He 2018 Mitra

2017-18 Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient Carving Small Fish from Gold: Exploring the Genesis of Magical Realism in Latin American Literature as a Means of Resistance Jacqueline He, Class of 2018

Carving Small Fish from Gold: Exploring the Gensis of Magical Realism in Latin American Literature as a Means of Resistance

Jacqueline He 2018 Mitra Scholar Mentors: Ms. Donna Gilbert, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan, Sra. Isabel GarcĂ­a April 13, 2018

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For Latin America, the 1960s were a decade of change. Caused in part by the cultivation of diverse socio-political opinions, a consumption-oriented capitalist expansion in the wake of decades of neocolonialist control, and the cross-cultural facilitation of modern technology, the social atmosphere was filtered through a lens of complexity, ambiguity, and disorder that shaped artistic and academic sentiments throughout the subcontinent. Never before had the Caribbean played such a critical political role as it did in the 1960s, with the catalytic Cuban Revolution in 1959 and a simultaneous decade-long flourishing of experimental writing. Well-versed in the European literary canon, particularly the influential surrealist movement in the 1920s, novelists borrowed modernist techniques such as nonlinearity or linguistic neologisms to generate the hybridized new novel, which explored societal issues such as ideological polemicism or national identity. This literary movement, known as the Latin American Boom, sparked a frenzy of interest worldwide as its most prominent writers reached meteoric success.

What followed the birth of the new novel was the emergence of magical realism, or what Binghamton University professor Brett Levinson termed as a “key aesthetic mode" that recontextualized the mythos of Latin America into the turbulent realities of the Boom.1 From a poor couple’s discovery of an old man with enormous wings in a muddy courtyard, to a woman who spices her cooking with her tangible sorrow, magical realism merges the fantastic with the mundane. This aesthetic interweaves bizarre, legendary, and otherwise unreal elements into a

1

Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 26.

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realist narrative in such a way that they are difficult to separate.2 Yet as a trademark of Boom-era literature, magical realism also contains an implicit reflection and critique of its societal era.

By promoting global exposure to magical realism during the 1960s’ Latin American Boom, the major writers known as the Big Four—Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa—aimed to utilize this literary mode both to promote a means of political resistance and to help shape and contribute to a pan-Latin American cultural identity.

On the Historical Context of Magical Realism Magical realism was first coined as “magischer realismus” in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to detail the surrealist aspects of New Objectivity, a counter-Expressionist style of the art that celebrated the intrinsic wonder embedded within reality.3 The meaning of magical realism was originally rooted in the visual arts. It was not until after the Second World War that this term shifted into the literary realm when Latin American writers began to incorporate magic and myth into everyday life through fiction.4 Early predecessors of the Boom-era figures, such as Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges and Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, grew up in Eurocentric hemispheres (Switzerland and Belgium, respectively) and adopted the surrealists’ fascination for the inherent supernatural properties imbued within ordinary objects.5 Yet their versions of magical realism were almost exclusively confined to literature rather than generalized into a cross-medium aesthetic mode. Carpentier, in particular, rejected the notion that everything

2

"Magic Realism," in Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements, ed. Ira Mark Milne, 2nd ed. (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2009), 1.

3

Hannah R. Widdifield, "Myth y la magia: Magical Realism and the Modernism of Latin America" (Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2015), 3, accessed August 31, 2017.

4

Ibid., 4.

5

"Magic Realism," 2:2.

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is embedded with magic: in his 1949 landmark essay, “Lo real maravilloso” (“On the Marvelous Real in America”), which prefaces his novel The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), Carpentier argues that the constituent history of the Americas is practically magical, an element derived from the vibrant religious nature, heavily dependent upon magic, rooted within Afro-Caribbean culture.”6 According to Carpentier, Latin America is inherently enriched by its multiculturalism, a mezcla of diverse influences ranging from pre-Colombian cultures and European colonialism to African customs brought by the Transatlantic slave trade and even 19thand 20th- century globalized immigration.7 Magical realism, then, is specifically intertwined with a non-Western, primitive way of characterizing reality. In The Kingdom, Carpentier retells the Haitian revolution narrative in a manner distinct from both the normative rationality of contemporary Western literature and the “literary ruse” of European Surrealism.8 AfroCaribbean beliefs and practices, including Voodoo spiritualism, animal metamorphoses, and phantasmic apparitions are blended seamlessly into the storyline of the revolt. This realist style, infused with a knowledge of cultural magic and other irrational belief systems, creates a narrative disjunction that stands at odds with its Western counterpart, which attempts to mimic the world as much as possible by emphasizing rationality, progression, and linearity over rituals and emotion.9

6

"Magic Realism," 2:8.

7

Ryan Saul Cunningham, "Magical Realism as a Means of Expressing Cultural Disjunction in Alejo Carpentier's 'El reino de este mundo'" (paper presented at Portland State University, Portland, OR, May 8, 2013), 1.

8

Ibid.

9

"Magic Realism," 2:12.

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Carpentier contextualizes magical realism exclusively within the subcontinent, a notion later supported by several regionalist writers. Mexican-American writer and literary critic Luis Leal, for instance, furthered Carpentier’s argument by claiming that magical realism is not “the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances.”10 He clarifies Carpentier’s definition of magical realism as an approach that confronts rather than abstracts from a clear sociohistorical reality.11 Such an interpretation of magical realism persisted in the 1960s and 1970s, whereupon the Latin American Boom generated a sudden flowering of experimental literature, poetry, and criticism.12 Political turmoil had flavored much of the literary activity produced during the Boom. With authoritarian military regimes controlling Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Peru, writers and intellectuals who published opinions against the government were frequently persecuted, jailed, or forced into exile.13 As Washington University professor Elzbieta Sklodowska describes, the “collective experience of torture, suppression, and exile [was consequently] paralleled in many innovative and aesthetically accomplished works” produced in the era, such as García Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), which chronicles the internal monologue of an eternal dictator in an unknown Caribbean country.14 Still, it became common for Boom writers to, according to historian Gerald Martin, “speak left

10

Luis Leal, A Luis Leal Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 325.

11

Ibid., 326.

12

Philip Swanson, "Introduction: Background to the Boom," introduction to Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction, Routledge Revivals (London: Routledge, 2014), 1.

13

Elzbieta Sklodowska, "Latin American literatures," in The Companion to Latin American Studies, ed. Philip Swanson (London, UK: Routledge Press, 2014), 102.

14

Ibid.

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and write right.”15 Though many writers were well-read activists who considered themselves the political minds of society, the growing repression of free speech that swept across the subcontinent had tempered much of their written criticism against dictators such as Fidel Castro.16 Most Boom writers were, at least at first, in fervent support of the Cuban Revolution, an armed revolt led by Castro that successfully displaced the authoritarian government of President Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959.17 Largely forgotten until the mid-1950s, Cuba was suddenly catapulted into the world’s attention after Castro’s triumph, forming a central political issue that was collectively discussed, criticized, debated upon, and celebrated. The abundance of ideological beliefs, Castro’s initial promise of a free bourgeois democracy, the revolution’s call for the “first free territory of America,” and the various social experiments brought by the people’s revolt appealed to Boom writers in a subcontinent mired in governmental corruption.18 As the Boom-era Chilean writer Jose Donoso explains, “the support that the Spanish-American ‘new’ writers lent to Castro at the beginning of his leadership in the early sixties served to unify them” as a cohesive, like-minded group.19 This optimism for political liberation mirrored much of the writing produced during the Boom.20 However, later events like the 1971 Padilla Affair, in

15

Gerald Martin, "Narrative since c. 1920," in A Cultural History of Latin America: Literature, Music and the Visual Arts in the 19th and 20th Centuries, by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193.

