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Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s `Del Amor y Otros Demonios’ : An Unwritten History of a People and LandGabriel Garcia Marquez maintains that he writes history, not fiction, that his novels are about the unwritten history of his people and land. Needless to say, the fantastical context in which his stories unfold, and which constantly defy readers’ credulity, make the Columbian novelist’s contention quite hard to accept. How is it possible to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as the history of the Columbian banana massacres of 1928, or Del Amor y Otros Demonios, as the history of colonialism and the true story of Saint Cajetan of Thiene and his well-recorded relation with the Augustinian nun, Laura Mignani? Yet, Marquez has repeatedly affirmed that his works are historical, that they tell the history of events as they were seen, understood and remembered by those who lived through themOfficial Columbian, Latin American history, as Marquez has persistently and repeatedly maintained, is a watered down version of the truth; it is a history written by, and for, those in power, designed, not to preserve the truth but, to sustain the power holders of the present and preserve the legend and memory of those of the past. Official history, within the parameters of such concerns, is a politically motivated re-telling of the truth which deliberately displaces the people, those who have lived through and experienced history and, challenges the national memory. As Marquez has often said, his works are designed to resurrect the true history, the version of history which official history has tried to bury. As such, he encourages readers to approach his works as realistic and truthful renditions of historical events. In Del Amor y Otros Demonios, the focus of this research, Marquez quite openly demands this of his readers. Just in case they fail to comprehend the narrative as the `true’ history of the interrelationship between the church and colonialism, between religion and the immiseration of countless of innocents, he alternately alludes to and explicitly names real historical characters. Few of his Latin American readers would not recognise Cayetano as a clear allusion to Saint Cajetan and, his protagonist’s surname, Delaura, as a reminder of his relationship with Sister Laura Mignani; a relationship which is echoed by Cayetano and Sierva Maria’s.
Should readers, despite their fantastical context and content, accept Marquez’ narratives as history, which Shaw concedes they could very well be, they need to reserve judgement on the manner in which Marquez remembers, interprets and presents history. Indeed, Marquez does not simply engage in the transmission of an alternative version of history but deconstructs official history in the process. His doing so, however, should not be interpreted as a disregard for, and a displacement of, fact but of the presentation of fact from within the magical realist context. Although the presentation of fact through the medium of a magical realist narrative persistently challenges the reader’s credulity, an analysis of the theoretical and definitional parameters of the genre, followed by a close textual analysis of Del Amor y Otros Demonios from within the matrix of magic realism, with specific focus on his treatment of place, dreams and memory, will lend to the conclusion that Marquez’s narratives represent a history as remembered and told by the people; a history infused with myth and supposition but, a history nonetheless.
As a literary and artistic genre, magic realism is apparently plagued by its insistent use of supplementation as a literary strategy for the improvement of the realist text. The boundaries framing realism so constrained many artists and burdened them with the nagging difficulty of how to compromise between realism and their own creative desires and inclinations that the movement towards magic realism was instigated. Supposedly, this genre expresses both the seen and the unseen realities, the historical memories which make and shape a people and the myths and superstitions which dominate their worldview. Magic realists contend that realism never allowed them the leeway to express reality’s multiple dimensions, further asserting that, as a linguistic and literary medium, it constrained their creativity. Magic realism supposedly overcomes realism’s boundaries and limitations and seems to displace its predecessor’s shortcomings through the conveyance of textual apparitions, ephemeral and ambiguous themes and images which cast a confusing and somewhat dark shadow over everyday life and its most mundane tasks. The magic realist text is, itself, somewhat akin to a fantastical apparition which, even as readers recognize the magical imagination which informs it, detect its underlying realism. In essence, the magic realist have been able to achieve this effect, have succeeded in enveloping readers in an alternate world where myth and history co-mingle and the boundaries between fact and fiction are fluid, because they have determinedly sought the overcoming of textual limitations. Magic realists, in other words, and chief amongst them Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have contributed to the supplemental discourse that is magic realism through the infusion of a sense of textual magic in their own narratives.
Although the rationale behind the term `magic realism’ is evident from the above stated, it has been the subject of controversy and disagreement ever since it was first introduced by Franz Roh in the 1920s. Referencing a “counter-movement” in art wherein “the charm of an object was rediscovered” by expanding the parameters of realism,magic realism eventually found its home among the Latin American writers. Their almost instantaneous attraction to, and embrace of, magic realism was engendered by their conviction that they had finally found an artistic genre which allowed them the creative expression of the “marvellous reality” particular to their own culture, history and world view.
In order to better comprehend the implications of the asserted while, at the same time, contextualise magic realism vis-à-vis realism, it would be useful to define the latter in relation to the former. According to Roh, realism’s reliance on history was transformed into a dependency upon myth and legend by the magic realists; its mimetic style was replaced by both the fantastic and supplication; the familiarity which realism engenders among readers was displaced by de-familiarity within the context of magic realism; realism’s empirical and logical perspective was, almost violently, set aside for mysticism and magic; realism’s narrative style was replaced with meta-narration and its commitment to closure and reduction was exchange for open-ended expansiveness; realism’s naturalism became magic realism’s romanticism and its proclivity for framing the narrative within a rational cause and effect structure was replaced with imagination and negative capability. Indeed, the one appears the very antithesis of the other culminating in magic realism’s transforming “daily life into eerie forms.”
