http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html
Marquez had called for Europeans to stop seeing Latin America as a land of illegitimate cousins and had asked for greater global integration of the arts.
IV. MAGICAL REALISM
"The term "magical realism' was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, who considered magical realism an art category. To him, it was a way of representing and responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality. In Latin America in the 1940s, magical realism was a way to express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature." However, observing the supernatural stories of Edgar Allen Poe in the mid- 19th Century, for example, one recognizes that the mode or genre is not truly new. However, the humor and well-developed-hybridism of the New World cultures enabled a native flavor to dominate in Latin American modern and post-colonial literature to an ever greater degree over the last six decades.
This world of magical realism, fully supported in the 1980s and 1990s by the Nobel selection choices, is not a world without terror as wars have remained with us all through this current age. However, terror is attacked by time and irony by author with a thoughtful reader encouraged to play along with the multi-layered narrations in such fiction. As Lindsay Moore has noted, in magical realism, "the idea of terror [in society and culture] overwhelms the possibility of rejuvenation in magical realism." Moore adds that "prominent authoritarian figures, such as soldiers, police, and sadists all have the power to torture and kill. Time is another conspicuous theme, which is frequently displayed as cyclical instead of linear. What happens once is destined to happen again. Characters rarely, if ever, realize the promise of a better life. As a result, irony and paradox stay rooted in recurring social and political aspirations."
Especially in Latin American literature, the role of carnivals, dances or balls areportrayed with a special mission to the literary community. This is why one "particularly complex theme in magical realism is the carnivalesque." According to Moore ,"The carnivalesque [in magical realism] is carnival's reflection in literature." She adds thatthe "concept of carnival celebrates the body, the senses, and the relations between humans. "Carnival' refers to cultural manifestations that take place in different related forms in North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean , often including particular language and dress, as well as the presence of a madman, fool, or clown. In addition, people organize and participate in dance, music, or theater. Latin American magical realists, for instance, explore the bright life-affirming side of the carnivalesque. The reality of revolution, and continual political upheaval in certain parts of the world, also relates to magical realism."
V. MISSION OF A LAUREATE
So, starting with William Faulkner's selection in 1949, the idea of time, carnival and decades of family history have been paraded before Nobel Literary audiences. In Faulkner, who focused on the decline and disintegration in the South, we observe a similar "[t]heme and technique - the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake , a young girl from a distinguished southern family."
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html
A generation later, one African American author, Toni Morrison began to write and her mode of tale-telling often clearly can be labeled as a North American form of magical realism, with works like Sula, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved, a ghost story, to her name. In her 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, Morrison gave the audience one perspective on her narration-style by talking about a clairvoyant old women-- much like the matriarch Ursula in the house of the Buendia household of Macondo as told in Marquez's award-winning novel of over a decade earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
Morrison begins her award winning speech by noting, --Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."
Morrison interjected into her own narration to the Nobel audience the warning that this tale was simply her own version of a retold tale: "In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.'"
Morrison continued "She [the old women] does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?' Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know', she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.'"
In short, there may be a repetition as such in any tale we tell or retell using our own memory and narrative skills. This is true whether we read ghost stories or of supernatural events in the Japanese Yasunari Kawabata's (1968) Thousand Cranes, Colombian Marquez's Solitude (1982), Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz's (1988) many short stories , or the North American Morrison (1993) in her Beloved, we are hearing different ghost stories framed in different ways, but the magical imagery of fiction meeting realistic narration is ever-present.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1988/index.html
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