16

Ibid.

17

Ana Campoy, "Fidel Castro, a giant influence in Latin American literature, once edited Gabriel García Márquez," Quartz, last modified November 30, 2016, accessed March 8, 2018.

18

Ibid.

19

Jose Donoso, Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977), 78.

20

Martin, "Narrative since," 192.

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which Cuban poet Herbert Padilla was imprisoned for openly criticizing the regime’s Communist praxis, and Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” (1961), a speech that delineates the boundaries of artistic sentiment within Cuba, eventually divided Latin American writers.21 With growing disenchantment as the “true intentions of Cuban socialism” came to light, some writers belatedly realized that they were actually not as “‘free’ to imagine and to create whatever they [liked],” resulting in a lasting schism between the leading intellectuals of the day.22 Nevertheless, the political solidarity assembled from the early days of the Cuban Revolution colored much of the initial Boom phenomenon.

Another factor that formed the backdrop of the period was the improvement in economic circumstances throughout Latin America. Martin highlighted the vast economic growth and rapid modernization of the 1950s and 60s in Latin America, which contributed to a “new cosmopolitan era of consumer capitalism, a perspective of change, progress and infinite choice.”23 The expansion of the middle class, the exponential growth of literacy, and a more equalized economic distribution signified that more households were able to purchase books and bolster sales, transforming writing and publishing into more lucrative professions.24 Publishing houses like the Spanish Seix Barral located novel markets abroad and hired reputable translators such as Gregory Rabassa and Suzanne Jane Levine, who made novels available to a broader

21

Campoy, "Fidel Castro," Quartz.

22

Martin, "Narrative since," 192.

23

Ibid.

24

Neil Larsen, Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 69.

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Western readership.25 From the 1940s to the 1960s, sales of Latin American novels increased over sixfold, and new writers such as Gabriel García Márquez became household names.26 It was not until the 1960s that the term bestseller was used to describe Latin American literature in the publishing world when Boom writers began to establish long-lasting media reputations even outside of Latin America and dominate the global literary scene.27 The Nature of Magical Realism and its Relation with the Big Four But while you’re drying yourself, you remember the old lady and the girl as they smiled at you before leaving the room arm in arm; you recall that whenever they’re together they always do the same things: they embrace, smile, eat, speak, enter, leave, at the same time, as if one were imitating the other, as if the will of one depended on the existence of the other…You cut yourself lightly on one cheek as you think of these things while you shave; you make an effort to get control of yourself. When you finish shaving you count the objects in your traveling case, the bottles and tubes which the servant you’ve never seen brought over from your boarding house: you murmur the names of these objects, touch them, read the contents and instructions, pronounce the names of the manufacturers, keeping to these objects in order to forget that other one, the one without a name, without a label, without any rational consistency. What is Aura expecting of you? you ask yourself, closing the travel case. What does she want, what does she want?

—Carlos Fuentes, “Aura”28

25

Russell Cobb, "The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American 'Boom' in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo," A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 78.

26

Ibid.

27

Martin, "Narrative since," 192.

28

Carlos Fuentes, Aura: A Novel, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 15.

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Published in 1962, “Aura,” by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, exemplifies the hallmarks of magical realism as it examines the mysterious relationship of the beautiful Aura and her widowed aunt Consuelo from the perspective of young historian Felipe Montero. A genre that straddles both reality and fantasy, magical realism oftentimes destabilizes autonomy and rationality from the reader’s perspective, conflating single identities through the unexplainable justification of magic. According to professor Wendy B. Faris, in magical realism “individuals merge or identities are questioned in other ways, and mysterious events require [readers] to question who or what has caused them.”29 In “Aura,” Consuelo and Aura appear at the same time and mimic the same actions, “as if the will of one depends on the existence of the other,” before finally revealing to be one body at the end, just as Felipe transforms into General Llorente, Consuelo’s deceased beloved, as if the past and present are interlocked.30 The nonlinearity of time, compounded with the perpetration of a deconstructed double identity, privileges the hallucinatory underpinnings of the text and blurs the distinction between dreams and wakefulness: “You stroke Aura’s long black hair...a ray of moonlight...falls on Aura’s eroded face...the ray of moonlight shows you...Señora Consuelo, limp, spent, tiny, ancient, trembling because you touch her. You love her, you too have come back...”31 Through Fuentes’ purposeful inclusion of the second person viewpoint, the reader is unable to distinguish between the real and unreal when Montero embraces Consuelo with familiar intimacy. The dreamlike quality of this narrative becomes more pronounced when juxtaposed against an infallible backdrop of realism:

29

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 1995), 111.

30

Fuentes, Aura: A Novel, 15.

31

Ibid., 18.

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Fuentes recounts the mundane aspects of Montero’s daily life in exact detail, from “[counting] the objects in [his] traveling case, the bottles and tubes” to “washing [his] face, brushing [his] teeth with [his] worn toothbrush that’s clogged with greenish paste.”32 In doing so, Fuentes creates a verisimilitude that mimics the events and outward experience of the external world, while simultaneously challenging its objective nature.33 When Montero discovers an old labeled photograph of Consuelo and her deceased husband, only to find the mirror image of Aura and himself, the reader questions the authenticity of reality, made dubious through such clairvoyant phenomena.34 Yet what further blends suspension and acceptance of belief in “Aura” is the matter-of-fact narrative behind textual events. Towards the end of the story, the mythic merge of Consuelo and Aura goes unquestioned and is implicitly accepted by Montero, further perpetuating the notion that such fantastical events are taken as real in his world, a version that is similar but nevertheless mysterious and rooted in supernatural origins.

With the destabilization of identity, the purposeful confusion between dreams and reality, and supernatural occurrences presented as ordinary, Fuentes’ “Aura” encapsulates the fundamental traits of magical realism. Carlos Fuentes, who from an early age was exposed to a number of South-American literary giants, was “the first active and conscious agent of the internalization of the Spanish-American novel” in the 1960s, according to Chilean novelist Jose Donoso.35 Enigmatic and charismatic, Fuentes aligned himself with the preeminent literary

32

Ibid., 34.

33

Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 111.

34

Ibid.

35

Jose Donoso, Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History (New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 1977), 37.

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coterie of his time, forming particularly close friendships with internationally recognized writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar.36 As Luis Leal recalled, “it was just these four, and they didn’t let anyone else into what became a kind of club or clique.”37 From 1969 to 1971, the personal relationships among Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar were extremely strong.38 Their tight-knit friendship was partially derived from mutual admiration. For instance, it was commonplace for Boom writers to send each other signed copies of their latest masterpieces, as in the case of Fuentes, who gave García Márquez and his family a copy of his Tiempo Mexicano (1971), replete with hand-drawn portraits of the two authors. (See Fig. 1)39

Figure 1. Carlo Fuente’s “Tiempo Mexicano” (photograph) Ransom Center Magazine.

