joy Ebong Mbipom. “Discovery, Assertion and Self-Realisation in Recent
Nigerian Migrant Feminist Fiction: The Example of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good
Will Come.” African Nebula 3 (June 2011): 62-77.
Kehinde, Owoeye Durojaiye. Reconstructing the Postcolony Through Literature of Fantasy:
Fantasy Confronts Realism in Selected Novels of Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie.
Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing GmbH & Co. KG,
2011.
364
Kenzo, Mabiala Justin-Robert. “Religion, Hybridity, and the Construction of Reality in
Postcolonial Africa.” Exchange 33.3 (2004): 244-68.
Killam, Douglas. “Cyprian Ekwensi.” In Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited by
Bruce King, 77-96. New York, NY: Africana Publishing Corporation, University of
Lagos and Evans Brothers Limited, 1972.
King, Bruce, ed. Introduction to Nigerian Literature. New York, NY: Africana Publishing
Corporation, University of Lagos and Evans Brothers Limited, 1972.
Krapp, John. “Apathy and the Politics of Identity: García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Contemporary Cultural Criticism.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical
Interpretations: Gabriel García Márquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude, edited
by Harold Bloom, New Edition, 169-91. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Kure, Alexander. “Literature and National Development.” Journal of the Nigeria English
Studies Association (JNESA) 14.1 (September 2011): 81-91.
LaRosa, Michael J. and Germán R. Mejía. Colombia: A Concise Contemporary History.
Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.
Larson, Charles R. “In Postcolonial Limbo.” Nation 262.21 (27 May 1996): 31-33.
Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Translated by. Wendy B.
Faris. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson
Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 119-24. Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 1995.
Levitt, Morton P. “The Meticulous Modernist Fiction of García Márquez.” In Bloom’s
Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 227-42.
New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Linguanti, Elsa, Francesco Casotti & Carmen Concilio (eds.), Coterminuos Worlds: Magical
Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, Amsterdam, NLD:
Editions Ropodi B.V., 1999.
365
Llosa, Mario Vargas. “García Márquez: From Aracataca to Macondo.” In Bloom’s Modern
Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 5-19. New York,
NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 1984.
Maczynska, Magdalena. “Ben Okri.” Magill’s Survey of World Literature. Revised Edition.
(January
2009)
Accessed
4
October
2012.
Accession
No:
103331MSW12569850000255.
http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=11&sid=97b77901-2cba-44d9-a3c9fe41608758c6%40sessionmgr104&hid=101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ
%3d%3d#db=lkh&AN=103331MSW12569850000255.
Mahmutovic, Adnan. Ways of Being Free: Authenticity and Community in Selected Works of
Rushdie, Ondaatje, and Okri. Amsterdam, NLD: Ropodi, 2012.
–––––. “History as the Road of Existential Struggle in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
(1993).” Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 1.3&4 (2010): 1-13.
Accessed 4 October 2012. ISSN [Online] 1948-1853. http://www.jpcs.in.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Martin, Gerald. “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism in García Márquez.” In Gabriel García
Márquez: New Readings, edited by Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 95-116.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
–––––. Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.
–––––. “Boom, Yes; ‘New’ Novel, No: Further Reflections on the Optical Illusions of the
1960s in Latin America.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 3.2 (1984): 53-63.
Accessed 3 February 2011. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3338252.
366
McCabe, Douglas. “Higher Realities: New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road.” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 1-21.
–––––. “Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku.’” Research
in African Literatures 33.1 (Spring 2002): 45-74.
McGuirk, Bernard and Richard Cardwell, eds. Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Merrell, Floyd, “José Arcadio Buendía’s Scientific Paradigms: Man in Search of Himself.”
In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold
Bloom, 21-33. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Moh, Felicia Oka. Ben Okri: An Introduction to His Early Fiction. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth
Dimension Publishers, 2002.
