Literary Master 1983

Chapter 16 The prophecy cast by Yu Qie
[Indians once believed that there was no absolute boundary between life and death, and that death was another kind of "life". Life could be extended in disability, and that the dead also had emotions, and the ability to hear, speak, remember, and think. The Aztecs believed in the immortality of the soul and in various natural gods such as the sun god. Indians also believed that all things have spirits, and advocated harmony between man and nature. Flowers, trees, birds, beasts, rivers, and mountains all have their own lives and characteristics, and play their own roles.]

[When half of Latin America entered modern civilization, cities, electric lights, astronauts, and pet dogs appeared in this unchanging tropical rainforest, and of course a large number of creators with literary literacy. However, their cultural identity flew forward together to the myths and legends that are even older than the tropical rainforest. This constitutes the social foundation for the outbreak of so-called magical realism.]

[Obviously, we can say that there is no real magical realism, but only realism rooted in history. To be more precise, what we are discussing today is the realism that is unique to Latin America.]

[Therefore, when we quote the term "magical realism" from the West, we unconsciously become one of the others who discriminate against and seek novelty in Latin America's painful history, and once again push the restless souls of Latin America into endless loneliness.]

Influenced by the craze over Marquez's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the relative closure of the domestic and world literary circles at that time, the domestic understanding of magical realism is a narrow summary of Marquez's personal narrative style.

That is, Marquez is equal to magical realism, and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is equal to the highest achievement of magical realism.

The former is definitely not true.

Marquez simply described his own experiences truthfully and recreated them in an artistic way. The key to this creative technique of "turning fantasy into reality without losing its reality" lies in "without losing reality".

Without losing authenticity!

There is no problem that domestic creators can draw inspiration from his genius creative techniques, just as Guan Moye couldn't help but say after reading the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
"Damn it, can a novel be written like this?!"

However, Latin America’s history of suffering is not something that domestic creators should imitate. This is not to say that we have no suffering, but that such one-sided imitation tends to exaggerate the suffering or even fabricate it.

Then, "magic" was used to justify this creation.

The third factor that supports my conclusion is the introduction of the numerous crimes committed by the United Fruit Company.

[In the 1950s, the United Fruit Company became the world's largest banana conglomerate. At its peak, the United Fruit Company's rule extended to the entire Central America, with tentacles covering Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba and other countries. It became a symbol of the "Banana Republic" and had a huge impact on the economies of Central American countries...]

A US Secretary of State later said, when talking about the country's foreign policy, "We steal, we lie, we cheat, and that is the glory of America." It is conceivable that in an earlier era, the United Fruit Company would have been more straightforward.

This is indeed the case. The "Banana Republic" plundered the land of Latin America, controlled the infrastructure, abused and exploited workers, and interfered in the internal affairs of small countries...Against this background, the "two hundred carriages and three thousand workers' bodies dumped into the sea like rotten bananas" described in Marquez's novel came from what Marquez heard as a child. He remembered it all his life and spent his whole life trying to verify the truth of this matter and could not let it go.

In real history, in 1928, workers at United Fruit plantations in Colombia went on strike to demand better treatment, but were suppressed by the Colombian military government with machine guns shooting thousands of people.

However, this inhumane thing is just one of the crimes of the Banana Republic. If it weren't for the stubborn Marquez who insisted on verifying it, wrote it in his novel and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I'm afraid this incident would have just passed by and become one of the countless historical dust.

The research manuscript was completed quickly.

The first person to look was Alai.

He exclaimed, "Yu Che, you can be an expert in Latin American literature!"

"The study you wrote is more comprehensive than any other study of Latin American literature I have ever seen... I deleted the part about One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it can be used as a general introduction to Latin American literature for readers who like Latin American literature."

Yu Qie's research manuscript is valuable in that it considers the source of Latin American literary creation from the social basis, which is the specialty of a large number of researchers who later became famous, and even undergraduates can do it. In the 1980s, domestic research was mainly pure literary research - not because people could not think of it, but because there were no such conditions.

This kind of research method can only be widely used in the era of information explosion, when the cost of collecting and retrieving information is already very low. Of course, it will not be surprising by then.

The study of the cotangent also has a key omission, which everyone has seen. The omission was pointed out by the second person who saw it, Ma Shi Tu.

He said, "Yu Qie, I totally believe this kind of thing happened. What have I not seen? However, everything must be based on evidence. If you want to gain everyone's approval, only when the facts in the book are revealed can you get absolute justice! Then, everything will be closed for you, but this is very difficult."

Of course it is difficult. If it isn’t difficult, how come Marquez himself is so confused?

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez described a "parchment scroll". At the end of this scroll, he wrote a prophecy that influenced the entire book:

“This city of mirrors – or mirages – will be wiped out by a hurricane when Aureliano Babylon has translated all the parchments, and will be eradicated from the memory of the world, and everything contained in the parchments will never be repeated again.”

When Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was pessimistic.

He emphasized that the town of Macondo and the family in it in the book will be completely erased from people's memory, and even its ruins will be taken away by the hurricane.

Because people's understanding of history is often based on memory or archaeology. When neither of them can confirm their existence, even objective things that did exist will be erased from history and regarded as non-existent.

Was this influenced by the “non-existent” massacre in 1928, the year Márquez was born?

When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, Márquez was already an old man.

How long does a person have to walk in his life?

Throughout his life, Marquez constantly pursued the truth of the matter, but he only got deceptive fragments, whether it was the official archives of Colombia or foreign newspaper materials. The truth, like Rashomon, kept fooling him. He could not see the whole picture of the matter, so he pessimistically wrote this fatalistic prophecy.

"It will be eradicated from the memory of the world..."

Yu Qi certainly didn't believe in fatalism, he knew that the truth would eventually come out.

So at the end of the research manuscript, Yu Qie also made his own prediction:

"I believe that the protagonist José Arcadio's experience of 'massacre of 3,000 workers' has a real historical prototype. However, just because of this key plot, this reality should not be labeled as 'magical realism'."

"On the contrary, the facts will fully prove that there has never been magical realism, only realism."

(End of this chapter)