Modern Mind

Luis Borges (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Pablo Neruda (Chile), Octavio Paz (Mexico), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) – come from countries that are scarcely postcolonial these days, having achieved their independence, for the most part, in the nineteenth century. At that time Latin American writers were traditionally very politically minded, often seeking refuge, when they went too far, in Europe. The European wars put a stop to that form of exile, while the numerous revolutions and political coups in South America forced upon writers a new way of adjusting, politically. The presence of indigenous groups also gave them a keener appreciation of marginal members of society, even as they regarded themselves as part of European civilisation.
    Against this background, the school of magic realism grew and flourished as a primarily aesthetic response to political and social problems. At one stage, in the earlier part of the century, Latin American writers saw their role as trying to improve society. The aims of magic realism were more modest – to describe the universal human condition in its Latin American context in a way that could be understood all over the world. The appeal of Latin American literature, apart from the sheer writing power with which it is composed, is that it isambitious, more ambitious than much European literature, never losing sight of social ideals and going beyond the purely personal.
    Jorge Luis Borges, for example, developed a new form for what he wanted to say, a cross between an essay, containing real people, and a short story in which episodes are invented. Borges mixes philosophy and aesthetic ideas and plays games, the aim being ‘to upset the reader’s confidence in fact and reality.’ 12 In one story, for example, he invented an entire planet, Tlön, down to its playing cards and dialects, its religion and architecture. Is this planet as strange as Latin America? By emphasising the differences, he also brings home the common humanity.
    In Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel
The City and the Dogs
(1963), the main characters are cadets in a military academy, who band together to fight off the bullying older pupils. 13 This tussle becomes sordid, resulting in perversion and death, and is contrasted with the much more civilised worlds these cadets will have to inhabit once they leave the academy. As with Tlön and Macondo (see below), the academy is cut off from the mainstream, like Latin America itself, and the same is true yet again of
The Green House
, set in a brothel in Piura, a town surrounded by rain forest (another green house). 14 In this book, arguably Vargas Llosa’s best, the chronology changes even in mid-sentence to suggest the shifting nature of time and relationships, and the magical and unpredictable nature of existence. 15
    In 1967 Miguel Angel Asturias became the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize. But of greater significance that year was publication of ‘the most seamless achievement in Latin American fiction,’ Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s incomparable
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
16 This book proved so popular that at one stage it was being reprinted every week. It is not hard to see why. Márquez has been compared to Cervantes, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, and has himself admitted the influence of Faulkner, but that does no justice to his own originality. No other book has so successfully fulfilled Lionel Trilling’s plea for novels to get outside the familiar ways of thinking, to imagine other possibilities, other worlds. Márquez not only does this but on top of it all, he is extremely funny.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
exists on almost any level you care to name. 17 Márquez invents an imaginary town, Macondo, which is separated from everywhere else by marshes and impenetrable rain forest. The town is so cut off that the main character, Aureliano Buendía, makes discoveries for himself (like the fact that the earth is round) without realising that the rest of the world discovered this centuries ago. Morality is at a primitive stage in this world – people are allowed to marry their aunts, and the inhabitants haven’t even got round to naming all of the objects in their little ‘universe.’ The story traces the rise and fall of Macondo, its civil strife, political corruption, exotic violence. This narrative is held together by the fortunes of the Buendía family, though because different