The new Netflix series Narcos tells a story of Pablo Escobar’s construction of a gangster capitalist empire centered on the cocaine trade and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) efforts to capture or kill him. Narcos opens with an uncredited quote from Matthew Strecher: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” Neither that the quote is wholly inapplicable to the story nor that it is uncredited and grabbed from Wikipedia’s introductory paragraphs on magical realism are surprising given the story that follows.
Wagner Moura plays Escobar, the Colombian narcotraficante par excellence who teams with his cousin Gustavo (Juan Pablo Raba) to found the anchor of what became the Medellín Cartel. The pair are hunted by DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) and Colombian cop Horatio Carrillo (Maurice Compte). How exactly that happens is the meat of the story. And despite a s a slew of fine performances, solid photography and high production values, the meat is rancid.
A Badly Drawn Story for White Americans
Chris Brancato and Paul Eckstein are the team behind Narcos and they previously collaborated on Hoodlum, a film notable for Laurence Fishburne’s performance and for the extreme divergence in its best concept/worst script pairing. Just as they poorly imagined the Harlem numbers game, so too do they mangle the Escobar story from every angle and do so to to tell an American story in Colombia for a white American audience. Empire’s subjects do not have a voice.
Narcos is one of few shows to have significant Spanish and English dialogue. In contrast to the wonderful Jane the Virgin however, Narcos is made first and foremost for English speakers. This is evident in the pan-American casting where all kinds of accents, frequently Mexican and surprisingly few Colombian, visit the screen as Colombians. What could be a partly redeeming feature of decent performances is undermined by bad accents, some worse than Keanu Reeves’ British turn in Dracula. In some cases they’re not even trying and in one particularly silly example, a Colombian nicknamed ‘The Mexican’ speaks with an obvious Puerto Rican accent. For an audience reading the middling quality subtitles the various accents are perhaps not an issue. A (possibly) positive result of mediocre translation is that ceaseless Colombian homophobic slang is infrequently translated as homophobic. Sometimes it is made into misogyny, which is a reasonable translation of meaning in some circumstances, and other times ungendered insults but most often it is not translated at all (this will be surprising to some given how much is translated).
The cumulative effect is not so much a bilingual program as an American English one with a preponderance of Spanish(es) in it. It does not help that the script includes groan inducing dialogue such as, “Like Goldilocks he had three options,” and confused phrasings like, “Escobar hadn’t built himself a prison at all. He’d built himself a fortress. But no matter how you decorate it, a cage is still a cage.” Nor that many characters are so shallowly drawn as to be two dimensional. The wide-eyed innocent plane bomber, for example, is less a character than baby-like naiveté given an adult body.
Empire’s Narrator
“Sometimes bad guys do good things” the narrator (Murphy) says in reference to mass executions of drug dealers carried out by Chilean dictator Pinochet. In what ethical universe are mass executions ok? In addition to the ‘heroic’ mass executions, the show doesn’t pause to reflect on the tremendous body count the DEA is directly and indirectly racking up in Colombia. All this is narrated with the ultimate hipster voiceover: an omniscient semi-folksy white guy with a ‘cynical above it all’ cadence that in the end is still deeply dedicated to hegemonic narratives. It sounds like nothing so much as Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas voiceover if it was instead narrated by one of the cops.
Narcos lays on thick an orientalist narrative of Colombia. The following exemplars all come from the shitty, ceaseless voiceover:
- “And the best smugglers in the world were in Colombia”
- “Emeralds are a pretty rough trade even by Colombian standards. If you make it to the top it means you’ve killed your enemies…and sometimes your partners.”
- “The problem was Colombia itself. It was too small a country for a fortune that big.”
- “A drug dealer running for president, it’s crazy right? Well not in Colombia.”
- “There’s a reason magical realism was born in Colombia: It’s a country where dreams and reality are conflated, where in their heads people fly as high as Icarus.”
- “But in Colombia, when money is involved, blood inevitably flows.”
- “In Colombia, nothing goes down the way you think it will.”
Narcos narrates Colombia with explicit, condescending racism and is just as racist in its brief forays narrating the United States, albeit implicitly. The narrator asserts, “Back then [1979] Miami was a paradise.” For whom? Not for working class Black people, Haitians, Cubans, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans. Equally absurd are declarations about U.S. prisons. Peña and Murphy aspire to have the various narcos extradited to the U.S. to rot in jail there. “Back home it was a whole different deal. Seventh richest man in the world? No one gives a shit. You still get a 6 x 8 cell like every other loser.” This bizarrely idealistic view of the carceral state, carceral empire really, is at complete odds with the supposedly worldly narration and reality. It shows how the narrator’s supposed cynicism about the status quo is actually deployed to affirm its mythos.
Racist and imperialist logics are normative throughout the story. Modest assertions of Colombian prerogatives are met with condescension and arrogance by the DEA agents and narrator. When Colombia temporarily suspends one kind of U.S. surveillance in Colombia the narrator declares, “We sat on the sidelines, hands tied by bureaucracy.”
What the writers show as necessary and virtuous furthers this. Agent Murphy heroically steals a Colombian baby and heroically interrogates a man by putting a gun in his mouth. The U.S. military engages in positively portrayed torture and constant interference in Colombian affairs is portrayed as a good thing.
Gangster capitalism vs. the Neoliberal capitalist state
Narcos posits narcotraficantes buying off Colombian politicians and bribing/sponsoring police forces as abnormal and corrupting when the real history of Colombian politics mirrors that of all capitalist states; the politicians are bought off by capital interests approved by the state. In the U.S. example this is called ‘campaign donations’, ‘lobbying trips’ and ‘corporate sponsorship’. Corruption is thus not the buying of politicians and media — corruption is (literal) gangster capitalists doing the buying. Alternately put, the gangster capitalists’ crime is trying to buy wholesale something that was already bought by the oligarchy. The closest Narcos comes to realizing this is when Escobar’s forces, in an attempt to sway policy, begin kidnapping the children of the rich and famous to replace the prior tactic of public bombings.
