A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Another British West Indian author, V.S. Naipaul, expressed in his Nobel Prize-winner's speech the complexities of a post-colonial writer like himself. His grandfather's generation had been brought to Trinidad, from India (then a British dominion), as ‘indentured labour’, mainly as office workers. Naipaul grew up ‘over the bones of the island's exterminated “aborigines”’, and alongside the descendants of black slaves from Africa. Outstandingly clever, he won a scholarship to Oxford University and made his ‘home’ in England as what he called a ‘mimic man’: English, but not English; Indian, but not Indian; Trinidadian, but not Trinidadian.

  The British live in a post-colonial era, but have colonial ‘ownerships’ been fully abolished? Not everyone would agree they have. The greatest Nigerian novelist, many would claim, is Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). He was christened Albert Achebe, after Queen Victoria's consort. His first published novel – still the work for which he is famous worldwide – is Things Fall Apart (the title is a quotation from the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats). It first came out in 1958, in Britain. His later works were all first published in Britain or the USA. In later life, Achebe's main employment was in American universities. Derek Walcott, the most distinguished of post-colonial poets, was also employed in a prestigious American university for most of his career. Can fiction – or poetry – so rooted, or authors so salaried, be truly independent? Or are there still colonial shackles clanking in the background?

  The USA is where the most interesting literature centred on racial themes is happening. The classic text is Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). Unlike his fellow African Americans, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Ellison wrote not realism but allegory; his fiction is playful in method, but deadly serious in content. He initially planned a short novel and in 1947 published what remains a core element of Invisible Man, ‘A Battle Royal’, in which, for the entertainment of jeering white men, black men are stripped naked, blindfolded, and made to fight each other in a boxing ring for sham prizes. As eventually published, the novel hinges on another conceit: ‘I am an invisible man … I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.’ The USA, the novel says, has ‘solved’ its racial problem by wilful blindness.

  Invisible Man is a jazz novel. Ellison loved the improvisational freedom of the great African American art form – one of the few freedoms his people could lay claim to. Louis Armstrong's ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?’ haunts the novel like a theme song. As its lyrics lament:

  I'm white … inside … but, that don't help my case

  'cause I … can't hide … what is in my face.

  Toni Morrison, America's greatest living African American novelist (many would say ‘American novelist’ tout court) is similarly inspired by what is called the one original art to come out of the USA. Discussing her 1992 novel, Jazz, she explained:

  the jazzlike structure wasn't a secondary thing for me – it was the raison d'être of the book … I thought of myself as like the jazz musician.

  The jazz Ellison loved was ‘traditional’ New Orleans jazz (hence Louis Armstrong). He disliked Swing and ‘modern’ jazz, thinking them ‘too white’. The jazz that most influences Morrison is the ultra-improvisational, post-modernist Free-Form jazz that Ornette Coleman pioneered in the 1960s.

  In general terms one could argue that in Britain (in its literature at least) there has been a kind of ‘blending’ – a dissolving of racial difference. Toni Morrison has insisted on maintaining angry difference. This anger is at its hottest in her early novel, Tar Baby (1981), in which a character concludes: ‘White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.’ At a conference at that time, Morrison herself roundly declared: ‘At no moment in my life have I ever felt as though I was an American. At no moment.’ In later years, particularly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, her comments about race have softened, but never to the point that she regards herself as ‘American’ rather than ‘African American’. An angry sense of racial separation burns in all her work.

  The endeavour of most politicians and, indeed, most citizens in the USA is to bring about a condition of enlightened colour-blindness. To rise, that is, above the racial division which has caused the country so much pain, and historically cost it so much blood. American literature and its figurehead writer, Morrison, have declined to buy into this. They have used, and still use, the division to explore black identity creatively. To dive into it, that is, rather than float above and forget it.

  We find a distinct African American presence nowadays in such literary enclaves as ‘private eye’ detective fiction. The career of Walter Mosley's black hero, Easy Rawlins, is chronicled in a series of novels, beginning with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), which, in their background, chronicle the history of race relations in Los Angeles. Chester Himes did the same for New York, with his Harlem Cycle series of the 1950s and 1960s (which he began writing in prison, and concluded in exile, in Paris). Samuel R. Delany, an African American science fiction writer, has brought a new imput to that genre. There are those who would argue (and I am one) that there is a strong vein of Whitmanesque free verse (Chapter 21) in the blues and, more recently, rap, both of which are African American preserves. In short, there has been no blending out, and American literature is the stronger for its many colours.

  What, to sum up, is literature's role in the complex relationships of race, society and history? There is no simple answer. But we can borrow the heartfelt cry in Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman: ‘attention must be paid’. Where race is concerned, literature is paying attention and we can be grateful for it. But it does not always make for comfortable reading.

