It’s not all about butterflies and levitation. Some people I know recoil at the mention of the fictional mode “magical realism”: perhaps it’s that word “magical”, with its connotations of twinkling tweeness. But a new TV adaptation of the sacred text of Latin American magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, shows that the genre can be earthier than it is often given credit for — and that “realism” is essential to the equation.
Published in 1967, García Márquez’s book is the sprawling chronicle of an apocryphal Colombian community, Macondo — and an origin myth for modern Colombia itself. A new Spanish-language Netflix series in two parts — with the eight episodes of part one premiering this month — tackles the novel’s intricacies with intoxicating brio, but also with commendable narrative and stylistic level-headedness. In the first four episodes supplied for preview, we don’t yet meet Mauricio Babilonia, the character who is permanently surrounded by a flight of yellow butterflies. But we do see a sack of bones that shift and clatter of their own accord, and the omnipresent ghost of a man killed by the Buendía family’s founding patriarch, José Arcadio: this haunting triggers the migration that will lead to the birth of Macondo.
The late literary critic Fredric Jameson thought the term “magical realism” should be done away with. For him, the Latin American strain of such fiction was grounded in the concrete complexities of political history. “No magic, no metaphor,” he said of One Hundred Years, “just a bit of grit caught in transcendence, a materialist sublime.” A similar view was expressed by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who in 1949 spoke of the “marvellous real”. Dismissing European surrealism as mere contrivance, Carpentier said that the truly marvellous could be observed directly in South American history and culture, in their contradictions, juxtapositions and extremities.