Morris, Pam. Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Moudileno, Lydie. “Magical realism: ‘arme miraculeuse’ for the African novel?” Research
in African Literatures 37.1 (2006): 28+. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document
No: GALE| A143009637.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA143009637&v=2.1&u=dumlu&it
=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Murphy, Laura. “In the Bush of Ghosts: Specters of the Slave Trade in West African
Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 38.4 (Winter 2007): 141-52.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature.” In African Literature: An
Anthology of Criticism and Theory, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson,
285-306. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.
Newell, Stephanie. West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford Studies in
Postcolonial Literature). New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
367
Nnolim, Charles E. Approaches to the African Novel: Essays in Analysis. Lagos, Nigeria:
Malthouse Press Limited, 2010.
–––––. Issues in African Literature. Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse Press Limited, 2010.
Nwakanma, Obi. Christopher Okigbo 1930-67: Thirsting for Sunlight. Woodbridge, Suffolk:
James Currey, HEBN, 2010.
Nyamndi, George D. “Prospective Commitment in African Literature.” Nordic Journal of
African Studies 15.4 (2006): 566-78.
Oberhelman, Harley D. “The Development of Faulkner’s Influence in the Work of García
Márquez.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by
Harold Bloom, 65-79. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Obiechina, Emmanuel N. “Cultural Nationalism in Modern African Creative Literature.” In
African Literature Today: A Journal of Explanatory Criticism, edited by Eldred D.
Jones, No 1, 24-35. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, Heinemann
Educational Books Ltd., 1972.
Ogunsanwo, Olatubosun. “Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road.” Research in African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 40-52.
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas: A Pre-Text for Rereading
Soyinka’s Ake and Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 36.4 (2002): 66378.
Okonkwo, Christopher N. “A Critical Divination: Reading Sula as Ogbanje-Abiku.” African
American Review 38.4 (2004): 651-68.
Okorafor, Nnedi. “Organic Fantasy.” African Identities 7.2 (May 2009): 275-86.
Okri, Ben. “Interview with Ben Okri.” Interview with Rosemary Gray. JLS/TLW 28.4
(December 2012): 4-12. Accessed 19 January 2013. ISSN [Online] 1753-5387. doi:
10.1080/02564718.2012. 735064.
368
–––––. “The Books Interview: Ben Okri.” Interview with Sophie Elmhirst. New Statesman
141.5099 (2 April 2012): 41.
–––––. “Ben Okri.” Interview with Rowenna Davis. New Internationalist 443 (June 2011):
62.
–––––. “Mixing It.” Interview with Bel Mooney. New Internationalist 370 (August 2004):
28.
–––––. Infinite Riches. London: Vintage, Random House, 1998.
–––––. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix, 1997.
–––––. Songs of Enchantment. London: Random House, 1993.
–––––. “Interview with Ben Okri.” Interview with Jean W. Ross. In Contemporary Authors,
edited by Donna Olendorf, Vol.138, 337-41. Detroit MI: Gale, 1993.
–––––. “Ben Okri.” Interview with Jane Wilkinson. In Talking with African Writers:
Interviews with African Poets, Playwrigths & Novelists, edited by Jane Wilkinson,
76-89. London: James Currey, 1992.
–––––. Incidents at the Shrine. Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann Educational Books Nigeria PLC,
1991.
–––––. The Famished Road. London: Vintage, Random House, 1991.
–––––. Stars of the New Curfew. New York: Viking, 1988.
Okuyade, Ogaga. “Weaving Memories of Childhood: The New Nigerian Novel and the
Genre of the Bildungsroman.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature
41.3&4 (2011): 137-66. ISSN [Online] 0004-1327.
Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Ato Quayson, eds. African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism
and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.
Oliva, Renato. “Re-Dreaming the World: Ben Okri’s Shamanic Realism.” In Coterminuos
Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English,
369
edited by Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Casotti and Carmen Concilio, 171-96.
Amsterdam, NLD: Editions Ropodi B.V., 1999.
Ortega, Julio. “Exchange Systems in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Gabriel García
Márquez and the Power of Fiction, edited by Julio Ortega, 1-16. Texas: The
University of Texas Press, 1988.