Narcos shares this analysis with the The Wire. When Lester Freamon follows the Barksdale outfit’s money through to lawyers and developers making campaign donations the problem identified is not that capitalists are buying policy and favor but that it is drug money used for the buying. Thus pharmaceutical companies producing legal addictive opiates and stimulants can give campaign donations and support police projects that purveyors of criminalized opiates and stimulants cannot. This isn’t just a case of missing the forest (capitalism) for the trees (the drug trade). The creators evidence no knowledge of forest or tree. Judging by the finished product their main source of analysis for the politics of narcotrafficking and counternarcotics is the same as their source for magical realism: the introductory paragraphs of a Wikipedia article.
All this supposedly has something to do with magical realism. It does not. There is nothing magical or fantastic about any of it. The writers mean surrealism but do not know it and that would still be a stretch as narcotrafficking is quite logical in its operations. Formal and informal capitalist markets have tremendous political consequences and frequently astonishing body counts. Hard, cruel logic is not surreal and certainly not magical. Only through a rigidly orthodox discourse of the capitalist state could informal markets seem surreal or magical.
In the end Narcos has some tremendous performances and terrific production value, all in the service of poorly drawn characters, bad dialogue from cliché scripts and imperialist politics. It is a well polished turd that mangles Colombian history and dialects and embraces racism and imperialism. In this way Narcos reminds me less of other televisions shows and more of Kermit Roosevelt and Larry Devlin’s autobiographical writings about their time with the CIA in Iran and the Congo. They narrate cynical, realpolitik histories where yeah, maybe a couple of things could’ve been done better, but the cause was just and their hands were clean. Narcos narrates the DEA and US military in Colombia this same nasty way and it leaves a bad taste made worse when combined with a crap story. A good cast, fascinating topic, high budget and fine production value should go a long way but Narcos only in brief moments rises to mediocrity and all the cocaine in the world couldn’t save it.
It’s interesting magical realism comes up so often in this series, probably because the writers didn’t know anybody else from the country except Marquez and were trying to be clever.
…but since you mentioned magical realism, that reminds me about some research I did for a Marquez paper a while ago. I read a paper arguing that “magical realism” (defined as at the start of your piece) is an inherently imperialist notion. The reasoning went that authors labeled as “magical realists” by western scholars didn’t consider anything in their writing to be magical at all. In other words, when Marquez writes about an old angel falling on a tourist beach, or a woman levitating into blinding light and disappearing to heaven, he was writing about something that he thought could or did literally happen. So when Westerners label these works (like Marquez, or The Windup Bird Chronicle, or Beasts of the Southern Wild) as magical realist, they’re basically gaslighting an entire culture. Even more interesting is that “magical realism” seems to show up a lot in the literature and oral traditions of every culture on Earth…except for those of Britain, France, Germany, and a small handful of countries who engaged in colonialism and imperialism.
So when the writers of Narcos label Colombia as an inherently “magical realist” place, they’re actually trying to dictate the boundaries of reality in such a way that justifies and encourages whatever actions they take. At least, that’s what that other article’s thesis would suggest…
OTOH, isn’t it a little patronizing to assume that writers like Marquez always believe in the literal realism of their supernatural fiction?
Gaslighting means telling people something they think really happened is all in their heads, not inferring that they mean it figuratively.
Imperialist countries enjoy their supernatural fiction just as much as the colonized, it seems to me, and approach it with a similar spectrum of attitudes from belief to skepticism & metaphor.
I don’t think it’s patronizing to assume that at all, because to writers like Marquez, a “literal reality” doesn’t exist the same way it does in American or some other Western cultures. Marquez and others seem to operate under a paradigm that assumes that a person’s perception IS their reality, regardless of the physically repeatable circumstances that contribute to that perception. Marquez (I assume) wouldn’t say his fiction was supernatural at all, at least according to the research I did a long while ago (which may be fuzzy in my head).
And to generalize the definition you gave for gaslighting, it means to dictate somebody else’s reality by telling them what is and isn’t real. It really has nothing to do with whether something is figurative or not, and I didn’t mean to say so.
And as far as I can tell, imperialist cultures (if such blocs exist and can be delineated) seem to prefer fiction where it is considered there is some verifiable, consistent reality at the heart of it. Even when the supernatural is involved, it is treated as consistent and fundamentally repeatable and real across the fiction’s whole reality. In “magical realist” fiction, reality is malleable and personal, and differs drastically from person to person. In the one, there is a normalized reality, in the other, there isn’t.
“because to writers like Marquez”
I’m really not sure this is the best way to think about this. Marquez is a hugely erudite writer steeped in Western literary traditions. That goes for Borges too, and certainly for Calvino and Toni Morrison (who are other writers often thought of as magical realist.) There just isn’t the kind of iron border between Latin American and European culture that you seem to be setting up here, I don’t think. Marquez is very aware of metafictional readings, and (at least from what I remember reading him) I don’t think there’s the kind of slippage around truth/belief that you’re suggesting for the most part. Trying to think of writers where that does happen…Philip K. Dick comes to mind, I guess, as someone who plays with his own possible belief in the non-realism he’s talking about. Or C.S. Lewis, in some sense. Or Blake, or D.H. Lawrence in a way. There are definitely mystical writers in the Western tradition. I don’t know that that’s exactly where Marquez is coming from though.
I’m either not explaining myself well, or I’m being very inconsistent. I think it’s the former, so let’s see if I can clarify what I mean here when I talk about the paradigm I think Marquez (and Borges, and many other non-Western authors) ascribe to, at least much more so than Western European authors (that’s some very hand-wavy categorization, but…oh well).
It’s not that Marquez is conflating, confusing, or equating truth and belief, deliberately or otherwise. It’s that the concept of reality functions differently in the West vs. non-West. In the West, perception is qualified and circumscribed by a fairly arbitrary notion of reality, the idea that there is a single, definitive version of events that did happen, and that’s that. In Marquez, as well as in Borges, and the other works I mentioned, everything that happens is real precisely because it is perceived. The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings IS REAL, even if his presence can never be measured or reproduced. It’s presence doesn’t have to be believed, because it was seen. The emphasis here is on the effect a person’s perception has on them, rather than some verifiable state in the universe.
