10 December 2015
Exorcising Magic Realism
Cold reality for a hot continent
by Neil Tidmarsh
The world-class literature of Latin America is characterised by a refusal to accept the true nature of reality. Novelists such as Mexico’s Juan Rulfo, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Jorge Louis Borges and many others have created worlds where the impossible, the fantastic and the irrational are presented as mundane and everyday. ‘Magic Realism’ wasn’t invented in South America (the term was coined by the German Franz Roh in 1925) and the roots of much of this work are nourished by Cervante’s “Don Quijote” back home in Spain – but it has been developed to its full potential in that continent, reaping more than one Nobel Prize for Literature in the process.
But a glance through the history of South America suggests that it isn’t only novelists who indulge in Magic Realism. There seems to be a strong vein of the surreal in all human activity south of the Rio Grande. And is it any wonder that mankind – finding himself in a new world of unimaginably vast jungles, huge mountain ranges, mighty rivers, ferocious wildlife, hallucinogenic plant life, volcanoes, deserts, abundant deposits of gold and silver and precious stones, all as incredible as anything his own imagination could dream up – should struggle to maintain any sense of reality there?
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the continent’s political history, from Cortez and Pisaro onwards (and even before – think of the sophisticated fantasies realised in the monuments of the Aztecs and Incas, and the denial of reality inherent in the collapse and destruction of their civilisations). Every one of the continent’s many dictators – Pinochet of Chile, Tejada of Bolivia, Videla and Galtieri of Argentina, to name but a few – was a dreamer who made his fantasies real through a cruel and ruthless force of will, only to be defeated in the long run by the everyday realities he had tried to deny.
In recent decades, left-wing presidents such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Cristina Kirchner of Argentina have pursued social justice and equality through nationalisation, high taxation, high welfare spending and protectionism, in denial of basic economic realities. In many instances, the subsequent intolerance of political opposition, the paranoid control of the media, the consolidation of political power through unconstitutional means, a relaxed attitude to human rights, and poor economic performance or even economic collapse, have all been signs of the stresses and strains generated when the President ignores basic and inconvenient realities such as one and one equals two.
And yet, could it be that South America is facing up to objective facts at last? It does seem that a cold blast of political and economic reality is sweeping through the continent at the moment.
Cuba has stagnated for fifty years under the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. The island has problems feeding itself, the economy has gone backwards, there has been no political opposition, free speech or free press. But in recent months a détente between Cuba and the USA has seen those countries opening embassies in each other’s capitals and engaging in dialogue and negotiation for the first time in half a century. A gradual evolution of political, economic and personal liberties in Cuba is sure to follow.
Since 2003, Argentina has stagnated under President Nestor Kirchner and his widow, President Cristina Kirchner. Their left-wing governments have pursued a course of nationalisation, protectionism and high taxation alongside high-spending welfare programs. The diminishing economic returns of the former have meant that the country can’t afford the latter. General elections last month presented the country with a choice between popular but unsustainable welfare programs, as represented by the left-wing candidate and Kirchner protégé Daniel Scioli, and the unpopular but realistic, and initially austere, free-market liberalism of the centre-right candidate, the ex-mayor of Buenas Aires Mauricio Macri. And Macri won.
Sixteen years of Socialist power in Venezuela, under President Hugo Chavez and his successor President Maduro, have more or less reduced it to a one-party state. The president controls parliament, the media, the Supreme Court, the army, the police, the paramilitary neighbourhood militias and various shady armed gangs, and tolerates no opposition. Venezuela is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil; but it produces virtually nothing but oil and the collapse in oil prices has hit it hard. The admirable social welfare programmes on which the President has spent the country’s oil revenues are no longer affordable. Venezuela now has the highest inflation rate in the world and a record murder rate, and suffers continual shortages of basic supplies.
This week’s elections in Venezuela were won by the opposition alliance MUD, which promises hard but necessary reform to the country’s politics and economy. They need to secure at least two-thirds of the 167 seats in the National Congress to have any chance of changing anything. The final results have not yet been announced, but it is clear that they have achieved even more than that, and are on line for a landslide victory.
It looks like Cuba, Argentina and Venezuela are set to exorcise magic realism from their political and economic lives at last. And there’s every possibility that this sense of reality could spread to the rest of the continent.
But let’s hope that the imaginations of Latin America’s novelists will nevertheless remain immune to this cold wind of mundane reality.