–––––, ed. Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, Texas: The University of
Texas Press, 1988.
Ouyang, Wen-chin. “Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy.” In A Companion
to Magical Realism, edited by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, 13-20.
Woodridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2005.
–––––. “The Politics of Magic.” In A Companion to Magical Realism, edited by Stephen M.
Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, 153-54. Woodridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, Athenaeum
Press Ltd, 2005.
Palencia-Roth, Michael. “Prisms of Consciousness: The ‘New Worlds’ of Columbus and
García Márquez.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez,
edited by Harold Bloom, 243-56. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
–––––. “Intertextualities: Three Metamorphoses of Myth in The Autumn of the Patriarch.” In
Gabriel García Márquez and the Power of Fiction, edited by Julio Ortega, 34-60.
Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1988.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Rereading of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World.” Research in African
Literatures 35.2 (Summer 2004): 114-27. Accessed 31 January 2012. Gale
Document No: GALE| H1420082930.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420082930&v=2.1&u=dumlu&it
=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
370
Parini, Jay. “Introducing the Stoku.” The Guardian, Saturday, 25 April 2009. Accessed 3
February 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/25/tales-of-freedom-ben-okri.
Pelayo, Rubén. Gabriel García Márquez: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2009.
Plummer, William. “The Faulkner Relation.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel
García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 33-47. New York, NY: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1999.
Povey, John. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe.” In Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited
by Bruce King, 97-112. New York, NY: Africana Publishing Corporation,
University of Lagos and Evans Brothers Limited, 1972.
Quayson, Ato. “Magical Realism and the African Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to
the African Novel, edited by F. Abiola Irele, 159-76. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
–––––. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in the Work of Rev.
Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri. Oxford: James Currey
and Indiana University Press, 1997.
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by M. A. Screech, London:
Penguin Books Ltd., 2006.
Rabkin, Eric S., ed. Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1979.
–––––. The Fantastic in Literature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Riach, Alan. “Ben Okri: Overview.” In Contemporary Novelists, edited by Susan Windisch
Brown, Sixth Edition. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Accessed 3 February 2011.
Gale Document No: GALE| H1420006102.
371
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420006102&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Rix, Juliet. “Ben Okri: My Family Values.” The Guardian, Saturday, 26 June 2010.
Accessed 3 February 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/26/ben-okri-family-values.
Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2000.
Robinson, Lorna. “The Golden Age Myth in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” In A Companion to Magical Realism,
edited by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, 79-87. Woodridge, Suffolk:
Tamesis, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2005.
Robles, Humberto E. “The First Voyage around the World: From Pigafetta to García
Márquez.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, edited by
Harold Bloom, 183-201. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Roh, Franz. “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism.” Translated by Wendy B. Faris. In
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora
and Wendy B. Faris, 15-31. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Rosati, Francesca, “An Overview of 20th Century Anglophone Literature in Africa.”
Introduction to The Quest for Democracy: Writings on Nigerian Literature in
English, edited by Francesca Rosati, 17-32. Roma: Aracne, 2004.
Rosenberg, Dona. World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics. Third
Edition. Illinois, USA: NTC/ Contemporary Publishing, 1999.
Roses, Lorraine Elena. “The Sacred Harlots of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H.
Bell-Villada, 67-78. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London:
Random House, Vintage, 2010.
372
Safford, Frank and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sánchez, Jesús Benito, Ana María Manzanas and Begoña Simal González. Uncertain
Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures, Critical Approaches to Ethnic
American Literature (CAEAL). Vol. 3. Amsterdam, NLD: Editions Rodopi, 2009.
Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible.” Cultural Critique 7 (Autumn 1987): 15786. Accessed 13 August 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354154.
Sandner, David, ed. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport: Praeger Publishers,
2004.
Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Westport, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 2004.
Shreve, Jack. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Overview.” In Contemporary Popular Writers,
edited by Dave Mote, Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. Accessed 6 October 2010. Gale
Document No: GALE| H1420003143.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420003143&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Simpkins, Scott. “Sources of Magic Realism/ Supplements to Realism in Contemporary
Latin American Literature.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community,
edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 145-59. Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Skinner, John. The Stepmother Tongue: An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction.