And yes, there is plenty of cross-pollination between these literary sets, but I think, in general, Marquez, Borges, and many writers who are knowledgeable of, but not necessarily a part of, the European literary tradition (pretending these are disjoint sets) utilize this “magical realist” paradigm much more than Europeans, and that most mainstream European literature resists and directly opposes this paradigm. I say this not having much proof off the top of my head, so who the hell knows if I could adequately support this given enough time.
Faulkner’s biggest influence is, self-admittedly, Faulkner. Secondarily, Marquez cites his grandmother who told outrageous stories with a “stone face.” But that storytelling style is basically the same as Kafka’s. And what about the banana massacre incident in 100 Years of Solitude? The whole point of the incident is the distinction between what most of the community perceives or convinces themselves to believe and what actually happens as narrated and retained by one character (can’t recall his name…they all have similar ones on purpose).
Aargh. Marquez’s biggest influence is Faulkner. Faulkner may also influence himself, of course.
‘Even more interesting is that “magical realism” seems to show up a lot in the literature and oral traditions of every culture on Earth…except for those of Britain, France, Germany, and a small handful of countries who engaged in colonialism and imperialism.’
Except of course that’s doubly bullshit, first because if you maul the definition of “magical realism” to include oral traditions and other things that don’t really have anything in common with Marquez, then it also includes British, French, and German literature, second because of the vague implication that Western (or just European?) colonialism is different from everybody else’s – with the vagueness conveniently excusing one from defending it.
You know, Orientalism doesn’t stop being Orientalism just because you tell yourself you’re on the Orient’s side.
I read 100 Years of Solitude about 3 years ago, so I can’t really add anything or address your point about the banana massacre. Looks like I’ll have to read it again soon! Admittedly, I’m terribly read, and have not read much of late, so I’m shooting from the hip all over here. But I would suggest that Faulkner and Kafka are examples of the cross-pollination I admitted earlier, without necessarily operating under the same assumptions about reality as Marquez. Again, my knowledge on all these people is very shaky, so I’m prone to being proven completely wrong here…
Yeah…I don’t think you’re case here is very convincing. Latin America is not some sort of pre-Enlightenment nirvana, and beyond that Marquez is an intensely ironic writer; a lot of his work as Eric suggests is satire. Pushing him into a primitivist box is not a good look for anyone.
I think there is something to be said about magical realism and the colonial experience— and I’m sure lots of people have said it, or various its, to one degree or another. I think it’s more along the lines of thinking about or playing with ideas around the primitivism of folk tales, and the positioning of Europe as an objective center, rather than simply embodying those binaries. Borges is kind of about being more Western than the Western canon in a lot of ways, as well as about the Western canon eating itself. There’s something there maybe about perception being reality in Borges, but he gets there through the Western critical tradition, much like Derrida, not through some sort of direct connection to folk tales.
“Miami was a paradise” as in “Miami was a bustling den of hedonism that was great if you could pay for it, like me,” or as in “Miami was Levittown.” I’m guessing something closer to the former – I haven’t seen the show – but in any case, the context here is maybe somewhat suspiciously sparse.
(By the way, not that it matters much, but is Jimmy Johnson implying that 1979 Miami was a paradise for working class white people? Because it sort of looks like he is.)
Okay, but that part at least isn’t necessarily racist – The Godfather does the same thing.
And why specify “capitalist”? What, as opposed to the incorruptibles of the Soviet Union? (Or are we saying the Soviet Union was really capitalist too? Alright, then every industrialized country ever has always been capitalist, so again, why specify?)
“I haven’t seen the show – but” [rolls eyes]
“Because it sort of looks like he is.” Nope.
“Okay, but that part at least isn’t necessarily racist.” Didn’t say it was.
“And why specify ‘capitalist’?” #notallcapitalisms To contrast the narratives of the gangster capitalism of informal markets vs. the capitalist state.
Oh, so you only wrote this piece for people who’ve already seen the show?
Or people who haven’t are supposed to take you at your word, no matter how persuasive or unpersuasive that word may be?
Well, I guess that’s one way to write criticism.
Nope you aren’t saying it (great!), or nope it didn’t look like you were saying it? Because it did look like you were saying it.
Didn’t say it wasn’t, either, and the title of this piece sort of makes all the examples guilty until declared innocent.
Who said anything about “#notallcapitalisms”? You? Because it sure wasn’t me. #yesallcapitalisms
The rest of your answer here simply prompts the same question as before. Why specify capitalism?
Forgot – thank you for the reply!
Graham, could you dial it down a bit, possibly?
“Okay, but that part at least isn’t necessarily racist – The Godfather does the same thing.”
The Godfather’s relationship to race and racism isn’t super clear, is it? Obviously it’s made by an Italian…but Schindler’s List was made by a Jew, and I’m pretty okay with saying that that film flirts with anti-semitic tropes.
Rolling my eyes at you making specific interpretations about a show you haven’t seen.
Didn’t look like I was saying it, nor was I saying it. There is a near infinite list of populations I didn’t note. Could’ve wrote just ‘working class’ but that wouldn’t do much to describe the targets of racial capitalism.
Answered the last part already very specifically.
@Graham
The definition of “magical realism” as I stated it is identical to what’s at the beginning of the article. It’s a way of categorizing stories, so by definition it HAS to include oral traditions from the get-go. I didn’t expand anything, as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m just being dense when I say I don’t understand how I “mauled” the definition when I didn’t actually change it at all…
Second, Marquez’s biggest literary influence may have been Faulkner, but I’m reasonably certain (read:absolutely certain) that the biggest influence on his writing HAS to be the culture he grew up in, which was characterized by a wholly unique storytelling tradition created by a wholly unique mix of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous traditions. Indigenous oral traditions are a major (perhaps(?) the dominant) ingredient in Marquez’s cultural heritage, and therefore an undeniably powerful influence on his writing (an influence that, because of it’s uniqueness, is not really shared by any other culture on Earth, let alone the British, French, and Germans).
