Non-Realistic Fiction

For writers to give up this power in the quest for a more up-to-date kind of fiction  it is as if an engineer were to set out to develop a more sophisticated machine technology by first of all discarding the principle of electricity, on the grounds that it has been used ad nauseam for a hundred years.

Needless to say, the trend toward non-realistic fiction during the 1960s and 1970s provokes Wolfe's disdain. He maligns the Magical Realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez along with with such other presumed apostasies as Absurdism and Radical Disjunction, "in which plausible events and plausible characters were combined in fantastic or outlandish ways. . ." But is Wolfe correct in praising realism and ridiculing the fantastic? To refute his case, one need only look at two books by Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

The earlier book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is by far the more fantastic of the two. It is also more epic in scope, covering several generations of the Buendia family in the fictional Latin American village of Macondo. It chronicles th

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becomes political, the result can be prolonged and meaningless violence. Macondo is a place where three thousand people can be slaughtered without the populace noticing, and where its greatest war hero can lose all thirty-two of his military adventures. But whether the fantastic is used for tragic or satirical purposes, it is easy to see that Magical Realism is not, as Wolfe would have us believe, an oxymoron. The magical and the mundane commingle in Macondo. To leave out one or the other would simply be dishonest. But how would Wolfe answer this argument? Perhaps he would restate his conviction that it takes hard-core realism to provoke strong emotions in the reader: It was realism that created the "absorbing" or "gripping" quality that is peculiar to the novel, the quality that makes the reader feel that he has been pulled not only into the setting of the story but also into the minds and central nervous systems of the characters. Let us ignore Mr. Wolfe's ensuing (and rather weird) insinuation that nobody was ever moved to tears by a work of literature until realism came along. What about Garcia Marquez? Is it possible to really feel for the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude? Is their fantastic world
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Approximate Word count = 2247
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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