In a series of forty-five short essays that constitute his book translated into English under the title “Damn the Novel: When a Privileged Genre Prevails Over All Forms of Creative Writing,” Sudanese-born poet and essayist Amr Muneer Dahab denounces the privilege granted to the novel, the literary genre that is treated by publishers—and viewed by the public—as superior to all others and is virtually guaranteed marketability and profitability, to the detriment of others.

In this series of posts, the prolific author shares excerpts from the book.

This week: Chapter 17

The Illusion of Imagination in Novels

“ ‘One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. . . .’ When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that,” Garcia Marquez said. “If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”

That is what Gabriel García Marquez said to Paris Review magazine in an interview with Peter H. Stone. The words of the most prominent writer in Latin America were then translated into Arabic by Mohamed Aldhaba in a book entitled Date a Girl Who Loves Writing.

It was Franz Kafka who surprised Garcia Marquez that he was about to fall from his bed when he read the introductory sentence in “The Metamorphosis.”

Garcia Marquez talked about his experience at the University of Bogota where he got in touch with a group of friends who introduced him to contemporary writers: “So I immediately started writing short stories which were basically the fruit of my readings. By then, I had not found the magical connection between literature and life yet. The stories were published in the literary section of El Espectador (newspaper) in Bogota and they did have a certain success at the time—probably because nobody in Colombia was writing like I was doing. My stories were mostly dedicated to depicting social issues along with countryside life. I was even told that my early pieces of work were largely influenced by the works of James Joyce.”

Garcia Marquez’s statement above is so surprising because it uncovers the fact that the prestigious magic realism writer was not born with a stock of imagination, as readers taken by the sublime story of Remedios’s ascension to heaven in One Hundred Years of Solitude might have thought. “When I was writing about the journey of beautiful Remedios,” says Garcia Marquez, “it took me long time to make it believable. One day, I went to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to our house to do the laundry. She was putting the bed sheets outside to dry while winds were blowing. The woman was talking to the strong winds as if begging them not to take the sheets away. I thought thus I would help beautiful Remedios ascend if I make use of the sheets. This is how I did it and everyone believed me. The main concern of every writer is how to convince the readers. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

In the above interview, Gustavo Arellano considers the best of what Garcia Marquez has written, revealing the magic recipe that can make everything believable in literature (perhaps talking about the novel in specific). Arellano said, “There is a sort of journalistic style in the manner you narrate. When you describe a supernatural event, for example, you tend to expatiate on details showing the timeline minute by minute in a way that gives the event much credibility. Can we say this is due to your being a journalist?”

Garcia Marquez said, “Yes, that’s a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of trick.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems to address magical realism literature more than any other literary genre deploying imagination (fantasy). In fact, it is because there is no specific category of literature or narrative writing that relies only and exclusively on fantasy. In this context, Garcia Marquez says that “it always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” What Garcia Marquez said here applies not only to magical realism but also to all literary and artistic work founded on imagination (science fiction, detective fiction, horror, fantasy, and so on).

“The problem,” said Garcia Marquez about his fantastical writing, “is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” We come to the realization that fantasy, to a large extent, resides in the crude concepts, not in what novelists write in their stories—plots so tough to believe.

I wrote in “Wisdom Highway”  that “All that is imaginable can be reachable; and only what no instance of imagination can reach is unperceivable.” Thereby, we can say that there is nothing inimitable except for things that cannot be fantasized. In fact, I am not quite obsessed with confirming what Marquez stated about the importance of finding the thread(s) that connect(s) imaginary stories with reality (life) so as to make them plausible. I am much more concerned with what lies behind his statement: “The Caribbean reality portrays the wildest imagination,” while reality in general portrays the most slippery instances of imagination. Garcia Marquez has chosen the Caribbean reality simply because, after all, it was there where he was born and brought up. These are myths that specialists and writers exaggeratedly describe as being deeply allusive while those myths are no more than palpable instances of people’s life everywhere under the roof of this world. They are undoubtedly truths whose fantasy is rooted in the fact that they do not occur every day and to whomever.

Novel custodians hereby exaggerate in amplifying fantasy as a notion existing outside reality. They proclaim that their sacred genre can invent charm that no other creative writing (including Arabic lyric poetry and the essay) can challenge whenever the contest is about the concept of the literary work as a whole rather than the rhetorical images that weave through the web of the narrative in question. Fantasy, as we have seen above, in the words of the most famous novelists, is, above all, a sound (and indispensable) connection to real life.

Referring, once again, to my “Wisdom Highway,” we can conclude that we usually imagine things that might come true in another place and time, in the past, present, or future, either around where we live or even million light-years away. Therefore, narrative fiction (that is, the novel) has no divine secret to reign over the other creative speech and writing genres.