Third, Western/European colonialism is different from everybody else’s, because its the most expansive, longest-lasting, and, at the moment, the only kind of colonialism that has undeniable, immediate global effects on culture, politics, and society, because its the only kind still going on on a global scale. These are basic factual conditions that set it apart, not abstract moral/philosophical judgments.
As for being Orientalist and/or on the Orient’s side…I, a) don’t understand how my assertion amounts to Orientalism (please do, enlighten me) and, b) The notion that reality is best defined by perception and is unique to every individual is something I actually believe. I think that view is shared and expressed by a finite (but expansive) subset of authors that I have observed, to some extent. So I guess this circles back to point a)…
Insofar as The Godfather contains anti-Italian tropes, I’d say it’s a result of self-sentimentalizing: Those movies don’t hate Italians, they hate WASPs, Jews, black people, and women’s liberation, and therefore love everything WASPs hate about Italians.
In any case, if the argument were that Narcos hates Latin Americans as much as The Godfather hates Italians, I’m guessing the creators would be pretty comfortable with that.
@Jimmy
I was specifically interpreting your summary. Noticing, by the way, that you still haven’t fill in some more context for that line.
And you didn’t answer the last part, you simply did the same thing again.
The context is the bougie White American nostalgia. For the last part you just don’t like the answer is all. So be it.
“if the argument were that Narcos hates Latin Americans as much as The Godfather hates Italians, I’m guessing the creators would be pretty comfortable with that.”
Not clear to me why I should care what the creators are or are not comfortable with?
Fetishizing a racial stereotype can still be pretty racist.
I mean, there are a whole list of reasons I think the Godfather is crap, and the treatment of a not particularly oppressed ethnic minority is pretty far down there. But still.
“Second, Marquez’s biggest literary influence may have been Faulkner, but I’m reasonably certain (read:absolutely certain) that the biggest influence on his writing HAS to be the culture he grew up in”
First, that’s just not true; influences on writers vary widely, and insisting that someone is defined by their culture is a super-aggressive thing to do.
Second, part of the reason it’s super aggressive is that you’re assuming you know what that culture is. Marquez’s culture is clearly in large part the western literary tradition. But you insist that his culture first has to be a marginalized Colombian identity. You’re nailing him to your own preconceptions about authenticity and marginal cultures. That really is not a favor to him.
@Petra Duric
Matthew Strecher’s definition of “magical realism” does not include oral tradition. Magical realism is when the story implies that it’s describing real life in detail for its own sake, and therefore of course not describing magic – or at the very least, when the story implies that it’s happening in a non-magical world – and then magic happens anyway (not necessarily to the characters’ surprise).
If you want to broaden the term to mean anything where people are living non-magical lives and then magic happens, fine – you’ve now made the term useless, but fine – but then the Brothers Grimm are “magical realism” too.
Previously we had: ‘Even more interesting is that “magical realism” seems to show up a lot in the literature and oral traditions of every culture on Earth…’
Now we have the above. Make up your mind.
“Longest lasting”? Not that primacy matters much once you’re talking about multiple centuries, but (for example) the colonization of India by Central Asian Muslims lasted for a good (bad) 600 years.
“The only kind still going on on a global scale”? Okay, you just don’t know or care what you’re talking about.
Opposition of an allegedly rational West to an allegedly non-rational non-West.
Congratulations, you’re David Hume. Rousseau and Kant will be along shortly to revise you.
@Jimmy
Look, you know that “To contrast the narratives of the gangster capitalism of informal markets vs. the capitalist state.” is not an answer to “Why specify capitalist?”
Stop blustering and either answer the question or don’t.
I’m nailing him to those preconceptions because that is what the (admittedly limited) research I did on his life and background suggested…
“Until Marquez was eight, he lived with his maternal grandparents in Aracataca. His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguaran Cotes, was an avid storyteller. She gave Marquez a deep reservoir of folkloric knowledge about omens, premonitions, dead ancestors and ghosts. The sincere manner in which she told her stories would have a profound effect on the mature writings of Gabriel García Márquez.”
“He received a better-than-average education but claimed as an adult that his most important literary sources were the stories about Aracataca and his family that Nicolás had told him.”
(Excerpts from the first and second Google hits, respectively, for “Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography) Both of these bios also note that he spent much, if not most, of his adult life abroad, soaking in Western literature, specifically American and French. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption to say those first few years were seminal in a big way, unless these bios and the handful of others I’ve read are just false and you have a more reliable one in mind. (which I would earnestly eager to read).
So we’ve got Garcia Marquez’s word that Faulkner was his most important influence, and we’ve got Garcia Marquez’s word that his grandfather was his most important influence.
Would this be a good time to remind ourselves that authors’ words about their influences should be taken with several grains of salt?
“Look, you know that “To contrast the narratives of the gangster capitalism of informal markets vs. the capitalist state.” is not an answer to “Why specify capitalist?””
It sounds like an answer to me. He’s talking about capitalism because he’s talking about the capitalist state vs. informal markets. I don’t see why this is confusing?
Capitalism is generally implicated in gangster narratives; they’re about getting ahead, making something of yourself, entrepreneurship, etc. Haven’t seen the Wolf of Wall Street, but it’s just Goodfellas but somewhat more legal, right? Gangster genre is generally about that distance, more or less consciously.
I mean, what alternative to capitalism are you thinking about Graham?
And also…you’ve noted multiple times on various threads that you come across as an aggressive jerk. You’ve even apologized for it. Rather than apologizing for it, maybe you could cut it out? Most of your points are reasonable enough; just take a breath before couching them as if your interlocutors are all mendacious idiots. Seriously, imagine you’re talking to someone who’s an actual human being, maybe? I presume you don’t talk like this in meat-space (or I hope not.) A little consideration for other’s feelings/humanity would go a long way, you know?
He could just as well say “the state.”
Huh. I don’t know that just the state works…I mean, communism has its own awfulness, obviously, but capitalism and narco-trafficking get to awfulness in some very similar ways. I think JJ was highlighting that.