36

Ibid.

37

Mario T. García, Luis Leal: An Auto-Biography (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 85.

38

Raymond Leslie Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 36.

Amy Brown, "Gabriel García Márquez’s republic of letters," Ransom Center Magazine, December 1, 2016, 2, accessed March 8, 2018.

39

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The Big Four were frank about their camaraderie with the public. When asked about the importance of writing in an interview with The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Julio Cortázar invoked Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa: “[as] Mario says so: to live, he needs only a room, a table, a typewriter and to be left in peace with a lot of paper.”40 And as Vargas Llosa later spoke of García Márquez, “We were friends; we were neighbors for two years in Barcelona, we lived on the same street...I wrote a six-hundred-page book on his work,” the 1971 García Márquez: Story of a Deicide.41 When discussing the passing of Cortázar and Fuentes with El País, Vargas Llosa concluded that “they weren’t just great writers, but also great friends.”42 Indeed, their friendship was far more than a professional relationship, but instead a deeper connection that went beyond the association of literary publication. During the Boom period, for example, Fuentes would frequently visit García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, who were neighbors on the same Barcelona street for two years.43 In 1968, mutually united by a fear of airplanes, the Big Four embarked on a train to Prague to tour the countries of the former Soviet bloc together.44 The Big Four were so close-knit that, as Donoso noted, they were compared by critics to the “literary Mafia...accused of blowing each other’s horns, of writing about each other, of maintaining a type of...admiration tolerating neither criticism nor examination.”45

40

Evelyn Picon Garfield, "A Conversation with Julio Cortázar," The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 3 (Fall 1983).

41

George Plimpton, ed., Latin American Writers at Work (New York City, NY: Modern Library, 2003), 281.

42

Javier Rodríguez Marcos, "Vargas Llosa breaks his silence over friendship with García Márquez," El País (Madrid, Spain), July 7, 2017, English.

43

Williams, The Writings, 37.

44

Ibid.

45

Donoso, Boom in Spanish-American, 66.

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As close friends, “[the Big Four] were a united front politically and aesthetically,” according to historian Raymond Williams.46 With respect to politics, the Big Four were among the most prominent intellectuals to support the Cuban Revolution, of which Fuentes was an especially energetic proponent. In his memoir, Donoso wrote that Fuentes particularly impacted the political awareness of his generation of writers, who were previously ignorant of continental politics beyond that of their home countries.47 Pre-Boom, Latin American writers were divided by location, culture, and politics, often aligning with regionalist points of view. The Cuban Revolution thus “served as a rallying point for many Latin American intellectuals, and Fuentes was the principal catalyst for their political awakening.”48 Politics and literature were inextricably tied during the Boom. Fidel Castro himself served as García Márquez’s friend and editor, and as Márquez notes, Castro was “such a good reader that before publishing a book [Márquez] bring[s] him the original manuscripts.”49 Perhaps paradoxically, Castro became an important patron during the Boom, positioning Cuba as the cultural leader of Latin America by establishing a cultural agency, the Casa de las Américas.

Before Cuba’s tolerance for free thinkers had worn thin, the Casa de las Américas in Havana had been a prime gathering spot for many notable writers and one of the most important birthplaces of Boom literature at that time.50 Fuentes composed his seminal piece, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), in Cuba. Vargas Llosa of Peru served on the Casa’s magazine editorial board, while

46

Williams, The Writings, 37.

47

Donoso, Boom in Spanish-American, 56.

48

Williams, The Writings, 29.

49

Campoy, "Fidel Castro," Quartz.

50

Martin, "Narrative since," 193.

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Cortázar of Argentina was a juror in Casa’s annual literary prize.51 The Casa was a concentration of talent and sponsorship in one physical space, a mecca that facilitated the pan-American literary exchange between Latin American writers and bolstered magical realism as a principal mode. Cortázar once praised the cultural house in a letter to his colleague, claiming that “once you arrive in Cuba, you don’t want to leave.”52 The Boom, as a period of artistic flourishing, witnessed the emergence of popular novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) from García Márquez, A Change of Skin (1967) from Fuentes, A Model Kit (1968) from Cortázar, and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) from Vargas Llosa.53 An “outgoing, expansion, engaging, [and] vital” man, as fellow writer William Styron once noted, Carlos Fuentes was central to actively promoting the success of his peers.54 It was Fuentes who shared his excitement over the first three chapters of García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude to his friends, including Julio Cortázar, labeling it in interviews as “magisterial” and a masterpiece, and then arranging for its early publication in August 1966. 55 Fluent in both Spanish and English, Fuentes was also skilled in pitching novels and recruiting influential individuals such as Gregory Rabassa, who translated the Big Four’s as accurately as possible into English, and New York-based literary agent Carl Brandt, who helped popularize Boom-era works not only in North America, but also in Spain and Latin America.56 Fuentes’

51

Campoy, "Fidel Castro," Quartz.

52

Ibid.

53

Williams, The Writings, 38.

54

Linton Weeks, "A Fleeting Memory Of Carlos Fuentes," NPR, last modified May 16, 2012, accessed February 20, 2018.

55

Bill Swainson, "How Carlos Fuentes reinvented the novel," The Telegraph, May 17, 2012, accessed April 8, 2018.

56

Cohn, The Latin, 16.

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efforts were important to elevating Latin American literature onto the world stage, promoting commercial accessibility and introducing the Boom to a mainstream Western readership.

Magical Realism as a Sociohistorical Critique When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep. Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people. There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as a plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had, and those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them up in the same way in which they transported bunches of bananas. Trying to flee from the nightmare, José Arcadio Segundo dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train was heading, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.

—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude57 In 1928, Colombian bananarera workers, in protest for proper labor conditions, instigated a strike against the United Fruit Company, a United States multinational corporation. The workers compiled nine demands that included “formalized [job] contracts” and fair

57

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York, USA: Harper Perennial, 1991), 125.

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“compensation for work accidents.”58 After weeks of tension-filled standstill between the laborers and the company, the strike reached a climax on the eve of December 6th, when what began as a pacifist demonstration in the town square degenerated into a brutalized slaughter under the order of General Carlos Cortés Vargas.59 “The soldiers fired on anything that moved.

They even killed donkeys at night,” recalled plantation worker Adán Ortiz.60 After General Vargas called for the firing to halt, he acted ruthlessly to obliterate this event from the annals of history. As witness Hernando Varela Oliveros recounted, “We heard the garbage truck going by in front of our house and then the boat tooting its horn. The next day, we realized that the truck had been transporting the dead bodies behind the hospital, where they loaded them onto [a] barge to throw them into the sea.”61 It was as if the hundreds of people massacred had disappeared overnight, for popular memory could recall only nine corpses strewn in the center of the town square. Later, strike supporter Josefa María summarized that “[the company] had only left nine dead bodies, equal to the nine demands that the workers made.”62 Post-massacre, news of the tragedy proliferated in various degrees of veracity. The coverage was chaotic. Haphazardly piecing together testimonials, the newspaper La Prensa first reported eight dead and twenty wounded, its headlines outlined in expensive red ink to

Kevin Coleman, "The Photos We Don’t Get to See: Sovereignties, Archives, and the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia," in Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, ed. Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipton (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015), 111.

