Friday 24 September 2010

Blackpowder tales

I am newly cast adrift from the student world, having handed in my dissertation just a few days ago. Restarting this blog is a part of the drive for self-improvement which I have begun since then. It is part of a commitment to write more, an undertaking which has been going surprisingly well for a couple of months now, in spite of the dissertation. Before then, having worked on it all day, the last thing I wanted to do was write more in the evenings. But I seem to be writing more all the time, which is excellent.

On my train journey yesterday I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In some ways it follows on from Hemingway. Both focus on slices of Hispanic history, Hemingway in Spain itself and Marquez in Columbia. Neither of these are histories or countries with which I’m familiar, apart from one term spent studying Spanish Mudejar architecture. Which I’ve mostly forgotten about. To me, this gives these books a mysterious romance. I was trying to pin this down yesterday. Both books are set on the cusp of modernity, but take place in benighted, dirt-poor settings. The result is a kind of cross-over between the antiquity of an unknown land and the magical intrusions of modernity – the maquina which is so vital to Robert Jordan and the rebels, the magnets and alchemical devices which the gypsies hawk to Jose Arcadio Buendia. This is a land where one can gun down a hundred men with a clanking, modern weapon but still unearth a rusted suit of conquistador armour.

I half-remember a line from an old computer game (I know, I know) which sums this up for me. It was something about a sorcerer using some new form of dark magic named ‘science.’ Guns, magnets, alchemy. The first block of ice that Jose had ever seen. These are the products of this dark new thing called science, at once modern and ancient. This is what has enchanted me about these two books.

Marquez’s ability to evoke antiquity and mystery in a few words reminds me of Borges. ‘The gypsy wrapped him in the frightful climate of his look before he turned into a puddle of pestilential and smoking pitch over which the echo of his reply still floated: “Melquiades is dead.”’ The magic is incredible. I think there is a genre at work in a lot of these books that I really enjoy. I think I’ll call this genre Historical Magical Realism. Perhaps I’ll write its manifesto sometime, but essentially it’s about invoking magic, old magic, and all the associations we make with past epochs. For me, the rusty suit of armour and the conquistador’s muskets are ancient and romantic and evocative. I find this in Hemingway and Marquez, in Borges, in Don Quixote and Blood Meridian. It is almost a saturation of the imagination, and for me it can be evoked by these few props.

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