@Noah
I don’t think there’s a difference between how I talk in real life and what I write on the internet; I hope there isn’t; I’d be ashamed if there was.
But honestly I’m a bit confused at this point. It seems to me I’ve seen you get about as aggressive as I ever do in these comment sections. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily, in retrospect, approve of talking like that, but you seem to see more difference in your and my style than I sometimes do.
Anyway:
My mistake. (And of course, now, too late, I find that I could have discovered that much with Google.) But now I feel like there’s context missing in a different way – whitebread suburbs described as “paradise” without any note of irony (from the show if not from the narrator)? That would be unusual, at least.
Of course, I could just watch the show – but see, I believe you that it’s a piece of shit.
I can sometimes be aggressive. I generally try to deescalate when I can, rather than escalate. You get very aggressive, very fast, without a whole lot of warning.
eric — “Faulkner’s biggest influence is, self-admittedly, Faulkner”
I’m disappointed this was corrected; I read it as an epic (albeit, to be sure, somewhat puzzling and apparently unmotivated) diss.
To be fair to Graham, I will admit that this:
“You know, Orientalism doesn’t stop being Orientalism just because you tell yourself you’re on the Orient’s side”
does sound very much like a berlatskyism.
But — set aside the matter of our host’s hypocrisy, or otherwise. Your very first comment here was a direct and aggressive insult, starting with the very first clause:
“except, of course, that’s doubly bullshit”
“Bullshit” is obviously rude, but it’s that “of course” that struck me. Likewise the way that first sentence ends: “with the vagueness conveniently excusing one from defending it.” On this thread and elsewhere, you lecture people about their rhetoric (by which I mean the informal logical structure of what they say), or their sentence construction, or about their psychological, demographic and socio-economic states (inferred on the basis of two or three sentences), and you do it from a unearned position of intellectual authority.
Just have another look at this:
“Congratulations, you’re David Hume. Rousseau and Kant will be along shortly to revise you.”
That’s condescending. I feel like a moron even writing that, but, come on, you do know that that’s condescending, right? You are not our professor, here to grade our papers.
At its best, a discussion thread is an exchange between people who treat each other as intellectual equals. That’s what makes it enjoyable and enlightening. Now look back at your comments and ask yourself — I mean this as a non-aggressive but completely sincere request — actually look at them and ask: have I treated my interlocutor as an equal? Have I treated them with the respect they deserve simply by being a rational human being?
Look, I 100% agree that Noah can be aggressive, dismissive and uncharitable in interpreting his interlocutors. (Sorry, dude). So can I, so can lots of people. But you do it, if not 100% of the time, then close.
I’ve hung out here a long time; god knows I enjoy a good stoush, and god knows I’ve been in plenty here. But arguing with you is no fun, and even arguing in your vicinity is no fun, because there’s always the possibility that you’ll start handing out the ex cathedra whuppings without apparent provocation.
Graham, you are making this site a place I don’t want to come to any more, and I cannot believe that I’m the only one that goes for. So: please stop. Before you comment, please think about your tone and the way it comes across. Bear in mind that what might seem to you as terse but fair might come across differently to whoever is on the receiving end, and consider whether you ought to factor that in to your decision.
@Jones
I’m not try to prove Noah a hypocrite. (And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his style.) When I said I was confused I meant it.
I’ve heard this from Noah before and I don’t get it either. The only authority I can have here is the persuasiveness of what I write; if it’s persuasive, it’s not unearned, and if it’s not persuasive, then it carries no authority.
This seems exactly backwards to me. It’s like you’re saying that if I’m a professor, with real power over you, I should then be less restricted in what I can say, rather than more.
I have no idea what you and Noah mean by treating somebody like a “human being,” but certainly I try to treat people as equals insofar as I don’t dish out anything I’m unwilling take. That’s not adequate, of course (though in one way it’s more than what most cultural commentators on the internet do, amateur or professional – the rule seems to be you can publicly run artists through the meat grinder all you want, but God forbid anybody talks to you that way to your face); not everybody has the same expectations I do; and some of those apologies that Noah’s going to hold over my head for the rest of eternity came when I felt that I’d made a stronger impression that I intended on my interlocutor.
That said, if I find something you’re written seriously objectionable then you’re not supposed to enjoy my saying so.
I’m sincerely sorry that I’m making this site a place you don’t want to come, for your sake, but more importantly because said site is somebody else’s job and not mine. I don’t think I post under all that many pieces here as is, but that would seem to be a reason to do it even less, at least in response to things I really dislike. I’ll have to think about whether I like the idea of only commenting under pieces or comment section posts that I admire or at least have no serious problems with.
The statement that British, German and French literature show no trace of magic realism is simply untrue. Consider Angela Carter for Britain, Marcel Ayme for France, and E.T.A. Hoffman for Germany. And of course the Russian Empire produced Gogol.
I mean, Hoffman is a particularly egregious example. His dreamlike fantasies were directly influenced by the most famous body of oral literature ever compiled, the Grimm brothers’Kinder und Hausmarchen.
And to state that Borges’ work does not stem from the Western cultural tradition is false.
Baldanders is right…and then there’s Calvino, and Kafka, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando….
Graham, I don’t want to force you to stop commenting. I really feel like just a little more politeness would go a long way, though I know those things can sometimes be hard to calibrate.
“I’ll have to think about whether I like the idea of only commenting under pieces or comment section posts that I admire or at least have no serious problems with.”
Graham – i dont think anyone is asking you to just agree with everything. Its just not very interesting when someone keeps getting personal all the time. I enjoy a good controversy as much as the next guy but im not coming here to see anyone “win” an argument by acting like a troll. Simply because you can “win” any argument at any time by just irritating people like that. Its a waste of time, thats all really.
@ Graham
For some reason, your huge comment ripping up everything I said did not appear on my screen, so assuming anybody still cares, I’ll try and address each point here.
