The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude
In criticism of the Latin American novel, "magical realism" has typically been described as an impulse to create a fictive world that can somehow compete with the "insatiable fount of creation" that is Latin America's actual history.1 This concept of magical realism received perhaps its most influential endorsement in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Gabriel GarcÃ-a MÃ¡rquez. The famous Colombian novelist began this speech, suggestively enough, with an account of the "meticulous log" kept by Magellan's navigator, Antonia Pigafetta. In the course of this fateful exploration of the "Southern American continent," the imaginative Florentine recorded such oddities as "a monstrosity of an animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the hooves of a deer, and the neigh of a horse" (207). In the course of his Nobel speech, Garcia MÃ¡rquez recorded many less imaginative but equally improbable factsÂ— "in the past eleven years twenty million Latin American children have died before their second birthday. Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand have disappeared as a consequence of repression. ... A country created from all these Latin Americans in exile or enforced emigration would have a larger population than Norway" ("Solitude of Latin America" 208, 209)Â—on and on, as if he were trying to combat a plague of amnesia.