A Little History of Literature (35 page)

It is no accident that two of those mentioned above, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa, were active and highly controversial politicians (the latter came close to becoming prime minister of Peru); nor that Salman Rushdie should have written a novel which led to two nations breaking off diplomatic relations; nor that Grass should have become, when not writing fiction, a spokesman for post-war Germany who regularly, as he put it, ‘spat in the soup’.

The writer, proclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre in his influential manifesto
What is Literature
? (1947), should ‘engage’. Sartre saw that mission as best achieved through what, in the Soviet Union, was called ‘social realism’. Paradoxically, the contemporary fairy stories of the magic realists achieved it better.

The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was the first magic realist to achieve worldwide renown in the 1960s. It helped that he was an ardent anglophile with many friends in Britain and
America. His short, crisply-written stories were collected in 1962 in
Labyrinths
– and it is a telling title: we ‘lose’ ourselves in fiction, seeking, like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, some string to lead us out. These stories translated easily, which also helped.

Borges's method was to fuse surreal imagination with banal human situations and everyday characters. Take one of his most famous works, ‘Funes the Memorious’ (1942). It tells the story of a young rancher, Ireneo Funes, who after a fall from a horse finds that he can remember everything that happens and has ever happened to him, and can forget nothing. He has, he says, ‘more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world’. He retreats to a dark room, to be alone with his memory, and dies shortly after.

The story is based on a fantastic idea, yet, on another level, it's real. There are such things as super-memorisers. The technical term is ‘hyperthymesia’, or ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’ (HSAM). The condition was first clinically described and given a name by psychologists in 2006. Borges himself had a fabulous memory and was in his later years blind. And, for those with any sensitivity to language, ‘memorious’ (
memorioso
in Spanish) beats ‘HSAM’ every time.

No one knew quite what to call Borges's strange blends of fancy and fact when they first began circulating widely in the 1960s. But they were recognised as something different and exciting. So, too, was the pioneer magic realist Angela Carter, with works like
The Magic Toyshop
(1967), which merges a bleak post-war Britain with
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. Readers did not know what to make of such books, but they responded to a power in them.

Borges was not a political writer, but he created a set of tools for the magic realists who came after. Salman Rushdie enthusiastically borrowed Borgesian devices in the novel that made his name,
Midnight's Children
. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and went on to become a worldwide bestseller. The novel takes as its (literal) starting point 15 August 1947, when India became an independent country, partitioned from Pakistan – a fact announced to the nation in a radio broadcast by Prime Minister Nehru, as the stroke of
midnight approached. It was an event of epoch-making historical importance. Children born in that hour would be different Indians. Rushdie's novel fantasises a telepathic link that connects the children born in the crucial minutes into an ‘overmind’ – a mental collective. The gimmick, as Rushdie frankly acknowledged, is borrowed from science fiction – John Wyndham's
The Midwich Cuckoos
(1957) comes to mind. (Science fiction is a favourite plunder-box for Rushdie.) But
Midnight's Children
is not set in Midwich – a village as ‘unreal’ as Brigadoon. It is set in a very real place: the colony which, in little over half a century, would become a superpower. Rushdie, one notes, was born in India in 1947 although not, alas, in the magic hour.
Midnight's Children
has a powerful political charge at the heart of its fantasies, as does all the best magic realism. The author was sued, for libel, by the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, and the text was amended accordingly.

One of Rushdie's starting points is, interestingly, that most basic of literatures, the children's story. He has written an illuminating short book on the film version of L. Frank Baum's
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
– a film which, since childhood, he has loved.
The Wizard of Oz
opens, it will be remembered, in grainy black and white, on a poverty-stricken farm in Depression-era 1930s Kansas: very much the ‘real world’. After Dorothy is knocked unconscious by a tornado, she and her little dog Toto wake to find themselves in a Technicolor wonderland, inhabited by witches, talking scarecrows, tin-men and cowardly lions. In Dorothy's immortal phrase, ‘Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more’. It's a magic world. Magic and realism run together in the film, as they do in the story on which it is based.

The most controversial and provocative of Rushdie's novels,
The Satanic Verses
(1988), opens with a hijacked passenger plane, flying in from India, exploding in mid-air over England. Two of the passengers, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (one with Hindu associations, the other Muslim), fall 29,002 feet to earth. The first line of the novel is ‘To be born again … first you have to die’. They do not die. They land on the beach at Hastings, as did that other foreigner, William the Conqueror, in 1066. They
are promptly labelled ‘illegal immigrants’ (Mrs Thatcher – ‘Mrs Torture’ in the novel – has decreed a hard line on incomers like them). As the novel evolves, they take on the characters of the archangel Gibreel (Gabriel in the Bible) and Satan. The realism of the terrorist outrage blends, like a potion, into myth, history and religion. This, in a word, is its ‘magic’. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, did not, as had Mrs Gandhi, bother with libel suits. Nor was he any admirer of magic realism. In 1989 he issued a
fatwa
on Rushdie – a requirement that any truly faithful Muslim should assassinate the blasphemous novelist.