58

59

Ibid., 117.

60

Carlos Andreis Arango, Sobrevivientes De Las Bananeras, 2nd ed. (Bogotá, Colombia: Ecoe, 1985), 79.

61

Ibid.

62

Ibid., 97.

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commemorate the fallen.63 A week later, it hastily changed its statistic to a hundred dead and 238 wounded.64 Internal diplomatic communications cited mortalities totaling over a thousand since militaries had “loaded the trains with some number of corpses and buried them in inaccessible areas.”65 There was a significant lack of primary accounts since many witnesses, fearing governmental persecution, had fled the area overnight in a mass exodus. Adding to the scarcity of accurate information, the Colombian government, in cooperation with the United Fruit Company, attempted to distort details released to the local press.66 International newspapers like the United Press in New York, biased and eager to defend the multinational interests of the North American company, misconstrued the revolt as “combats” between army troops and “revolutionaries,” and branded the protestors as “bandits” or “outlaws.”67 As such, journalistic coverage was unrealistic, and with considerable political manipulation, the government easily suppressed the massacre and imposed an alternative yet official version of the truth. Shortly thereafter, civil war broke out between two paramilitary political parties, leading to a tumultuous decade known as La Violencia in Colombia.68 The 1928 conflict in Ciénaga soon slipped from mainstream public consciousness.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez parallels this historically forgotten event, leveraging magical realism as a vehicle of pointed political critique on colonialism and

63

Jorge Caro, "La masacre de 1928 en La Zona Bananera, Magdalena - Colombia.," Memorias: Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueología Desde el Caribe Colombiano 18 (2012): 5, accessed March 6, 2018.

64

Ibid.

65

Ibid.

66

Coleman, "The Photos," 125.

67

Caro, "La masacre.”

68

Ibid.

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modernization. The fictional North American Banana Company penetrates the prehistoric town of Macondo and constructs a banana plantation at the periphery, and the foreigners bring along an influx of modern technology, including a flower-bedecked train that “[shakes the town] by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration.”69 Throughout Solitude, the advent of progress gains a decidedly negative connotation: the dramatized railroad represents both “a sign of Macondo’s assimilation into the modern world and a metaphor for its eventual exploitation by the North American Banana Company.”70 When thousands of striking plantation workers are massacred by the army with José Arcadio Segundo left as the sole survivor, an amnesiac rainfall descends upon the town, eventually erasing physical traces of the tragedy and memories from the collective consciousness of Macondo.71 The fantastic downpour thus allows the government to manipulate the narrative of history and claim that “there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped.”72 The supernatural rain that allows the government to erase the massacre is exaggerated by Márquez to strengthen the fantastic elements of Solitude. Yet Márquez is also careful to cultivate a semblance of credibility. He addresses the surreal so specifically that it becomes real and believable. As literary critic B.J. Geetha points out, each magical realist exaggeration in Solitude is “almost always numerically specific and gives each occurrence a

69

Márquez, One Hundred, 111.

70

Mustanir Ahmad, "Magical Realism, Social Protest and Anti-Colonial Sentiments in One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Instance of Historiographic Metafiction," Asian Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 3.

71

Márquez, One Hundred, 137.

72

Ibid.

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sense of reality.”73 As a case in point, the rainstorm in Solitude lasts precisely four years, eleven months, and two days.

The insomnia plague in Solitude serves as another metaphor upon the imposed version of reality by Western colonists or government authorities. Shortly after Macondo is exposed to civilization, the entire town becomes infected with a disease that causes sleeplessness, and where the townspeople forget the names of ordinary things of everyday use, instead resorting to pasting labels onto things to facilitate their memory. Hazara University professor Mustanir Ahmad explains that the insomnia plague “emerges as a metaphor to manifest the disgust of the colonized regarding the distortion of historical facts by the colonists...challenging the absolute reality and efforts to emphasize the very subjectivity of what is supposed to be real.”74 An imposition of modernization and cultural obfuscation, the sleeping plague serves to kill the past of a tribe, rich in tradition and culture, so quickly that they are stripped of memory and identity. 75 As “a powerful form of indirect political resistance,” magical realism adopts a formative role in constructing an implicit paradigm of protest in the insomnia plague episode.76 In Solitude, García Márquez employs magical realism in a manner that becomes “an important tool...to register social protest against the lingering effects of the process of colonialism.”77 As a journalist and writer who grew up in a period where political violence and

B. J. Geetha, "Magic Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude," Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 2, no. 3 (2010): 348.

73

74

Ahmad, "Magical Realism," 9.

75

Regina Janes, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading, Twayne's Masterwork Studies (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 64, Gale Virtual Reference Library.

76

Ibid.

77

Ahmad, "Magical Realism," 1.

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repression affected the ordinary life in Colombia, García Márquez imbues his fiction with a noticeably political slant. The sociopolitical violence and repression affecting 1960s Colombia is centralized to his other works: No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) and Of Love and Other Demons (1994). By trivializing the bizarre through a lens of magical realism, García Márquez allows for, according to Ahmad, “a political reading in which a ‘developing world’ perspective is privileged from within the implicitly ‘First World’ form of the novel and in which the reader is being invited to exercise his imagination...to invent an alternate and more just reality for the subcontinent.”78 In Solitude, Western conceptions of time, rationality, and progress are eschewed in favor of indigenous beliefs and magic.79 The people of Macondo are not surprised by fantastic events that defy Western logic. For instance, after José Arcadia Buendías dies in his sleep and “a light rain of tiny yellow flowers...fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm,” the town merely “[clears] them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession [can] pass by.”80 The perspective of the Third World easily accepts the wonder in magical phenomena and instead treats modernized objects as strange and unreal: Marquez writes that when the people of Macondo see a telephone for the first time, it was as if “God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation.”81 By presenting an alternative yet subversive perspective, historian Lois Zamora noted that the “in-betweenness, the all-at-

78

Philip Swanson, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," in The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58.

79

Ibid.

80

Márquez, One Hundred, 72.

81

Ibid., 112.

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onceness” nature of magical realism encourages a literary resistance to monologic political and cultural structures.82 Throughout years of Western colonization, imperialism, and exploitation, compounded by dictatorial rule and violence, there has been a substantial body of folklore about the way the Latin American population resists against such struggles. As Ahmad notes, “a propensity to mythologize” real struggles by transforming them into embellished stories has enabled the creation of a fantastic-real truth.83 García Márquez originally explained that Solitude is a metaphor for Latin America. Embedded within his narrative is a political critique that magical realism serves to amplify. When asked about the 1928 ‘masacre de las bananeras’ in a 1990 interview, García Márquez revealed that only a handful of people had died during the actual strike, a diminutive amount from the figure of three thousand given in Solitude and accepted by Colombian historians today.84 Though García Márquez often encouraged the view that his literary portfolio faithfully mirrors reality, he also insisted that, as historian Stephen Minta noted, “accuracy in this instance was never his primary consideration.”85 This deliberate exaggeration of detail is a case of “speak left and write right” that writers frequently practiced during the Boom, intimating that the historical interpretation of the 1928 banana massacre was “'a conspiracy of silence' among the Colombian elite to suppress the truth from the collective memory.”86 82

83

Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 258.

