Khasak and Macondo: Magical Realism Foretold

I just read O V Vijayan's 'The Legend of Khasak' and one thing that struck me was his style of narration and story formation which seemed quite close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. According to me he is the Indian Marquez not belittling him. Both wrote their masterpieces at the same time but they hadn't heard of each others work.  Both 'The Legend of Khasak' and 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' has narrative styles which can be tagged as 'magical realism'. In the most simple interpretation 'magical realism' portrays a situation where paradoxes exist like rationality and fantasy. It consists of a world where we could find paradoxical co-existence of 'rational view of society' along with the acceptance of a 'supernatural or occult or mystical' as a normal mundane reality. Oxymoronic world is very much part of their existence. Marquez has put this quite brilliantly in his Nobel lecture, 

"A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."

What place to know of magical realism better then  India where it oozes and pervades a large part of the folks.

 If we compare both the author's magnum opus than we can find that both the stories evolve and revolve around the imaginary town's created by them. In a sense in both the masterpieces the role of the protagonist is not played by the 'individual' but by a 'small fictional town'.The legend of Khasak has 'Khasak' and One Hundred Years of Solitude  has 'Macondo'. Town's where fantasy, supernatural or occult practices are part of their everyday existence. The story unravels within these towns. The story is strictly not woven around a central character  like say Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's 'The Portrait of a Artist as Young Man' rather we find  multitude of characters occupying the pages. Especially in Marquez the breadth of characters is huge with many generations living through a single novel. This sort of a  intertemporal narration provides a evolutionary view of the society than of individuals which is a commonality  found in most of the novels.We can say there is no 'existentialist angst' in the characters except in Ravi in the Legend of Khasak. But in a wider view existentialist pursuit exists in both the works. In  One Hundred Years of Solitude 'existentialist' crisis can be understood by the 'solitude' that embraces Macondo (Latin America in more broader way). The solitude  is not of a character but of  the whole town or say country or continent. The dysfunctional leaders, the wars, lawlessness and other misgivings has uprooted the existence of a 'proper state' leading to its solitude. Solitude is not somber like loneliness. But as  solitude is gained with maturity so Macondo also revels despite its misgivings.In legend of Khasak, Ravi has come to Khasak to experience solitude as part of soul searching 'existentialist' pursuit to unwind the moralistic guilt that he is carrying due to an incestuous affair. Here Khasak is meant to provide him the solitude to uplift his existence from the moralistic fall that he has undergone.As O Y Vijayan has also asserted  about the novel "It moves along, if you will, in a deeply emotional mode, in a constant search for cosmic mystery". 

This is just a first rough entry on these two great authors but  I would definitely try to show more shades of these giants of literature as I decipher them more.