Günter Grass starts from a different place to get to a similar destination. He was born in 1927 and grew up in the Nazi era. When he began his career as an author he accepted as a given that German fiction had to start, after 1945, from a new baseline zero. ‘The past must be overcome’, said Grass. But without the past, what does a writer do? After Auschwitz, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno had declared, poetry was impossible. So too, it could be argued, was the novel – at least for a German writer. The postwar German writer of fiction could not call on the full orchestra supplied by literary tradition. How could one reach back to Goethe, Schiller and Thomas Mann, across what had happened between 1933 and 1945? Instead of the orchestra, all the author had, Grass proclaimed, was a tin drum. But as
The Tin Drum
depicts, it is an instrument that still has its magic powers. Despite Adorno's grim prophecy, Grass contrived to make great fiction – great magic realism. When he received his Nobel Prize in 1999, Grass presented himself not as a great author but a literary rat. Rats survive anything. Even world wars.

Grass wrote his magic realist works in the aftermath of a period of oppression. The style has also proved useful to writers producing their work while under oppression or censorship. Realism – telling it how it is – can be very dangerous in such circumstances. A case in point is José Saramago, who won his Nobel in 1998.

Saramago (1922–2010) was a Marxist who lived most of his life in Europe's longest-lasting fascist dictatorship, that in Portugal, which lasted until 1974. Even after the overthrow of the dictatorship
he was persecuted and ended his life in exile. Allegory – not saying exactly what he meant – was his preferred literary mode. It is, if not magic realism, as close as makes no difference. One of Saramago's finest works,
The Cave
(2000), fantasises an unnamed state dominated by a vast central building. It is a futuristic image of mature capitalism. In the basement of this building is the cave described by Plato, emblematic of the human condition in which chained spectators are destined to see nothing but shadows of the real world projected on the wall. Those unreliable, flickering images are all we have. And in that cave, for Saramago, is where the novelist must work.

As we saw earlier, the most powerful energies within magic realism have been generated by countries in Central and South America. Alongside Borges at the head of this group is Gabriel García Márquez and a novel which, alongside
Midnight's Children
, is regarded as the undisputed masterpiece of the genre:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967). It has a bafflingly shifting narrative, which moves discontinuously through historical time and space.

The novel is set in an imaginary small Colombian town called Macondo and is as much about Márquez's native country as
Midnight's Children
is about India,
The Tin Drum
is about Germany, or
The Cave
is about Portugal. Macondo contains all Colombia within itself: it is a ‘city of mirrors’. In a flickering series of scenes, we see flashes of the key moments in the country's history: civil wars, political conflict, the arrival of railways and industrialisation, the oppressive relationship with the USA. Everything is crystallised into a single glittering literary object. The novel is as politically engaged as literature can be, yet remains a supreme artifice.

Magic realism flared up, brilliantly, for a few decades at the turn of the century. It would seem now to have had its day, but history will record it as one of literature's great days.

CHAPTER
37

Republic of Letters

L
ITERATURE
W
ITHOUT
B
ORDERS

In the twenty-first century, it's safe to say, literature has become truly global. But what does ‘world literature’ mean if we break the term down? A number of things, as we shall see.

Let's consider, for example, a novel originating in one of the tiniest, most isolated literary communities on earth – Iceland. The first Viking inhabitants arrived on this barren, rocky, freezing island in the ninth century. The following two centuries are called by literary historians the ‘Saga Age’ (the word ‘saga’, meaning ‘told tale’, comes from the Old Norse that Icelanders spoke, and still speak). It's an astonishingly rich body of thirteenth-century heroic poems about the clans who built the country when they weren't, as they often were, feuding with each other heroically.

A century before Chaucer, Norse literature was one of the glories of world literature. But only a few thousand people were familiar with it, stored as it was in their little nation's collective memory and recited lovingly from generation to generation. In 1955, the novelist Halldór Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize (no writer from a smaller country had ever received one, the Committee said). The
award was made largely on the basis of Laxness's 1934 masterpiece, a novel called
Independent People
(a defiant description of Iceland, the reader discovers). It's the story of Bjartur, whose family have been subsistence farmers for ‘thirty generations’ – since the Saga Age. Bjartur is steeped in his nation's poems, and recites them to himself as he walks the lonely hills with his sheep. His way of life is being changed, forever, by the twentieth century, and an outside world which has suddenly taken an interest in this cold, remote, tiny place.

Bjartur's story is as bleak, heroic and tragic as any of his beloved sagas. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Laxness went out of his way to impress upon his listeners his fiction's connectedness, like a baby's umbilical cord, to the stories narrated by Old Norse
skalds
(poets) in mud huts. Now it was being read in translation all over the planet by millions, and, thanks to the prize, was now ‘world literature’. The conclusion one draws? Literature, if it is great or popular enough, and even when it is as deeply rooted in its own soil as Laxness's, is now no longer confined by national boundaries. It can leap over them.

The next example is from the largest literary community in the world, that of the People's Republic of China. Despite its vast size, its population of 1.35 billion, and its millennia-long civilisation, even the best-read Westerners would, most of them, be hard put to come up with the names of more than half a dozen great Chinese writers.

In 2012, the Nobel Prize in Literature was won by the Chinese writer Mo Yan. One of his more significant works is the novel
The Garlic Ballads
. It was first published a few months before the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989 and was promptly withdrawn from publication. The author has many times found himself in hot water with his country's authorities. ‘Mo Yan’ is a pen-name he has chosen for himself. It means ‘don't speak’.

The Garlic Ballads
is dedicated to the remote region where Mo Yan, born into a peasant farming family in 1955, grew up. The story is of a community – cultivating, as they have for thousands of years, a fertile valley – who are ordered by Party bureaucrats to
grow nothing but garlic. It's agricultural nonsense. An edict that, literally, stinks. They rebel and are brutally repressed. Garlic it must be, the Party decrees.