First of all, oral stories are still stories. I might not be Hume, Kant, or Rousseau, but I’m literate and I have a dictionary. Secondly, the whole point is that Matthew Strecher falsely identifies what’s happening in “magical realist” stories as magic (I think). What’s actually happening (or so I claim) is that perception defies Western (or any) notions of rationality, and that that perception is still describing reality, even if that reality is not normalized and repeatable. What’s happening in the Brothers’ Grimm is identified as magic. It has rules, is repeatable and observable, and even if it is absurd, it does not oppose the idea of a normalized reality, as far as I understand (I would love to be proven wrong here).
Marquez’s Colombian storytelling heritage is unique, the same as a Japanese, or British, or a Turkish heritage is unique. But what we call “magical realism” is a common phenomenon because these different cultures and heritages seem to share particular traits or ideas. I think you are drawing a false equivalence/dichotomy between my two statements.
“Ok, you just don’t know or care what you’re talking about.” It’s clever of you to tell me I’m wrong while producing no argument as to how or why. Really, it’s thrilling to be condescended to somebody of your intellectual grandeur.
As for “opposition between a rational West and a non-rational non-West,” that’s actually the exact opposite of what I proposed, if that’s even possible. I am arguing that the Western notion of rational, normalized reality is an imperialist one, whereas the “magical realist” notion of reality is more pragmatic and honest, because it accounts for the variability of human perception. Western narratives about rationality and verifiable reality have been used, and are being used, to control oppressed populations, because the idea of a normalized reality empowers those in a position of social strength to gaslight (and I mean that exactly) oppressed populations by denying their struggles and pain in the name of preserving some predetermined normalized history (think about how everybody reacted to the suggestion of taking down statues of Confederate generals. I actually got a bunch of people on my Facebook feed yelling in all caps to “LEAVE HISTORY ALONE!!” as if history were discovered, not written). “Rational” reality is constructed and arbitrary, whereas “magical realist” reality seems more honest and less pretentious in my mind. It doesn’t pretend you can tell somebody else what they’ve seen and what they’re living. “Rational” reality was constructed for exactly that purpose.
“Congratulations, you’re David Hume.” Uuuuuuuhhh…thanks…
I don’t do any of those things.
I should not have included British, in my list of unique heritages. It is a unique heritage, but that muddles my point. Just correcting my mistake.
“Western narratives about rationality and verifiable reality have been used, and are being used, to control oppressed populations,”
The problem is that narratives about how non-Western people are more in tune with reality/less tied to objectivity are *also* used to control oppressed populations. That’s what Graham was trying to say; the idea of a more mystical or (if you prefer) wiser non-Western tradition can be really condescending, and often has more to do with squabbles within particular Western cultures (hippies vs. squares or whatever) than with any effort to understand the context of other places, much less show solidarity with their struggles.
Marquez and Borges are writing in a Western tradition. They play sophisticated metafictional games. They don’t have some sort of awesome non-Western consciousness learned from their grandparents which causes them to see reality more clearly or whatever. They certainly question truth and objectivity, and margins and centers, but to link that to some sort of natural cultural authenticity on their part is unfortunately in line with racial and cultural stereotypes which I’d say Marquez in particular tends to try to question and explode.
That’s not to say that Marquez and Borges are writing *only* in the Western tradition, nor that there is only one Western tradition to write in for that matter. But it is to say that making a non-Western box to drop them in is not a great idea.
@Petar Duric
You wouldn’t, but you are. Pre-19th century oral traditions and high art, in or out of the West, don’t “oppose the idea of normalized reality” in the same sense as Garcia Marque – you need realism, in the strict sense of the word, before you can half magical realism.
As for what you seem to be arguing, which is that South American Indian oral tradition or whatever count as magical realism, western and central European fairy tales don’t necessarily conform any better to rational thought.
Your saying ‘Western/European colonialism is… the only kind still going on on a global scale’ shows anybody who knows and cares what’s happening in the world today that you don’t. It doesn’t deserve a response beyond pointing that out.
No, it is what you proposed, you just don’t like having it put that way. And then you go ahead and do it again:
(“Honest”!!!)
You know, I was just having a conversation the other day with an admirer of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, which ended with my conceding that maybe it was time for me to stop despising the post-structuralists, because they weren’t really very influential any, for good or bad.
Thanks for reminding me why I hate them!
(Ah, the Reagan era never goes away. Let’s put on some Huey Lewis and the News to complete the mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6uEMOeDZsA)
And of course if your rational West/magical realist non-West dichotomy were valid, you could just as well argue that magical realism is used by non-Western powers to oppress, except you don’t want to do that. And of course non-rationalism has been used to oppress, by non-Westerners and Westerners alike, e.g. the Nazis, or both sides in World War I, when every nation’s intelligentsia was competing to prove that it was the intuitive side while the other side was soulless robots.
I’m actually curious to know what you’re thinking about when you talk about non-Western imperialisms Graham. Are you thinking of China? Russia? ISIS? I’d say American imperialism is a good bit more influential/omnipresent than any of those (especially if you throw in institutions like the World Bank and IMF with American imperialism) but I’d agree that it’s not the *only* one, even now.
Haven’t read deMan, but I like Derrida a lot. I wouldn’t blame him for Orientalism though, right? Around before him, will continue afterwards….
@ Noah
First off, it’s clear that narratives of a “wiser non-West” are used to appropriate and marginalize those non-Westerners as well. In those cases, there is a clear override of the sovereignty of those “non-Westerners.” I think what I am proposing is still in line with an anti-imperialist mindset, because I emphasize (or try/hope to emphasize) personal sovereignty. The idea of a rational, normalized reality is frequently used to override the oppressed’s perception of reality, and therefore override their sovereignty over their own reality. This “magical realist” tradition (I am at a loss for another adequate term to use in its place, but I really hate that term) seems to respect a person’s sovereignty over his or her own reality. It’s not that the tradition is “wiser.” It’s that it includes respect for personal sovereignty that I do not witness in American, British, French, or German cultures. Hence my insistence on using gaslighting to describe normalized reality.