In tracing the rise of the genre in Latin America and, indeed, in defending its adoption by many of the continent’s creative artists, Flores assets that it was engendered by the “effort to account for a narrative that could simply be considered fantastic.” Magical realist narratives do “not depend either on natural or physical laws or on the unusual conception of the real in Western culture,” because it is a text “in which the relations between incidents, characters, and settings could not be based upon or justified by their status within the physical word or their normal acceptance by bourgeoisie mentality.” Even while conceding to the fantastic within this genre, Luis Leal, however, maintains a distinction between fantastical literature and magic realism:
“El realismo mágico no puede ser identificada ni con literatura fantástica ni con literatura sicológica, pero tampoco con el surrealismo o la literatura hermética que describe Ortega. Realismo mágico no se vale, como el sobrer-realismo, de motivos oníricos; tampoco desfigura la realidad o crea mundo imaginados, como lo bacín los escriben literatura fantástica o ciencia ficción; tampoco da importancia al análisis sicológico de los personajes, ya que no trata de explicar las motivaciones que los hacen actuar o que les prohíben expresarse.”
The variances in boundaries only serve to exemplify the difficulties inherent in defining magic realism. Indeed, unlike other genres, whether classicism, romanticism or realism, magic realism defies definitional delimitations, just as it does the persistent attempts of critics to pin it down.
Magic realism may be an autonomous and viable literary genre but the interrelationship between surrealism and magic realism has led to confusion regarding the boundaries between them, especially as magic realists have exhibited a proclivity towards the production of works which echo both. Alejo Carpentier, one of the leading Latin American magic realists, for example, can quite validly be categorised as a surrealist. In his insistence upon the “marvellous American reality,” Carpentier betrays the Latin American preference for an ontological outlook towards the textual enterprise, an outlook infused with both surrealism and magic realism. As Eschevvaria writes,
“The Latin American writer preferred to place himself on the far side of the borderline aesthetics described by Roh – on the side of the savage, of the believer, not on the ambiguous ground where miracles are justified by means of a reflexive act of perception, in which the consciousness of distance between the observer and the object, between the subject and that exotic other, generates estrangement and wonder.”
Some, as Carpentier, have interpreted this borderline as a shared and fluid boundary with surrealism while others, such as Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have interpreted it as an explicit demarcation between magic realism and surrealism. Indeed, while Marquez succumbs to the concept of magic realism as fundamentally expressive of the inherent Latin American fantasia and, within the context of his narratives, constantly investigates and interrogates the very notion of the `real,’ he departs from surrealism and, instead, embraces a super-realism which becomes his brand of magic realism.
As a magical realist who seeks the expression of the super-real, Marquez employs a wide array of supplemental strategies for the intensification of the textual forces which enter into the production of a narrative which totters between realism and fantasy; which expresses an unreal reality wherein fact becomes fiction and myth becomes history but which, paradoxically enough, allow the reader an identification of the real and draws him/her into the text by weaving a sense of familiarity, even as it repels him/her from the narrative through de-familiarity. Consequently, when Shaw writes of Del Amor y Otros Demonios that “even if it is true, as has insisted , that everything he has written is based on reality, we have to avoid jumping to conclusions about his treatment of .’ We should not judge the text for what we may see as the distortion of reality and the deconstruction of history but need to evaluate it on its own terms, terms set by Marquez and by the genre which he embraced. Illustrating the stated through an analytical discussion and textual analysis of Del Amor y Otros Demonios, with specific focus on the use of imagery, the extent to which Marquez creates a shadowy world of reality intermingled with fantasy, a world in which myth and history alternate complement and challenge one another, shall be exposed.
In immediate comparison to modern and post-modern literature wherein writers afford little time or space to the description of place, Gabriel Garcia Marquez devotes considerable time to the precise and articulate description of place. Indeed, critics have maintained that Marquez-ian place is the focal point of his literary productions insofar as they play a profound role, not in the delimitation of the story’s locus but, in the development of plot, theme, character and, most importantly, the creation of symbols and myths. Del Amor y Otros Demonios exemplifies this wherein the aforementioned are expressed within the matrix of a complex interplay of multivalent narrative elements where images of place coalesce with visual-spatial imagery to produce a complex matrix of symbolic space which simultaneously defines and borders the narrative’s ethical and affective values.
Telling the hi-story of the eighteenth century Marques de Casalduero’s twelve-year old daughter, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, Del Amor y Otros Demonios is, in essence, the story of confused familial and marital relations, distorted relations between man and religion and male and female. It is, to a degree, an other-worldly narrative which manages to deeply shake and disturb readers because, within the context of its repulsive defamiliarisation, it is familiar. The Marquez is described as follows:
“no daba señales de nada. Creció con signos ciertos de retraso mental, fue analfabeto hasta la edad de merecer, y no quería a nadie.”
