Abstract
The rejection of ‘committed’ literature by Latin American magical realist writers is legible within Cold War cultural interventions and the tensions between politics and aesthetics. For some critics, the rejection of such literature by most Boom authors evoked the dictum of anti-communist politics espoused by the United States, which had institutionalised modernism as a counter to Soviet programmatic realism. However, this chapter argues that Latin American magical realism responded instead to a self-affirmation of the author’s individual/national autonomy against the political dicta coming first from the Soviet Union and later from Cuba. The chapter will then explore the uses of magical realism in other national contexts during the Cold War, where the form became progressively more aligned with ‘free world’ ideologies.
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Notes
- 1.
Camayd-Freixas, ‘Theories of Magical Realism’, in Ignacio López-Calvo, ed., Critical Insights: Magical Realism (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2014), p. 14.
- 2.
Riding, ‘Evolution and the Intellectual in Latin America’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 March 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/13/magazine/evolution-and-the-intellectual-in-latin-america.html (accessed 27 July 2018).
- 3.
Quoted in Stonor Saunders, ‘Modern Art Was CIA “Weapon”’, Independent, 22 October 1995, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html (accessed 23 July 2018).
- 4.
Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 207.
- 5.
Mudrovcic with Mario Campana, ‘La Guerra Fría Cultural’, Guaraguao, 16: 41 (2012), p. 90.
- 6.
It is important to point out that not all Boom writers practiced magical realism, as some non-Latin Americanists sometimes tend to assume. Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, for instance, is a realist writer who never practiced the form, with El hablador (The Storyteller, 1987) as his only novel that comes close to it.
- 7.
See Vargas Llosa’s La verdad de las mentiras (The Truth of Lies, 1990).
- 8.
Larsen, ‘The “Boom” Novel and the Cold War in Latin America’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 101.
- 9.
Studies that survey Latin American magical realists and their commonalities include Maggie Bowers’s Magic(al) Realism (2004), Wendy Faris’s Ordinary Enchantments (2004), Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris’s Magical Realism (1995) and Seymour Menton’s Historia verdadera del realismo mágico (1998).
- 10.
With ‘pseudo-magical realism’, an unreliable narrator presents a case of ostensible magical realism only to unmask it later as mere popular ignorance, superstition or religious fanaticism (see Ignacio López-Calvo, ‘Translation, Unreliable Narrators, and the Comical Use of (Pseudo-)Magical Realism in Of Love and Other Demons’, in Gene H. Bell-Villada, ed., Gabriel García Márquez in Retrospect: A Collection (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 183–94).
- 11.
See Riding, ‘Evolution and the Intellectual’.
- 12.
Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 127.
- 13.
Carpentier, ‘Prologue’ to Carpentier, El reino de este mundo/The Kingdom of This World, new edn (1949; New York: La Editorial, UPR, 1994), p. 4.
- 14.
Santiago Juan-Navarro, ‘The Dialogic Imagination of Salman Rushdie and Carlos Fuentes: National Allegories and the Scene of Writing in Midnight’s Children and Cristóbal Nonato’, Neohelicon, 20: 2 (1993), p. 258.
- 15.
Faris, ‘The Latin American Boom and the Invention of Magic Realism’, in Brian McHale and Len Platt, eds, The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 154.
- 16.
Camayd-Freixas, ‘Reflections on Magical Realism: A Return to Legitimacy, the Legitimacy of Return’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 23: 2 (1996), pp. 584–5.
- 17.
García, Dreaming in Cuban, new edn (1992; New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 238.
- 18.
Quoted in Riding, ‘Evolution and the Intellectual’.
- 19.
Serrano, ‘Entrevista a fondo’, Radiotelevisión Española, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8DUO0gbo58 (accessed 23 July 2018).
- 20.
For example, the New Zealand writer Janet Frame’s The Carpathians (1988), combining the titular Eastern European mountain range with metafictional landscapes in New Zealand and America, sourced, if it did not explicitly name, the Cold War context. Similarly, the Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Tales of the Tikongs (1983) used magical realist techniques to convey the energy of Pacific oral storytelling in a period when the region was developing into an active cockpit of Cold War manoeuvring, particularly with the trade pact signed between the USSR and Kiribati in 1985 and the military coup in Fiji in 1987.
- 21.
Rothwell, A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality, and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), p. 15.
- 22.
Rushdie, ‘Magic in the Service of Truth’, The New York Times Book Review, 18 May 2014, p. 1.
- 23.
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Viking, 1981), p. 140.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 101.
- 25.
The rivalry between India and Pakistan—by which Rushdie, as an Indian of Muslim background, felt personally riven—is referenced in Shalimar the Clown (2005), when the author speaks of the ‘fatal heart attack’ of the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Soviet Uzbekistan in January 1966, where he had been attending a conference that formalised the ending of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War (Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 187).
- 26.
Only recently have works such as Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tirana memoria (Tyrant Memory, 2008) and Roberto Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América (Nazi Literature in the Americas, 1996) explored how close things came to be otherwise.
- 27.
Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 312.
- 28.
Quoted in Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 12–13.
- 29.
Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 44.
- 30.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, ‘A Novelist’s Magic Realist Vision of Australia’, The New York Times, 12 December 1988, p. C18.
- 31.
Quoted in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds, Magical Realism: Theory, History. Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 307.
- 32.
Swift, Waterland (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 119.
- 33.
See Davies’s Fifth Business (1970).
- 34.
Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 107.
- 35.
Jean Stein, ‘William Faulkner: The Art of Fiction No. 12’, in Philip Gourevitch, ed., The Paris Review Interviews II (New York: Picador, 2006), p. 56.
- 36.
Oates, Angel of Light (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 376.
- 37.
Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), a realistic, deeply observed tale of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, is punctuated by two boys finding a magic ring. Lethem’s title could allude not just to Superman’s Arctic hideout but also to the title of García Márquez’s novel. But Lethem’s hipster Brooklyn reflected the way that, during the last phase of the Cold War, the United States rebranded itself as champion of the bespoke and distinct against an overweening and standardising Soviet imperialism.
- 38.
Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’, in Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Putnam, 1984), p. 193.
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López-Calvo, I., Birns, N. (2020). Magical Realism in the Context of Cold War Cultural Interventions. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_12
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