by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Galeano and Grass: Magic Realism’s Antipodean Masters
Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the
same day. So did Fela Anikulapo
Kuti and Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan – or so it seemed when WKCR’s
hundred-hour memorial broadcast for the one was followed immediately by the hundred-hour memorial broadcast for the other. (They died two weeks apart in August 1997.)
And yesterday came the news that Günter Grass is dead, and the news that Eduardo Galeano is dead.
Truly, these two were magic realism’s antipodian pair, set at opposite poles on the same literary-political line. Grass bent the laws of nature so as to record the way his countrymen (and, it turned out, he himself) had done so in the Nazi years. He turned German history back on itself, insisting that his big and strong and ever-present country should make itself small in the way of his protagonist Oskar Mazerath, who refused to grow as an act of promordial protest against the adult world and its ways. He was an author of Big Books and a public figure as visible as any premier. Success came early; the Nobel came late and was asterisked by the news that he had been in the SS.
And Galeano? Galeano bent the laws of nature so as to record the way the nature of life in his region was scanted or left out when the laws were too strictly applied. He faced Latin American history outward, making the “open veins of Latin America” the veins of human civilization and making, out of several hundred miniatures, the great historical epic of the Americas that is the Memory of Fire trilogy. A Uruguayan, he was a citizen of the Spanish language; any place where Spanish was spoken was his. Great as he was, he was outswaggered by García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and Fuentes and by Bolaño, who swaggers still from beyond the grave. Hugo Chavez, presenting Galeano’s Open Veins to President Obama, made it a bestseller all over again, but the Nobel never came.
Grass’s work, crucial as it is – and it is crucial to my own work just now – feels finished, while Galeano’s feels like work in progress, the veins still open.