Ahmad, "Magical Realism," 7.

84

Eduardo Posada-Carbo, "Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude," Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 2 (May 1998): 395.

85

Ibid.

86

Ibid., 410.

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García Márquez, though not affiliated with any major political party, professed socialist revolution to be the best course of development for Latin America, and valued “the promotion of human rights and peaceful existence” over the rigid confines of any ideology. In that sense, although his fiction does not explicitly lean towards any view, it nevertheless incorporated his political biases. For biographer Gerald Martin, García Márquez intended Solitude to be more of “a socialist...reading of Latin American history” rather than a “patently historical one.”87 In the novel, García Márquez interprets solitude as solidarity, as evinced by the introduction of an idealistic Macondo wherein villagers are geographically separated from the outside world.88 What ultimately corrupts this metaphorical Eden is the introduction of greedy foreigners and their technology, leading to frequent government overhauls, political dictatorship, and violence, as well as dissent amongst the villagers. In this regard, magical realism serves primarily as a means to convey García Márquez’ sociopolitical messages, creating a different, slightly exaggerated version of historical truth.

During the Boom, García Márquez and the rest of the Big Four had garnered sizable political clout both within and outside the literary sphere. García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Fuentes, along with hundreds of lesser-known intellectuals, considered themselves the political conscience of society and were especially drawn to the left.89 These intellectuals often formed an unofficial parliament, in which the major events of the day were debated,

87

Martin, "Narrative since," 227.

88

Verity Smith, ed., Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London, UK: Routledge Press, 1997), 655.

89

Alan Riding, "Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America," New York Times (New York, USA), March 13, 1983.

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assimilated into the local agenda, or allowed to disappear from public awareness.90 Journalist Alan Riding noted that through their activism, Latin American writers became weighted political figures, and “few...showed many qualms about making use of this power” through the written word.91 For example, García Márquez, along with Miguel Angel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, and Alejo Carpentier, often ridiculed the classic Latin American dictator, or el caudillo. A popular Boom genre that often merges with magical realism and incorporates the same postmodernist styles, the dictator novel closely examines the enduring power of Latin American tyrants, particularly its association with United States imperialism, and presents an implicit political statement concerning dictatorship.92 One classic dictator novel is Garcia Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975), which follows in six sections the eventual degeneration of an eternal dictator, whose reign of terror and political repression parallels the historical regimes of fascist leader Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Márquez’ Colombian homeland.93

Magical Realism and its Facilitation of a Cultural Identity With one last hope he parted his eyelids, groaning to wake up. For a second he thought he had achieved it, because once again he was immobile in his bed, safe from the swinging with his head propped up. But it smelled of death, and when he opened his eyes he saw the bloody figure of the high priest that came toward him with a stone knife in his hand.

He was able to shut his eyelids once more, but now he knows that he would not wake,

90

Ibid.

91

Ibid.

92

Smith, Encyclopedia of Latin, 17.

93

Ibid.

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that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd like all dreams; a dream in which he had ridden the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with red and green lights that burned with neither flame nor smoke, with an enormous metal insect that buzzed beneath his legs. In the infinite lie of that dream they had also lifted him from the floor, someone had also cut him with a knife in his hand, with him lying face up, face up with his eyes shut in the midst of the fires.

—Julio Cortázar, “The Night Face-Up”94 In his short story “The Night Face-Up,” Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar merges an ancient Aztec sacrifice with death in a modern hospital. A characteristic example of magical realism, “The Night Face-Up” obscures the distinction between reality and dream sequences as the protagonist alternates between fleeing from the Aztecs as a member of the Moteca tribe, to remaining half-conscious in a hospital post-surgery after a motorcycle accident. Only at the end did the protagonist realize that “he would not awake, that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other,” and that the Motecan sequence is in fact reality, concluding with the protagonist’s imminent sacrificial death.95 Similarly, Cortázar often distorts historical linearity by invoking indigenous traditions in a modern setting. As Faris notes, in “The Night Face-Up,” “buried beliefs are revived to question ‘appallingly new’ realities of contemporary life” as the timeline skips from past to present. 96

94

Julio Cortázar, "La Noche Boca Arriba," in End of the Game and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York City: Pantheon Books, 1968), 120.

95

Ibid., 121.

96

Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 107.

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Cortázar specifically references primitive and indigenous cultures in his short stories, indicating a “nostalgic primitivism,” or a yearning of a pre-Colombian past that is slipping away, a common avant-gardism in magical realism.97 Such a notion is also apparent in García Márquez’ Solitude, which villainizes technology, progress, and the new railroad train in favor of preserving the culture and tradition of native Macondo. Likewise, Fuentes’ “Aura” depicts the eventual progression of Felipe and Aura into General Llorente and Consuelo, respectively, embodying the nostalgia of the past and the rejection of the future.

The underlying theme of nostalgic primitivism in much of Boom-era magical realism was not incidental. Since the cosmopolitan era of the 1960s, new writers had sought to establish a cohesive literary identity, infusing cultural and historical mythology with a dazzling array of innovative narrative and language techniques.98 Prior to the Boom, there was no true Latin American literature, as works produced were largely isolated by region. For example, Mexican writers produced stories set in Mexico that were accessible only to Mexican audiences, and so forth. Such indigenismo writings were, as historian Gustavo Pellón found, “rarely distributed and read outside the individual countries,” more difficult to obtain than North American or European texts, and thus unable to attract outside attention.99 Writers and readers alike, who came of age during the Boom, began to criticize the exclusivity and isolationist nature of the style. Cortázar, for one, branded the indigenismo as the “provincials of folk obedience.”100 And if the Cuban

97

Ibid., 104.

98

Gustavo Pellón, "The Boom," in A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. Albert James Arnold, Julio Rodríguez-Luis, and J. Michael Dash (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 209.

99

Ibid.

100

Ibid.

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Revolution had politically drawn together writers from multiple Latin American countries, then the London-originated Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) International Conference in 1966 was responsible for aligning Boom individuals in a literary sense, bringing together 23 writers from Peru, México, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba, and Brazil, along with pivotal figures such as the translator Gregory Rabassa.101 Facilitated in part by Carlos Fuentes, the group felt the need to foster a pan-Latin American literary identity that will “enhance the visibility of the writers and their work,” in the United States and elsewhere, and separate from the title “with which PEN had previously identified them: ‘Peripheral Writers (Latin America).’”102 They discussed the difficulties of fostering such an identity, including geographic isolation and the lack of circulation of works within and between nations within the subcontinent. Vargas Llosa spoke about the cultural marginalization of writers and literature in Peru, calling not only for an overarching literary characteristic but also for “the re-appropriation of Latin America from the ‘European’ ways of storytelling.”103 At the conclusion of the conference, the writers committed to fostering the growing primacy of Latin American literature in subsequent years.

Magical realism, in a sense, became an exclusively Latin American product that responds to the problems in the first PEN International Conference. Extending Alejo Carpentier’s theory of lo real maravilloso, García Márquez once declared that magical realism has “nothing to do with fantasy, but is based on the imaginative processing of reality”—his later magical realist works contained a distinctively Caribbean nuance, trending towards referencing explicit Latin

101

Deborah N. Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 87.

