Magical Realism and Marxist Aesthetics: García Márquez in the Second World

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media IV: Transcultural Flows and their Socialist Valences: Different Scales of Second and Third World Exchange

Abstract

The remarkable success of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Cien años de
soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) marked a turning point in the international
circulation of literature originating from the Global South. In the West, the novel’s popularity
was tied to its use of a “magical realist” idiom, which for many became a signifier of an
exoticized image of Latin American culture. In the socialist East, however, critics took care to
distinguish García Márquez’s “epic” mode from the “decadent” magical realism of his
predecessors. In doing so, they engaged in an ongoing debate regarding revisionist approaches to
realism in Marxist aesthetics.

This paper examines the reception of Cien años de soledad in the Second World in the
context of competing conceptions of the nature of socialist realism. I argue that the translation
and critical reception of Latin American novels (and that of García Márquez’s bestseller in
particular) in the Second World contributed to an increasingly flexible definition of socialist
realism, culminating in Soviet critic Dmitrii Markov’s assertion that it was a “a historically open
system of artistic forms.”

Author

• Michael Lavery, U of Maryland, College Park