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A Real Shipwreck

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The Dead Baby Thing is So Over

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Are Gun Locks Like Aspirin Caps?

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Putin Together A Government

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The Dangers of Mandatory Gun Locks

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What Hath Ward Wrought?

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Leave E-commerce Alone

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E-mailgate

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Senator, You're No Ronald Reagan

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Against Microsoft: A Primer For Conservatives

3.22.00
Kessler Control

abriel García Márquez, the author of such imperishable monuments to tedium as A Hundred Years of Solitude (the title refers to what the experience of reading it feels like) and Love in the Time of Cholera, has now delivered himself of an opinion in the matter of Elián González. As translated by Edith Grossman and published on the op-ed page of Wednesday's New York Times, the views of this Nobel prize-winning novelist are scarcely to be distinguished from those of the crudest Castroite mouthpiece.

Indeed, an official propagandist would hardly have dared go so far as to write, as Señor García Márquez does, about Elián's "Miami captivity" by his own relations or that "the real shipwreck of Elián did not take place on the high seas, but when he set foot on American soil." Presented with that line, you'd think that a half-way competent Minister of Information would have sent it back for rewrite. How are we going to propagandize these people, he might have scribbled in the margin, if we simultaneously insult their intelligence with such drivel as this?

Ah, but he would have reckoned without the willingness of the New York Times and its most liberal-minded readers to lap up even the most grossly anti-American sludge and then to ask for more — at least when it issues from a Nobel prize-winner and apologist for Fidel Castro like García Márquez. Coming on the heels of the arrest of the former H. Rap Brown for killing a policeman this week, this stuff must have made the op-ed page editors think that the great days of the 1960s and revolutionary Amerika were come again.

If you came of age among those for whom it was a commonplace that America's was a "sick society," it must be easy to share Márquez's fear that little Elián's mental health has been endangered by his "cultural uprooting"; if you grew up burning flags and demonstrating against "the military" you might well share his horror at the idea of an alleged photograph, taken on the boy's sixth birthday in Miami last December, in which he is "wearing a combat helmet, surrounded by weapons and wrapped in the flag of the United States." But only a Nobel prize-winner could come up with such a breathtaking non-sequitur as that involved in jumping from the murder of a schoolchild in Michigan by another schoolchild to that business about "the real shipwreck."

"In other words. . ." writes García Márquez. In other words, a neglected kid in Michigan living in a crack house picks up a loaded gun and makes a shipwreck some 1,500 miles away no shipwreck. Unreal! And he makes the rescue and safe landing of the survivor of that non-shipwreck into — a shipwreck! Magic! This kind of thing, you may say, is the privilege of the artist. "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar," as Wallace Stevens wrote. It is certainly the privilege of García Márquez, who made his literary reputation by inventing something called "magic realism," which was just an easily-marketable way of saying that in his novels the magical became real and the real magical.

But our indulgence of the artist's quaint fancies sort of depends on our knowing that it is the blue guitar and not the red or the green one. So long as the "magic realism" is within the covers of a novel, however boring, we are unlikely to confuse it with serious social commentary. It is of course not surprising that someone who has got into the habit of writing magic realism has obviously come to believe that the "real" — whether "real" shipwrecks or "real" anything else — is what he says it is. But even a Nobel prize does not make it okay for the New York Times to retail his delusion as if it were, indeed, real.

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