What is Language for Marquez?

I haven't read many of Marquez's work. Marquez's talent is better displayed in his works that are closer to 'Magical Realism'. However the objective of this post is to challenge the Magical Aspect of Marquez's writing; but from a different angle. By the end of this post you will see why 'Magical Realism' is a wrongly understood term to denote the insights of Marquez.

It should be a matter of concern for all the literary critics how to classify those phenomena in literary works which are beyond human comprehension. How can one categorise a phenomenon like a sleepless community which has been sketched in the beginning of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'? Calling it a magical phenomenon or something related to mysticism is only a shallow understanding. Depth of understanding such writings must be initiated from a different point.

I understand many of the magical elements in Marquez’s writings as having close affinity towards sleep (and dream as its essential by product), memory and meaning. The sketching of Macondo’s sleeplessness is a symbolic effort by the author to reveal his audience how he understands language and its function. For Marquez there is always a connection between sleep (dream) and memory. In the novel he says only if human can sleep he can have memory and can recall his past in any way. Sleeplessness of Macondo actually affects its language and memory. The people of Macondo had to write on objects their respective names. With sleeplessness all the relevance and ‘being’ of language was lost. Conversely, this also implies that human language has a function only in dream, or rather language functions as dream.

Blanchot and Writing

What is new with Blanchot’s writings? One of his important writings on which we can initiate this discussion is his short narrative, La folie du jour. I have read it in English, a translation by Lydia Davis. “Can such a story be narrated anywhere else other than in writing?” – this was my immediate response. Before reading it in full I had read a paper by Derrida in Acts of Literatrue. The paper was titled, Law of Genre. Derrida actually does a deconstruction of this story in order to state his point. Nothing but the text speaks in La folie du jour. And hence it was quite possible to find out how literature actually functions in tandem with the rules set by the discourse on literature as well as the rules set by the author. One needs to read this one story alone to understand many of the arguments put forward by Derrida in his texts.

Other blogs and sites of interest on Blanchot:


Long Sunday

Nature of Writing

Let me present some of the problems in which I am interested: What was the nature of writing before the emergence of the 'phonetic alphabet' (I've seen McLuhan using this term for the first time)? With the emergence of the 'phonetic alphabet' has language undergone any major change in the mediational role it is supposed to play in communication? If you say that even after the emergence of the 'phonetic alphabet' language continues to play the role that it had played earlier, then it should be inferred that 'writing' is only an activity that supplements speech.

Author and his 'self'

At what point can I begin a discussion on writing? Will it be the same starting point for a discussion on 'author'? Can the term 'author' ascribe the complete 'authorial function' of writing a novel, or any other book to a single self (or to two, three persons in case of co-authored books)? To begin with, let's listen to what Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentinian author, has to say about the relationship between the self and the author.