London: Macmillan, 1998.
Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse.” In Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 407-26.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
373
Smith, Andrew. “Ben Okri and the Freedom Whose Walls Are Closing In.” Race and Class
47.1 (July-September 2005): 1-13. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No:
GALE| H1100072531.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072531&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Snipp-Walmsley, Chris. “Postmodernism.” In Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford
Guide, edited by Patricia Waugh, 405-27. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Soliman, Mounira. “From Past to Present and Future: The Regenerative Spirit of the Abiku.”
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 24 (2004): 149-68. Accessed 3 February 2011.
Gale Document No: GALE| H1100072529.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072529&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Sommer, Doris and George Yudice. “Latin American Literature from the ‘Boom’ on.” In
Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach, edited by Michael McKeon, 859-81.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Sowande, Bode. Preface to The Quest for Democracy: Writings on Nigerian Literature in
English, edited by Francesca Rosati, 13-15. Roma: Aracne, 2004.
Spindler, William. “Magic Realism: A Typology.” In Literary Movements for Students:
Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements, edited by David
Galens, 166-73. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2002.
Stein, Susan Isabel. “The Kingdom of This World: Overview.” In Reference Guide to World
Literature, edited by Lesley Henderson, Second Edition. New York: St. James Press,
1995. Accessed 31 January 2012. Gale Document No: GALE| H1420001425.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420001425&v=2.1&u=dumlu&it
=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
374
Swanson, Philip. “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Philip Swanson, 57-63. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
–––––, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
–––––. Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
–––––. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Thelwell, Michael. Introduction to The Palm-Wine Drinkard. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard
and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola, 177-90. New York: Grove
Press, 1984.
Thiem, Jon. “The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction.” In Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy
B. Faris, 235-47. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by
Richard Howard. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Treglown, Jeremy. “Past Glories Prove Elusive.” Spectator 290.9086 (28 September 2002):
68-69. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No: GALE| H1100072526.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072526&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Tutuola, Amos. The Village Witch Doctor & Other Stories. London: Faber and Faber
Limited, 1990.
–––––. Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1987.
–––––. Yoruba Folktales. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1986.
–––––. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. New York: Grove
Press, 1984.
375
Vazquez, Jose Santiago Fernandez. “Recharting the Geography of Genre: Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road as a Postcolonial Bildungsroman.” Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 37.2 (Fall 2002): 85-106. Accessed 3 February 2011. Gale Document No:
GALE| H1100072527.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100072527&v=2.1&u=dumlu&i
t=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.
Warnes, Christopher. Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and
Irreverence. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.”
Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 449-64.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory:
A Reader. London: Pearson Education Limited, 1994.
Williamson, Edwin. “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of
Solitude.” In Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, edited by Bernard McGuirk
and Richard Cardwell, 45-63. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Wilson, Rawdon. “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.” In Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy
B. Faris, 209-33. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Wood, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Landmarks of
World Literature). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
–––––. “Aureliano’s Smile.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:
A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 79-89. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Wright, Derek. “Pre- and Post-Modernity in Recent West African Fiction.” Commonwealth
Essays and Studies 21.2 (1999): 5-17.
376
Ying, Zhu. Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Tony Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, and
Ben Okri. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers,
2006.
Young, David and Keith Holloman. Introduction to Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology,
edited by David Young and Keith Holloman, 1-8. New York: Longman, 1984.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge
Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.” In A Companion to Magical Realism,
edited by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, 28-45. Woodridge, Suffolk:
Tamesis, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2005.
–––––. “Magical Romance/ Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction.”
In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora
and Wendy B. Faris, 497-550. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
1995.
–––––. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
–––––. Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American
Fiction. New York NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris. “Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s.”
Introduction to Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 1-11. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
–––––, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995.
Zavala, Iris M. “One Hundred Years of Solitude as Chronicle of Indies.” In Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. BellVillada, 109-25. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
377