  CHAPTER 36

  Magical Realisms

  BORGES, GRASS, RUSHDIE AND MáRQUEZ

  The term ‘magic realism’ became current in the 1980s. Suddenly everyone seemed to be knowingly dropping it into conversations about the latest thing in literature. What, though, does this odd term mean? On the face of it, ‘magic realism’ looks like an oxymoron, jamming together two traditionally irreconcilable elements. A novel is ‘fictional’ (it never happened) but it is also ‘true’ – that is, ‘realistic’. The mass of British fiction, from Defoe, through what has been called the ‘Great Tradition’ (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence), on past Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, to Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt, has tended towards literary realism. So too in the USA, where the mainstream followed Ernest Hemingway's injunction to present life ‘as it is’. There were, of course, writers of fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, but they resided in a quite separate compartment. Gormenghast Castle is a very different kind of structure from, say, the country houses of Brideshead or Howards End. Magic realism was a new literary hybrid.

  Varieties of magic realism had in fact been around for almost half a century before the 1980s. One can see a number of works playing with the idea in an experimental way on the fringes of literature and art. But it was not until the twentieth century was drawing to a close that magic realism took off as a powerful literary genre.

  Three reasons can be suggested. One was the recognition in Europe and America that new and exciting things were happening in South American hispanic literature, with Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa – writers whose international fame, as translation made its impact worldwide, created what was called ‘the Latin American Boom’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Writers like Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie also recruited mass readerships in Europe. A clear precursor to the boom was Grass's novel The Tin Drum (1959); with the publication of Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), magic realism became mainstream and a literary style without frontiers. The third element that helped make magic realism a style for the time was that it allowed writers, despite the extravagant unreality of their narratives (the ‘magic’ ingredient), to make what were, in fact, important political interventions. To be players, that i
s, not merely in literature, but in public life and geopolitical affairs. They came into the public arena, as it were, by a side door that no one was guarding.

  It is no accident that two of those mentioned above, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa, were active and highly controversial politicians (the latter came close to becoming prime minister of Peru); nor that Salman Rushdie should have written a novel which led to two nations breaking off diplomatic relations; nor that Grass should have become, when not writing fiction, a spokesman for post-war Germany who regularly, as he put it, ‘spat in the soup’.

  The writer, proclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre in his influential manifesto What is Literature? (1947), should ‘engage’. Sartre saw that mission as best achieved through what, in the Soviet Union, was called ‘social realism’. Paradoxically, the contemporary fairy stories of the magic realists achieved it better.

  The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was the first magic realist to achieve worldwide renown in the 1960s. It helped that he was an ardent anglophile with many friends in Britain and America. His short, crisply-written stories were collected in 1962 in Labyrinths – and it is a telling title: we ‘lose’ ourselves in fiction, seeking, like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, some string to lead us out. These stories translated easily, which also helped.

  Borges's method was to fuse surreal imagination with banal human situations and everyday characters. Take one of his most famous works, ‘Funes the Memorious’ (1942). It tells the story of a young rancher, Ireneo Funes, who after a fall from a horse finds that he can remember everything that happens and has ever happened to him, and can forget nothing. He has, he says, ‘more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world’. He retreats to a dark room, to be alone with his memory, and dies shortly after.

  The story is based on a fantastic idea, yet, on another level, it's real. There are such things as super-memorisers. The technical term is ‘hyperthymesia’, or ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’ (HSAM). The condition was first clinically described and given a name by psychologists in 2006. Borges himself had a fabulous memory and was in his later years blind. And, for those with any sensitivity to language, ‘memorious’ (memorioso in Spanish) beats ‘HSAM’ every time.

  No one knew quite what to call Borges's strange blends of fancy and fact when they first began circulating widely in the 1960s. But they were recognised as something different and exciting. So, too, was the pioneer magic realist Angela Carter, with works like The Magic Toyshop (1967), which merges a bleak post-war Britain with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Readers did not know what to make of such books, but they responded to a power in them.

  Borges was not a political writer, but he created a set of tools for the magic realists who came after. Salman Rushdie enthusiastically borrowed Borgesian devices in the novel that made his name, Midnight's Children. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and went on to become a worldwide bestseller. The novel takes as its (literal) starting point 15 August 1947, when India became an independent country, partitioned from Pakistan – a fact announced to the nation in a radio broadcast by Prime Minister Nehru, as the stroke of midnight approached. It was an event of epoch-making historical importance. Children born in that hour would be different Indians. Rushdie's novel fantasises a telepathic link that connects the children born in the crucial minutes into an ‘overmind’ – a mental collective. The gimmick, as Rushdie frankly acknowledged, is borrowed from science fiction – John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) comes to mind. (Science fiction is a favourite plunder-box for Rushdie.) But Midnight's Children is not set in Midwich – a village as ‘unreal’ as Brigadoon. It is set in a very real place: the colony which, in little over half a century, would become a superpower. Rushdie, one notes, was born in India in 1947 although not, alas, in the magic hour. Midnight's Children has a powerful political charge at the heart of its fantasies, as does all the best magic realism. The author was sued, for libel, by the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, and the text was amended accordingly.