@Graham
“You wouldn’t, but you are.” A), you are not the arbiter of anybody’s thoughts but your own. Do not pretend you are, as I see that as a mark of unbelievable arrogance, to claim I am lying, and with absolutely no proof, or even a cohesive argument, to show why. B) That half a sentence or so you dedicate to brushing me aside does not count as proof of anything. Again, you are yelling at me that I’m wrong while producing absolutely no argument as to why or how.
“Your saying ‘Western/European colonialism is… the only kind still going on on a global scale’ shows anybody who knows and cares what’s happening in the world today that you don’t. It doesn’t deserve a response beyond pointing that out.” I care a great deal what goes on in the world. The vast majority of my family lives outside of this country in a country that was recently bombed by the United States. And, to avoid rambling too much, I’ll avoid launching into a discussion of Pakistani, Chinese, German, Russian, Turkish, etc colonialism and the comparisons with America. Suffice to say, I’m pretty sure I know quite a lot about what goes on in the world, and I’m damn sure I care. I know this is unimaginable to you, but I will ask to be kind and refrain from the arrogance of assuming you know who I am, where I’m from, what I think, and what my stake in this issue is, please and thank you.
On opposition between the West and non-West, I said exactly what I meant to say, please do not presume you know better than me what I think. On “rational” reality, see what I wrote in response to Noah. On the post-structuralists, I really couldn’t give a damn what you think about Derrida or de Man, because I have read neither. My views were developed as a part of my experience as a first generation immigrant from a recent warzone.
And as for you drawing a parallel between me and the Nazis…that’s really classy. Keep that up.
Yes; not much; and yes, though of course four years ago it was the future IS that was being more or less colonized by the Alawites in Syria and Shiites in Iraq; and, on the other hand, IS needs to be seen as part of a wider phenomenon, extending from western Africa to Afghanistan, of expansion by locally dominant Sunni groups against non-Sunnis and less powerful Sunni groups, such as the Kurds or the people of southern Mali.
You mention Russia, but the country that best fits the definition of a colonizer in Europe today is Germany, which forced the rest of the Eurozone plus Ukraine to destroy their welfare states – though of course only Ukraine is experiencing something comparable to the kind of brutality that the West (Europe, Israel, and the other Anglo-Saxon countries as well as America), Japan, and China all routinely sponsor in the developing world.
Of course not. But when Petar Duric says rationality was invented by Europeans to oppress people, he is paraphrasing Derrida’s sort-of-ally Foucault.
Again, never read Derrida…
…or Foucault for that matter…
@Petar Duric
Same thing, different words.
Well, you’ve certainly read either Foucault or somebody paraphrasing Foucault.
I didn’t draw a parallel between you and the Nazis. (Though that’s a taboo that everybody should have gotten over a long time ago.)
I said non-rationalism can be and has been used to oppress, and that the Nazis did it. I didn’t say you’ve used non-rationalism to oppress.
Bad conscience?
For the last time. I have not read Derrida, de Man, or Foucault. The last philosopher I read was Bertrand Russell, and I was studying his contributions to logic and set theory for a course. Again, you do not know who I am, where I’m from, what I’ve read, or why I’m in this discussion. Address my arguments, or don’t speak at all, please and thank you.
As for a bad conscience…I kicked a kitten the other day and I just can’t get over it. Please, Holy Father, absolve me, for I have sinned!
On a serious note, every single thing you’ve written in response to my posts has been in the form of an incomplete argument, a non-argument, or an ad hominem attack. Address my arguments, or stop trolling, I don’t care which.
I’m quite prepared to believe that you got your Foucault from somebody on Tumblr without knowing it, but it’s still Foucault.
And you have to actually make an argument before I can address it. Post an example from Latin American oral tradition that you think is magical realism and we can go from there.
I don’t have a Tumblr, nor do I read it.
Then were do you get your cat GIFs?
Anyway, are we going to have that example?
I don’t.
And secondly, you are not likely to get one. I have admitted multiple times I am not literarily versed enough to give you solid examples. Feel free to be thoroughly unconvinced, that much is your prerogative. But please do not condescend to me by just screaming that I’m wrong without actually showing why.
So basically you just make things up, and then I have to do the work of writing your argument for you and the counterargument? Yeah, no.
And everybody has cat GIFs.
– “im not coming here to see anyone “win” an argument by acting like a troll”
“I don’t do any of those things.”
It’s funny how you say this, turn around and go on trolling in this very thread. I think this discussion would be much more worthwhile if you wouldnt keep on making assumptions about the personal background of other participants etc. But yeah, good idea to bring up cat gifs.
What do you think “trolling” means? (I know the answer, but if you want to go through the whole charade, fine, let’s go through the whole charade.)
I haven’t assumed anything about Petar Duric’s background. I don’t know or care how he ended up paraphrasing Foucault.
Going back to something you said earlier, obviously nobody wants me to agree with everything. But since my method of seriously disagreeing is evidently maybe threatening to diminish Noah’s readership, and since I don’t want to do that, and since I’m not going change how I seriously disagree, I’m considering whether to make this my last serious disagreement here, and whether, if I do, I should therefore also make it my last participation of any kind in the comment section here.
“Derrida’s sort-of-ally Foucault.”
Hah; Derrida and Foucault are both spinning in their graves. I think they kind of hated each other.
Graham, maybe I can email you….
“What’s happening in the Brothers’ Grimm is identified as magic. It has rules, is repeatable and observable, and even if it is absurd, it does not oppose the idea of a normalized reality, as far as I understand (I would love to be proven wrong here). ”
Petar,
Are the (likely) illiterate German peasants who crafted the Grimm fairy tale stories in the oral tradition really so married to objectivity and testable, repeatable reality, circa the 1700s or whatever? Seems unlikely to me.
And in contrast are non western illiterate 1700s peasants so married to the notion of personal perception as reality that they would, say, jump off a cliff because they don’t believe in rationality, so what is notions of gravity or observable nature to say whether or not they should jump off a cliff?