102

Ibid., 92.

103

Ibid.

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American geography, history, and sociology.104 García Márquez had grown up in the Aracataca, which was located in the Caribbean region of Colombia. He argued that the inherent mystique of magical realism was directly due to Latin America itself: “To grow up in such an environment is to have fantastic resources for poetry…[magical realist authors] are capable of believing anything, because [they] have the influences of Indian, pirate, African, and European cultures, mixed in with…[their] own local beliefs.”105 With a diverse melting pot of various cultures, superstitions, and folklore, Latin America was uniquely suited to facilitating such a literary genre.

Magical realism is also notably diasporic in style, as evinced by Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (La casa verde, 1966). Though Vargas Llosa’s literary repertoire predominantly focuses on narrative realism, The Green House explores a popular brothel on the outskirts of Piura, Peru, as well as its magical properties that fade after the death of its owner, Anselmo.106 Later, in an essay on writing The Green House, Vargas Llosa admitted to having to retrace his incomplete memory of Peru and study up on the natives of his own landscape: “Every time I saw a puma or a vicuna, I remember what another writer who had also lived in Paris many years wrote. This writer, Ventura García Calderón, commented that when he would pass by the llama’s cage, the animal’s eyes would fill with tears of recognizing a compatriot.”107 As a diasporic Peruvian writer living in Paris, Vargas Llosa found himself separated between memory

104

Pellón, "The Boom," 215.

105

Williams, "One Hundred”, 73.

106

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

107

Kristjana Gunnars, "The Diasporic Imagination: Writers' Perspectives," in Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing (Ontario: Ontario Arts Council, 2004), 36.

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and imagination, not only in the present day but also in the past. Vargas Llosa, who frequently wrote about the association of modern Peru with the ancient Inca and Aztec civilizations, believed that since much of the history of the ancient world is unrecorded, writers must utilize their mind and imagination, which may “turn out to be truer and more psychologically and emotionally accurate than factual reporting could ever be.”108 It is the same instinct that drives Jorge Luis Borges, an earlier magical realist novelist, to reject the real world of his Argentine homeland and, according to Vargas Llosa, “[create] this other world, where there are only ideas, knowledge, curiosities that deal with this intellect.”109 This curious sense of lost culture was echoed in many Boom-era magical realist texts. As Alejo Carpentier described decades earlier, writing about his native culture was akin to “a Latin American trained to see things as a European who rediscovers an American way of looking at things.”110 Martin noted that “each [work] also has an unmistakable additional element, this labyrinthine, historical-mythological national quest motif ” which has been elaborated on progressively since the 1920s by pre-Boom novelists such as Miguel Ángel Asturias or Jorge Luis Borges.111 This thematic choice, combined with the modernist sophistication that characterized the Boom, appeared to indicate “more of a continuation of cultural dependence...than any true break with past cultural relations.”112 Yet magical realism, birthed from 1920s surrealism and refined in Latin America, inherited an irrepressible Western streak as

108

Ibid., 38.

109

Ibid.

110

Pellón, "The Boom," 212.

111

Martin, "Narrative since," 183.

112

Pellón, "The Boom," 209.

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well.113 Cortázar, for example, drew aesthetic inspiration not only from the cultural distinctions of his native Argentina but also from Ireland’s James Joyce and America’s William Faulkner.

The other major Boom novelists, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez, were similarly recognizable in a Faulknerian vein. As Pellón explained, these writers identified with Joyce’s attempt to “express his Irishness in the language of the English oppressor,” and Faulkner’s struggle to “come to grips with a history of racial hatred, civil war, defeat, and moral decay in the South.”114 Latin American writers, regardless of region, shared similar socio-historical concerns. In studying and emulating the canon of Joyce and Faulkner, which was internationally well-known and available in multiple translations, Boom-era writers shared another common point that further unified their works.

As Gabriel García Márquez remarked once in a 1967 interview, “The group is writing one great novel. We’re writing the first great novel of Latin American man. Fuentes is showing one side of the new Mexican bourgeoisie; Vargas Llosa, social aspects of Peru, Cortazar likewise, and so on. What‘s interesting to me is that we’re writing several novels, but the outcome, I hope, will be a total vision of Latin America….It’s the first attempt to integrate this world.”115 The close association of the Big Four authors helped develop magical realism as a literary aesthetic during the Latin American Boom. By reflecting both the politically activist nature and cultural underpinnings of the subcontinent, these writers shaped a global literary phenomenon that, for the first time, centered the dazzling vibrancy of Latin American culture under the international spotlight.

113

Martin, "Narrative since," 160.

114

Ibid., 209.

115

Cohn, The Latin, 5.

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Bibliography Ahmad, Mustanir. "Magical Realism, Social Protest and Anti-Colonial Sentiments in One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Instance of Historiographic Metafiction." Asian Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 1-26.

Ahmad analyzes the literature of One Hundred Years of Solitude through a historical point of view. Mustanir Ahmad is the Head of Department in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hofstra University. By referencing specific paragraphs of the text, Ahmad makes a cogent argument that Solitude is a reflection of Márquez' political ideologies.

Arango, Carlos Andreis. Sobrevivientes De Las Bananeras. 2nd ed. Bogotá, Colombia: Ecoe, 1985.

Arango presents a journalistic investigation of the 1928 banana massacre in Ciénaga, Magdalena, collecting testimonies from several survivors and witnesses of this tragedy.

In this book, which was later awarded the "Simón Bolivar" National Journalism Award in 1979, Arango provides important interviews with survivors of the massacre and both national and international newspaper articles regarding the aftermath of this event. Carlos Arango is a Colombian journalist who had worked for Semanario VOZ. Brown, Amy. "Gabriel García Márquez’s republic of letters." Ransom Center Magazine, December 1, 2016. Accessed March 8, 2018. http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2016/12/01/republic-of-letters/.

In this article, Brown explores García Márquez' collection of letters from famous literary friends. Amy Brown is a cataloguer and historian from the Henry Ransom Center of the University of Texas. By including photographs from García Márquez' private library collection, Brown provides access to a valuable cultural resource.

Burns, E. Bradford, and Julie A. Charlip. Latin America: An Interpretive History. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006.

Burns and Charlip summarize the political, economic, and cultural context of the Latin American Boom. Professor Julie A. Charlip obtained a Ph.D. in Latin American History in 1995 and researches the sociopolitical history of Latin America at Whitman College.

Charlip draws numerous connections between seemingly disparate points in time when discussing the advent of the Boom, formulating a clear and cohesive argument based on historical evidence.

Campoy, Ana. "Fidel Castro, a giant influence in Latin American literature, once edited Gabriel García Márquez." Quartz. Last modified November 30, 2016. Accessed March 8, 2018. https://qz.com/847274/fidel-castro-influenced-latin-americas-most-famous-authorsincluding-gabriel-garcia-marquez-mario-vargas-llosa-and-carlos-fuentes/.

In this article, Ana Campoy explores the influence that Fidel Castro as a patron of arts and culture had on the Latin American Boom. Ana Campoy is a former Wall Street Journal writer with a specific focus on Latin America. Campoy delves into the Havanalocalized Casa de Las Americas and its presence as a physical literary space to Boom writers.