His wife, who had chased him prior to marriage for the sole purpose of having a child is “para atraparlo por vida,”and later, “se había borrada del munda por el abuso de la miel fermentada y las tabletas de cacao.”Within the matrix of the described familial unit and the characters and relationships which dominate it, Sierva Maria is practically abandoned, and grows up in her father’s courtyard among his African slaves, speaker their language and worships their gods.
One day, while visiting the market, Sierva is very slightly nipped in the ankle by a rabid dog. The wound, nothing more than a scratch, heals but the local Catholic bishop persuades the Marquez that his daughter is, indeed, infected with rabbis, and that the former is nothing other than a dreaded manifestation of demonic possession. As don Torbio de Caceres y Virtudes tells the Marques, “entre las muchas astucias de demonio es muy frecuenté adoptar la apariencia de una enfermedad inmunda.”Sierva Maria is subsequently locked up in the convent, in preparation for her exorcism. There she meets the priest assigned to her exorcism and, unaccountably, the two fall in love. Their affair, which in typical Marquez-ian fashion, is never consummated, is discovered and culminates in padre DeLaura’s being defrocked, and subjected to a lifetime of service at the local leprosarium. Trapped in a straitjacket, a shaved, purged and emaciated Sierva Maria endures five days of exorcism but tragically dies just before the sixth. Within the context of the stultifying atmosphere of colonial Cartagena, described as ” sumergida en su marasama de siglos,” this fantastical, super-real tragedy unfolds in a triad of place, which arguably symbolize the trinity: the Casalduero mansion (the father), bishop Toribio de Caceres’ palace (bishopp as son of God, the earthly, and distorted, embodiment of Christ and his message); and the Convento de Santa Clara (the Holy Spirit) where, after enduring five days of intense torture (comparable to Christ’s scourging) Sierva Maria’s spirit is released.
Whereas the plot unfolds from without the Casalduero mansion, all of plot, theme and character development are inextricably linked to this particular locus. As readers discover, the mansion “había sido el orgullo de la cuidad hasta principios de siglo. Ahora estaba arruinada y lóbrega, y parecía en estado de mudanza por los grandes espacios vacíos y las muchas cosas fuera de lugar … todo estaba saturado por el relente opresivo de la desidia y las tinieblas.” The negative impression, communicated in the quoted passage, is later fortified through repeated references to the mansion as “la tenebrosa mansión”and “la casa sórdida” to name but two examples. In various passages and phrases, such as the quoted, the mansion is depicted, not as an inanimate structure but as a dark force which not only casts a sinister shadow on all within it but, on its surroundings as well. Indeed, by describing the house as sinister, sordid, tenebrous and lazy, to name but a few of the adjectives used, Marquez is effectively defying the reader’s classic conceptualisation of mansions as brick, stone and mortar and seeks a projection of the aforementioned as a sinister and autonomous entity whose tentacles spread to touch those around it with misfortune and ill-fate. When Sierva Maria ventures just outside the house and is slightly nipped by a dog, setting in motion the tragedy which follows, the reader finds himself slowly descending into a state of belief; he finds his protective armour of disbelief gradually dissipating and begins to question, although hesitatingly, whether indeed, the house commands a sinister presence and has the power to touch those in its vicinity with ill-fate. Marquez is slowly drawing us into his world of magical realism.
That the mansion commands those within and without it, that it influences their psychological development, shapes their personality and determines their state of mind, is affirmed and reinforced through multiple passages in the narrative. The way in which Bernarda and Ygnacio react to Servia Maria’s troubles is communicated through their choice of dwelling within the mansion itself. Ygancio, feeling that he is losing control of his family and life attempts to regain control through a failed attempt to assume control over the house, “ël marques … anuncio … su determinación de asumir con mano de Guerra las riendas de la casa.”His life, which is wildly slipping out of his locus of control, is symbolically represented by the house which is, or has, similarly fallen from beyond his control. Interestingly, however, in the quoted expression of his determination to regain control of his house, and by association, his life, military imagery is used, effectively depicting the house as a wild and fierce entity which has to be violently conquered. Indeed, the linkage between both his house and his life slipping from beyond his control, reaffirms earlier suspicions that the mansion is exerting a dark and mysterious influence over events and once the house is conquered, the Marquez life will be, once again, ordered. This is not an inanimate object but a dangerous and sinister entity. Hence, the Marquez reacts to his daughter’s troubles by inadvertently maintaining the mansion’s culpability, seemingly believing that the resolution of the first lies in assuming control over the second. Marquez is not only stretching the readers’ imagination but is challenging us to enter into the narrative’s superreal world and, in so doing, embrace Coleridge’s `willing suspension of disbelief.’
Bernarda similarly reacts. She initially attempts to distance herself from the troubling events which are unfolding by locking herself in