Abstract
Magical realism has become a powerful signifier to express the uniqueness of Latin American culture produced from the 1940s onward. Magical Realism is also considered a postcolonial instrument to fight back against the traditional realism of Western literature. Some of the major themes developed by Latin American magical realism writers are the relationships between Eros and Thanatos, past and present, and memory and reality. The fascination with death (and love) leads to the creation of a magical space in which older age is perceived by some as decadence and by others as one from which to explore other (imagined or not) realities. Aging, death, and love are central themes in almost all writings by Gabriel García Márquez and some by Isabel Allende. This chapter offers a comparative study of the last novel written by García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), and The Japanese Lover (2015) by Allende. From a feminist perspective on aging, this chapter analyzes the magical realism deployed by both writers in order to explore older age and love/sexuality, older age and gender, memory and temporality.
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Notes
- 1.
Heike Hartung discusses Edward Said’s notion of late works of artists as a “form of exile.” She argues that there is a tension within the concept of late style “between timeliness and the untimely, between place and displacement, and between ending and open-endedness” (99). See also Hartung, this volume.
- 2.
Within the context of Latin America, magical realism and marvelous realism have been extensively debated. Marvelous realism, coined and represented first by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier in his 1949 novel, The Kingdom of This World, considers that the fantastic is part of our reality and cannot be explained but just accepted. Magical realism, with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez as its main referent, denotes a reality able to combine the uncanny, the fantastic, and the magical with the most normal daily life through narrative.
- 3.
The same idea is expressed by Nandy, Fanon, Bhabha (Location), and Ashcroft et al.
- 4.
For a detailed discussion on the misogynistic character of surrealism see Surrealism and Women, edited by Caws et al.
- 5.
Delgadina is a character in a Medieval Spanish ballad (called romance) who became part of Mexican folklore in the eighteenth century as well as the protagonist of a Mexican corrido about a younger woman who disobeys her father’s wish to be his wife. This story of incest ends with Delgadina’s death. Márquez’s story moves away from the tragic death of the young woman.
- 6.
It is interesting to note here the changes that occurred in the translation into English. While the original Spanish makes the distinction between “vejez” and “ancianidad,” the English version employs “old age” and “decrepitude” to distinguish between the common, socially accepted representations of older age: the third and fourth ages. The translator’s strong words point to hegemonic discourses that associate aging and ‘very old’ age with a particular “social imaginary” that represents, according to Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs “a terminal destination—a location stripped of the social and cultural capital that is most valued and which allows for the articulation of choice, autonomy, self-expression, and pleasure in later life” (123).
- 7.
Miguel de Cervantes and his portrait of Dulcinea del Toboso are clearly behind this description of Delgadina.
- 8.
This animalization or depiction of Delgadina in the form of a bull also occurs when the narrator talks about himself after looking in the mirror. In addition, the mirror is a key element in both novels that deserves an in-depth analysis elsewhere. For instance. Kathleen Woodward and Leni Marshall each address the second mirror stage, a stage that emphasizes the discordance between subjective aging/time and body aging; that is, the misrecognition of one’s own image.
- 9.
Among others, Cristina Ruiz Serrano and Lila McDowell Carlsen argue that most of ‘magical feminism’ is not subversive but rather merely reinscribes oppressive discourses and re-affirms alterities.
- 10.
Included in García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968).
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Medina, R. (2024). Magical Realism and Older Age: García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende’s The Japanese Lover (2015). In: Lipscomb, V.B., Swinnen, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50917-9_4
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