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Caro, Jorge. "La masacre de 1928 en La Zona Bananera, Magdalena - Colombia." Memorias: Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueología Desde el Caribe Colombiano 18 (2012).

Accessed March 6, 2018. http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/memorias/article/viewArticle/4835/3832.

Caro analyzes the 1928 Magdalena banana massacre through newspaper archives and photographs. Jorge Caro holds a Ph. D in History, a Masters in Latin America and the Caribbean contemporary history, and a Masters in Business Administration. He is a specialist in Public International Law and is a research professor at the Universidad del Magdalena. In this piece, Caro provides a clear summary of the banana massacre and the government's active attempt to suppress newspaper coverage following the tragedy.

Cobb, Russell. "The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American 'Boom' in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo." A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 75-94.

Cobb details the unprecedented critical and commercial success of the Boom in international literary circles. Russell Cobb is Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. In this journal article, Cobb provides an overview of translation efforts during the Boom, particularly those of Gregory Rabassa.

Cohn, Deborah N. The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.

Cohn researches the international response to the Latin American Boom and describes the meteoric popularity of magical realism. Deborah Cohn is an assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Indiana University. In this text, Cohn covers common perceptions of magical realism from both domestic and foreign points of view.

Coleman, Kevin. "The Photos We Don’t Get to See: Sovereignties, Archives, and the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia." In Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, edited by Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipton, 104-36. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015.

Coleman traces the obfuscated history of the 1928 Colombian massacre in Ciénaga, putting together primary and secondary sources to provide a cogent argument. Kevin Coleman is a researcher and Assistant Professor of Latin American History at the University of Toronto.

Cortázar, Julio. "La Noche Boca Arriba." In End of the Game and Other Stories. Translated by Paul Blackburn. New York City: Pantheon Books, 1968.

A short story that merges a death in a modern hospital with one in an Aztec sacrifice.

Julio Córtazar, a member of the Big Four, was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Córtazar weaves a magical realist narrative that transcends temporal linearity and blurs the distinction between past and present.

Cunningham, Ryan Saul. "Magical Realism as a Means of Expressing Cultural Disjunction in Alejo Carpentier's 'El reino de este mundo.'" Paper presented at Portland State University, Portland, OR, May 8, 2013.

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In this paper, Cunningham explores magical realism as a mechanism to express cultural disjunction, in which Third World narratives are told in a way that cannot be captured by Western literary techniques. Ryan Saul Cunningham is a Portland State University research scholar specializing in Spanish literature. Cunningham extends Alejo Carpentier's notion of "lo real maravilloso" by defining the diverse cultural influences that make up Latin American culture Donoso, Jose. Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977.

In his personal biography, Donoso describes both his own experience during the Boom and his interactions with the Big Four. Jose Donoso was a Chilean writer who was active during the Latin American Boom. This text provides detailed information about that time period, and especially about Donoso's friendship with Carlos Fuentes.

Fuentes, Carlos. Aura: A Novel. Translated by Lysander Kemp. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.

A short novel that contains some of the most noticeable features of magical realism, including confusion between past and present as well as the phenomena of double identity. Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican novelist and essayist, and a member of the Big Four.

García, Mario T. Luis Leal: An Auto/Biography. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010.

García offers a comprehensive account on Luis Leal, a Mexican-American Boom-era writer who had won Mexico's Aquila Azteca and the United States' National Humanities Medal. Mario T. García is a distinguished professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, and authored several books on Mexican American leaders, including Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, Identity. In this biography, García paints a clear picture of Leal's relationship with other figureheads of the Boom.

Garfield, Evelyn Picon. "A Conversation with Julio Cortázar." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 3 (Fall 1983).

Garfield interviews Julio Cortázar in The Review of Contemporary Fiction about his writing in the context of Argentina and Latin America. Evelyn Picon Garfield is a Spanish educator who holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. In this conversation, Cortázar discusses the literary nuances of his Boom counterparts, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar.

Geetha, B. J. "Magic Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 2, no. 3 (2010): 345-49.

In this scholarly article, Geetha analyzes magical realism as a means to recount Colombian history in Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. B. J. Geetha is the Assistant Professor of the Department of English at Periyar University. By analyzing Solitude from a modernist, magical realist perspective, Geetha makes the persuasive argument that Solitude provides a literary glimpse into Márquez' perception of Latin America.

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Gunnars, Kristjana. "The Diasporic Imagination: Writers' Perspectives." In Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing. Ontario: Ontario Arts Council, 2004.

Gunnars investigates the diasporic nature of Vargas Llosa's text, especially in The Green House. Kristjana Gunnars is a research and novelist based at the University of Manitoba as professor emeritus. In this work, Gunnars references specific interviews with Vargas Llosa and delves briefly into his experience as a Peruvian novelist educated abroad.

Janes, Regina. One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading. Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Janes analyzes the socio-historical purpose in Gabriel García Márquez' works, particularly in Cien Años de Soledad. Regina Janes is a Professor of English at Skidmore College with research interests in modern Latin American literature. By invoking historical facts and the life of Márquez into her argument, Janes argues that his works, though fictional, mirror reality to a certain extent.

Larsen, Neil. Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Neil Larsen is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Northeastern University. In Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics, Larsen takes on a historical materialist approach to analyzing Latin American texts that rose to fame during the Boom, and provides insightful commentary on the socio-economic realities of that time period.

Leal, Luis. A Luis Leal Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

A Luis Leal Reader is a selection of Luis Leal’s writings from the past sixty years as an author and literary critic of Latin American literature. Luis Leal is a Mexican-American writer who had received the National Humanities Medal in 1988. In this book, Leal provides a fresh account of magical realism both before and during the Boom.

Levinson, Brett. The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

In contrast to other works about the Latin American Boom, Levinson discusses this phenomenon and its aftereffects from a modern context. Brett Levinson is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. Levinson presents a clear definition of magical realism as an aesthetic mode and expounds upon its common features and origin.

Llosa, Mario Vargas. The Green House. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

The Green House is one of Vargas Llosa's few examples of magical realism and is one of the analyzed works in this paper. Mario Vargas Llosa hails from Peru and is a member of the Big Four from the Latin American Boom. The Green House is one example of cultural dissociation that is common in Boom-era literary works.

López-Calvo, Ignacio. Magical Realism. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2014.

This book is useful for its literary criticism on magical realism as a subversive mode against contemporary politics of the writers' time. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo is a professor at

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UC Merced who focuses on cultural production by and about Latin-American authors.

Through delving into the personal writings of a few key Boom-era writers, Lopez-Calvo makes the case that the inherent nature of magical realism contains a noticeable politically rebellious slant.

Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1967.

Arguably the most popular example of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seminal work in the context of the Latin American Boom. Gabriel García Márquez is a Nobel Prize Winner, novelist, and journalist from Colombia.

"Magic Realism." In Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements, edited by Ira Mark Milne, 437-65. 2nd ed. Vol. 2.

Detroit, MI: Gale, 2009.

Milne provides a holistic examination of the aspects and history of magical realism. Ira Mark Milne is an editor who published multiple articles about different literary movements. By providing a general summary backed with specific authorial examples, this article presents a comprehensive surface-level overview of magical realism.

