On ‘magical’ and social realism in García Márquez

Abstract

Although you have every right not to believe me after putting up for so long with my sly tricks and falsifications, I swear to you by the bones of my mother that what I am now about to show you is no illusion but the plain and simple truth …' (García Márquez, ‘Blacamán the Good, miracle-salesman’) What interested me in my novel was above all to tell the story of a family obsessed by incest, and which, in spite of every precaution taken for several generations, ends up having a child with a strange pig's tail. (García Márquez on One Hundred Tears of Solitude , 1968) The true history of Latin America is as yet an almost totally blank book, save for a few phrases recorded in such equivocal terms that no one troubles to try and understand them … Through misinterpreting their past, Latin Americans construct false projects for the future, and every step they take in the present in accordance with those projects, vitiated by that initial falseness, only serves to sink them deeper in their sickness, as in a circle from which there is no way out. (H. A. Murena, The Original Sin of America ) They wanted nothing to do with that series of conflicts, revolts, alternations between dictatorship and anarchy. In past history they found nothing constructive, nothing they aspired to be. […]

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