When the epidemic of insomnia and forgetting arrives in Macondo, Aureliano hopes that by marking objects with their names (bridging the gap between signifiant and signifié as it were), he will help the townsfolk remember things. This works until they start forgetting how to read. It is only once Melquiades returns and provides his magic drink that their memory is restored. Both epidemics appear as natural phenomena within the Macondian universe and, far from seeming fantastical, are viewed by their victims as entirely prosaic occurences. By destroying the line between real and fantastic, Marquez gives us here a perfect example of magical realism, which was described in class as a manner of treating the extraordinary as if it were ordinary and hybridizing European rationality with the supposed 'magical' mentality of the Indian.
Having read Como agua para chocolate previously in the semester, I have the impression of meeting two key points in the life of a (now exhausted) literary mode, with Esquivel (who cashed in on magic realism´s appeal so thoroughly as to kill it) at one end and Marquez (whose formulations were so alluring as to inspire a generation of New and Third World writers) at the other. I am also reminded of Bolaños´s critique of Isabel Allende as a pseudo-writer in whose "scribbles" one finds imitations of Marquez. Reading the latter makes Esquivel and Allende appear even worse and confirms one of the criteria for bad literature we came up with in class: resorting to tried and tested formula to compensate for imaginative deficiency.
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