What if magical realism and Spanish-language surrealism and the duende were all parts of the same thing? We will call it Magical Hispanism, the idea that Spanish-language literature is deeper and more primitive. This cuts to the core of "ideologies of Hispanism" (Mabel Moraña). It is hard to do away with it, because some of us went into the field in search of it.
My most famous book was a salvo against magical hispanism, though I didn't formulate the phrase until this morning. Its emblematic figure is the mythical writer *Gabriel García Lorca* and the ever-cited Mark Hayes.
2 comments:
It's a great phrase. Another book for you to write. No joke!
Back to this. Magical hispanism is definitely a thing and I think it was what Flores was doing in that 1955 article on magical realism, too.
But here is the question: literature in Spanish *is* more interesting. What makes it so? I was in Comp Lit not intending to put Spanish first -- this was as an undergraduate -- but did because I thought the writers were better. I made this decision based on several people but they included Quevedo, Larra, Pérez Galdós, Carpentier and Cortázar. They just seemed better with language and less afraid to explore the dark, and also funnier, than writers in other languages. I only found a few non-Spanish language authors as interesting those first few quarters of college, Diderot and George Eliot were both very smart, I thought, but most of the really smart ones turned out to be in Spanish so I put this language first, against my original intentions and better judgment. What is it about them?
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