  One of Rushdie's starting points is, interestingly, that most basic of literatures, the children's story. He has written an illuminating short book on the film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – a film which, since childhood, he has loved. The Wizard of Oz opens, it will be remembered, in grainy black and white, on a poverty-stricken farm in Depression-era 1930s Kansas: very much the ‘real world’. After Dorothy is knocked unconscious by a tornado, she and her little dog Toto wake to find themselves in a Technicolor wonderland, inhabited by witches, talking scarecrows, tin-men and cowardly lions. In Dorothy's immortal phrase, ‘Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more’. It's a magic world. Magic and realism run together in the film, as they do in the story on which it is based.

  The most controversial and provocative of Rushdie's novels, The Satanic Verses (1988), opens with a hijacked passenger plane, flying in from India, exploding in mid-air over England. Two of the passengers, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (one with Hindu associations, the other Muslim), fall 29,002 feet to earth. The first line of the novel is ‘To be born again … first you have to die’. They do not die. They land on the beach at Hastings, as did that other foreigner, William the Conqueror, in 1066. They are promptly labelled ‘illegal immigrants’ (Mrs Thatcher – ‘Mrs Torture’ in the novel – has decreed a hard line on incomers like them). As the novel evolves, they take on the characters of the archangel Gibreel (Gabriel in the Bible) and Satan. The realism of the terrorist outrage blends, like a potion, into myth, history and religion. This, in a word, is its ‘magic’. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, did not, as had Mrs Gandhi, bother with libel suits. Nor was he any admirer of magic realism. In 1989 he issued a fatwa on Rushdie – a requirement that any truly faithful Muslim should assassinate the blasphemous novelist.

  Günter Grass starts from a different place to get to a similar destination. He was born in 1927 and grew up in the Nazi era. When he began his career as an author he accepted as a given that German fiction had to start, after 1945, from a new baseline zero. ‘The past must be overcome’, said Grass. But without the past, what does a writer do? After Auschwitz, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno had declared, poetry was impossible. So too, it could be argued, was the novel – at least for a German writer. The postwar German writer of fiction could not call on the full orchestra supplied by literary tradition. How could one reach back to Goethe, Schiller and Thomas Mann, across what had happened between 1933 and 1945? Instead of the orchestra, all the author had, Grass proclaimed, was a tin drum. But as The Tin Drum depicts, it is an instrument that still has its magic powers. Despite Adorno's grim prophecy, Grass contrived to make great fiction – great magic realism. When he received his Nobel Prize in 1999, Grass presented himself not as a great author but a literary rat. Rats survive anything. Even world wars.

  Grass wrote his magic realist works in the aftermath of a period of oppression. The style has also proved useful to writers producing their work while under oppression or censorship. Realism – telling it how it is – can be very dangerous in such circumstances. A case in point is José Saramago, who won his Nobel in 1998.

  Saramago (1922–2010) was a Marxist who lived most of his life in Europe's longest-lasting fascist dictatorship, that in Portugal, which lasted until 1974. Even after the overthrow of the dictatorship he was persecuted and ended his life in exile. Allegory – not saying exactly what he meant – was his preferred literary mode. It is, if not magic realism, as close as makes no difference. One of Saramago's finest works, The Cave (2000), fantasises an unnamed state dominated by a vast central building. It is a futuristic image of mature capitalism. In the basement of this building is the cave described by Plato, emblematic of the human condition in which chained spectators are destined to see nothing but shadows of the real world projected on the wall. Those unreliable, flickering images are all we have. And in that cave, for Saramago, is where the novelist must work.

&nb
sp; As we saw earlier, the most powerful energies within magic realism have been generated by countries in Central and South America. Alongside Borges at the head of this group is Gabriel García Márquez and a novel which, alongside Midnight's Children, is regarded as the undisputed masterpiece of the genre: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). It has a bafflingly shifting narrative, which moves discontinuously through historical time and space.

  The novel is set in an imaginary small Colombian town called Macondo and is as much about Márquez's native country as Midnight's Children is about India, The Tin Drum is about Germany, or The Cave is about Portugal. Macondo contains all Colombia within itself: it is a ‘city of mirrors’. In a flickering series of scenes, we see flashes of the key moments in the country's history: civil wars, political conflict, the arrival of railways and industrialisation, the oppressive relationship with the USA. Everything is crystallised into a single glittering literary object. The novel is as politically engaged as literature can be, yet remains a supreme artifice.