| Saturday, April 28, 2007 12:13AM | | | | Gritty vs. Magical Realism | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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The title for the event that I attended this afternoon, Gritty Realism, is a response to the literary movement that dominated Latin American literature in the mid twentieth century: magical realism. To emphasize this, the moderator, Francisco Goldman, started the event with two contrasting quotations. The first comes from the great Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essay: “What is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (a quotation which many critics interpret as being synonymous with magical realism). The second was uttered by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, whose novel The Savage Detectives was just published in English: “Latin America is the insane asylum of Europe, a land where despite its chaos and corruption, if you open your eyes wide, you can see the shadow of the Louvre.” So, Goldman asked, how did we go from magical realism to gritty realism?
Daniel Alarcon, the young yet immensely talented Peruvian/US writer, remarked that the demographic shift from the rural to the urban in Latin America changed the way that writers viewed their countries. Over the past two decades, there has been an influx of Latin Americans from the countryside—the jungles, the mountains, the deserts—who have migrated internally to the cities in search of employment. This shift inevitably led to an intensification of typically urban problems: overcrowding, segregation, and increases in violence. But did this demographic shift also lead to the shift from magical to gritty realism? Possibly. Or it could be that magical realism was never a cohesive or well-defined movement to begin with, that it was simply a label that critics applied to a diverse group of writers in order to categorize their works. It seems that the same thing may be occurring with the so-called “gritty realists.” After all, on the panel there’s a Peruvian/US novelist, a Mexican novelist/screenwriter (Guillermo Arriago, author of Babel and Amores Perros), a Brazilian novelist, and a Colombian novelist. Based on the selections they read today, I would be hesitant to lump them together into any cohesive movement.
But these writers don’t necessarily label themselves as gritty realists, nor did they seem to know what to make of the term. Indeed, the Colombian novelist Jorge Franco said that the reality in Colombia is so absurd that he often finds himself having to take out some of the grit in order to make it appear real in fiction. They all touched on the panoply of cultures swirling about any Latin American country now: German techno music, Hollywood movies, etc. This isn’t a recent phenomenon. When Guillermo Arriaga was growing up in Mexico in the 1960s, the so-called “traditional” Mexican mariachi music, with its emphasis on love or the rural life, didn’t speak to him. Instead, he found inspiration in the music of The Doors and Jimi Hendrix, even though he didn’t understand the lyrics fully. So perhaps the infusion of diverse cultures and great demographic shifts within contemporary Latin American countries are partially responsible for what we perceive as the more gritty fiction coming from Latin America. Or perhaps there’s no need to label this fiction at all; perhaps we should just call it what it is: great writing.
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