Marcos, Javier Rodríguez. "Vargas Llosa breaks his silence over friendship with García Márquez." El País (Madrid, Spain), July 7, 2017, English. Accessed April 6, 2018. https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/07/07/inenglish/1499428317_486118.html.

In this newspaper article, Marcos discusses Vargas Llosa and his falling out with Gabriel García Márquez due to both personal and political differences, and provides more information on the ideological split among Boom writers over Fidel Castro's increasingly oppressive political regime. Javier Rodríguez Marcos is a journalist for El Páis, a Spanish newspaper.

Martin, Gerald. "Narrative since c. 1920." In A Cultural History of Latin America: Literature, Music and the Visual Arts in the 19th and 20th Centuries, by Leslie Bethell, 133-227.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

In "Narrative since c. 1920," Martin provides a collaborative account of Latin American literature and its rise to prominence, from the early Surrealist influences to post-Boom works. Gerald Martin is a critic of Latin American fiction who received his Ph. D in Latin American Literature from the University of Edinburgh (1970).

Pellón, Gustavo. "The Boom." In A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, edited by Albert James Arnold, Julio Rodríguez-Luis, and J. Michael Dash. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994.

In "The Boom," Pellón provides an account of the evolution of magical realist literature in one cultural region and especially notes the Joycean and Faulknerian influences of the Boom. Gustavo Pellón is a Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Virginia.

Plimpton, George, ed. Latin American Writers at Work. New York City, NY: Modern Library, 2003.

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Latin American Writers at Work is a collection of interviews with some of the Latin American writers of the Boom. By hosting an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, Plimpton provides a glimpse into the Peruvian author's friendship with Gabriel García Márquez. George Plimpton is an American journalist, writer, and literary editor who helped found The Paris Review.

Posada-Carbo, Eduardo. "Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude." Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 2 (May 1998): 395-414.

In "Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude," Posada-Carbo examines the way that the fiction in Gabriel García Márquez' Solitude has been accepted as history by literary critics and historians. Posada-Carbo also provides a close analysis of the 1928 workers' strike in Colombia and the degree of accuracy to which Solitude portrays this event. Eduardo Posada-Carbo is a Professor of the History and Politics of Latin America at the University of Oxford.

Riding, Alan. "Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America." New York Times (New York, NY), March 13, 1983.

Through interviews with members of Latin American political intelligentsia, Riding provides a comprehensive report on the political effect of the Boom-era writers and their eventual fragmentation over Castro. Alan Riding is a British author and journalist who served as a long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

Sklodowska, Elzbieta. "Latin American literatures." In The Companion to Latin American Studies, edited by Philip Swanson, 86-106. London, UK: Routledge Press, 2014.

In "Latin American literatures," Sklodowska analyzes the Boom-era literary works produced in their full historical, social, political, and cultural context, and provides an account of the effect of authoritarian militarian regimes on the nature of works produced during the Boom. Elzbieta Sklodowska is a Randolph Family Professor of Spanish at the Washington University of St. Louis.

Smith, Pete. Carlos Fuentes' "Tiempo Mexicano" (1971). December 1, 2016. Photograph.

Accessed March 7, 2018. http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2016/12/01/republic-of-letters/.

Pete Smith's Carlos Fuentes' "Tiempo Mexicano" is a photograph of the title page of Carlos Fuentes' Tiempo Mexicano, replete with Fuentes' doodle of himself and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as a brief note to Márquez' family.

Smith, Verity, ed. Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. London: Routledge Press, 1997.

Smith provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Verity Smith is an honorable research fellow at the University of London. In a review of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Smith presents a socialist critique on the core organization of the narrative.

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Solé, Carlos A., ed. Latin American Writers: Supplement 1. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Solé presents a small biography of each of the key Latin American writers from the 20th century and onwards. Carlos Solé is a Spanish researcher who has published three volumes of Latin American Writers Supplement to date. This book presents both positive and negative criticisms of each author.

Stock, Jennifer, ed. Central and South America. Vol. 3 of Global Events: Milestone Events Throughout History. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, 2014. Gale World History In Context.

Stock analyzes important events with global significance in Central and South America, most notably the economic modernization of Latin America in the 1950s and the factors surrounding the Cuban Revolution. Jennifer Stock is a writer for Gale who has compiled six volumes of milestone events throughout history. Although this text rarely references magical realism, it is useful for background reading on the political and economic contributions to the Latin American Boom.

Swainson, Bill. "How Carlos Fuentes reinvented the novel." The Telegraph, May 17, 2012.

Accessed April 8, 2018. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9272892/HowCarlos-Fuentes-reinvented-the-novel.html.

In this newsletter article, Swainson charts the effect that Carlos Fuentes had on the Latin American Boom, particularly his role in uniting the Big Four and promoting their works.

Bill Swainson is an editor for Oneworld and had previously served as a journalist for the Telegraph.

Swanson, Philip. "Introduction: Background to the Boom." Introduction to Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction, 1-26. Routledge Revivals. London: Routledge, 2014.

In "Introduction: Background to the Boom," Swanson chronicles the works of pre-Boom Latin American authors and their legacy on the Boom. He offers a clear definition of the Latin American Boom and provides the origin story on how it came to international prominence. Philip Swanson is the Hughes Professor of Spanish at Edinburgh University.

———. "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez, 57-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

In "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Swanson analyzes Gabriel García Márquez' Solitude through a political, subversive angle, and focuses on the 'developing world' perspective that Márquez imbues into the narrative. Philip Swanson is the Hughes Professor of Spanish at Edinburgh University.

Widdifield, Hannah R. "Myth y la magia: Magical Realism and the Modernism of Latin America." Master's thesis, University of Tennessee, 2015. Accessed August 31, 2017. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4661&context=utk_gradthes Widdifield provides information on the origins of magical realism before it was utilized in Latin America. Hannah Widdifield is a graduate teaching associate who earned an MA in General English Language and Literature from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

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By analyzing the development of magical realism in both Germany--where the term was first coined--and Latin America, Widdifield describes the nuances between these two distinctive types.

Williams, Raymond L. "One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)." Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Raymond L. Williams is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. This text, which documents much of Mรกrquez' journalistic career aside from covering One Hundred Years of Solitude, successfully documents the metafictionality of Mรกrquez' works in how it references other texts of his period.

Williams, Raymond Leslie. The Writings of Carlos Fuentes. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Williams provides a comprehensive biography on the life of Carlos Fuentes, especially during the Boom period. Raymond L. Williams is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. This text sheds light on Fuentes' interaction with and enthusiastic promotion of political affairs, specifically the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community.

Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 1995.

Zamora provides a comprehensive overview on the history of magic realism, from its beginnings as a regional trend to its growth into an international movement, as well as its influence among contemporary literature. This critical collection combines primary sources from Boom-era Latin American authors, as well as analyses from historians evaluating how this literary genre came to be. Zamora is a former Professor of the English, History, and Art departments at the University of Houston, and her studies on Latin America have been published by the Duke University Press and Rodophi Publishers. By providing both primary and secondary accounts ranging from the mid20th century to the modern day, this book provides a clear, cohesive account on the rise and development of magic realism over the decades.

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