I mean, if non western peasants didn’t buy into the notion of “literal reality” like your hypothetical German peasants wouldn’t they be jumping off cliffs on a regular basis? Just because my buddy died from cliff related injuries doesn’t mean I will, because reality is non-testable, right?
It’s pretty clear to me that non western people are not as “non-literal” as you want to claim, and I really doubt illiterate German peasants had strong notions of “rationality” in contrast with peasants in other countries. I doubt they were taught the scientific method in school.
What I’m saying of course is that western and non western writers are not so fundamentally different from each other.
By all means. Warning in advance: If it takes me a month to get back to you, it’s nothing personal, I just never check it and am lazy besides.
@pallas
You make a very good point. I hadn’t actually considered the constituencies that created these different folk traditions and falsely conflated them with imperialist vs non/anti-imperialist. My bad, I should have thought more about that.
Also, I came up with a term I like better term than “magical realist” which conveys my point better, which is “perceptual realist.” I know, it’s kludgey and kinda nonsensical, but that’s what I’m going with.
As for the consequences of non-normalized reality…I don’t know. Well, it seems fair to assume that nobody’s jumping off any cliffs because reality isn’t real anyway, but…I’m not entirely sure what the concrete actionable consequences of that non-normalized notion would be.
Brand new from our best working cartoonist, on the vogue for a certain word: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=384
(responding to Graham’s response to me; stoopid time-zone difference)
Ack, Graham, I was afraid you’d say that you weren’t dishing out anything you can’t take in return. The problem with the golden rule is that it doesn’t really tell you how to behave if you’re naturally an asshole.
That there would be a disrespectful way for me to response (and I disavow it). A more respectful way would be for me to push further on your admission that other people have other expectations and lower thresholds for abuse, and repeat that you should adjust your behaviour accordingly.
It’s perfectly possible to disagree with someone — even to think that their opinions are ill-formed, asinine, beneath contempt — and to express that disagreement and yet not insult or patronise them. I spent the back half of my twenties doing just that, all day, every day.
Here’s a tale of two contrasts from my days in the salt mines of grad school. When I was at Rutgers, Tim Maudlin and Jerry Fodor were both on the faculty. One time there was a job talk from a Princeton student about truth, a subject on which Maudlin is an authority. In the Q&A, Maudlin asked a question/made a comment which, bit by bit, just demolished this poor guy’s entire talk; by the end of it, the guy was holding his head in his hands, saying ‘oh, I hope that’s not right’. But Maudlin did it without making the guy feel stupid, or belittling him — he just walked him through his (Maudlin’s) chain of reasoning, just like Socrates talking to one of his hapless straight men.
(The guy didn’t get the job)
By contrast, there’s a story about Fodor at another talk. After the talk, Fodor raises his hand and says ‘I have just one question: was that talk a joke?”
What I’m saying is: Fodor is funnier, but Maudlin is a better role model.
Or, let me put it this way: why do people make comments on the internet? I can think of, broadly, three reasons — (1) to convince others of the truth; (2) because stating the truth is intrinsically valuable, whether or not anyone else gets convinced; and (3) for other, non-epistemic reasons (e.g. for fun).
If your aim is (1), then your method is, not to mince words, mind-bogglingly ill-conceived. You will not convince people that their opinions are stupid by telling them that their opinions are stupid (or bullshit, or that they’ve only read about Foucault on tumblr, or…). You won’t convince bystanders either. IF you can’t muster the due respect for your fellow inquirers and their idiotic beliefs, then you can at least fake it. (I speak from experience) That’s the only way you’ll convince them, or others.
If your aim is (2) or (3), then you need to ask yourself: are those aims valuable enough to outweigh the undeniable offence you cause? I can’t answer that question for you, but speaking for myself, the answer is unequivocally ‘no’.
(Just to be clear here, I’m not trying to present myself as some paragon for intellectual humility, civil discourse, good hygiene, etc. I’ve been throwing stones at you, and my house isn’t even made out of glass, it’s made from, I don’t know, cellophane, or bubbles. I’m just trying to articulate what I, and plenty of other people here, find objectionable in your commenting style)
John Searle has a great story about Foucault’s view of Derrida. Check out
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jean_searle_on_foucault_and_the_obscurantism_in_french_philosophy.html
and scroll down to the third block quote.
I think you were more afraid that I wouldn’t – or that I would then follow with something like “That’s not adequate, of course” – which, hey, I did! – but I guess just pretending that part isn’t there, until later in your comment, is one way to solve that problem.
The fuck you do, you hiding-behind-an-apophasis weasel. (See, I don’t disavow that.) You posted it!
Not that I mind – not at all – but come on.
But Socrates as rendered by Plato is a condescending, disingenuous, proselytizing monster. (Look at how contemptuous he’s made you of his interlocutors!)
Man, I sure wish I’d thought to distinguish between the obligations of an academic with actual power over his students or prospective hires and some nobody talking in an internet discussion section – oh wait, I did that too.
As for the rest: Nobody changes her mind about things she really cares about in the course of a discussion, ever. That happens gradually through accumulated experience and reflection, when it happens at all. When I reply to something I despise, I do it to afflict its allies and comfort whomever among its enemies may happen to be reading.
I’m considering not doing it as much here any more (either by censoring myself or by just refraining from commenting) only because this is Noah’s house.
@ Scott
Thank you!
Okay then.
But for the record, Graham, I don’t think you’re an asshole. I do think you just play one on the internet.
PS to clarify, so Fodor doesn’t seem as shitty as I seem to have suggested — I don’t think it was at a job talk. I only heard the story third-hand, and it’s possibly apocryphal, but there was no suggestion it was at anything other than another tenured professor’s talk.
You know, Aaron Sorkin already used that line, so you’ve got no excuse for not realizing how much it sucks before you posted it.
Regarding the implication that I don’t dare talk in real life the way I do on the internet, I do (Want to meet up some time? I live just outside of Boston.), but even if I didn’t, I’d still at least have the distinction of acknowledging when I do insult somebody on the internet, instead of doing it while pretending I’m not.
Me me in Temecula
*meet! Damn, so much for timing
I didn’t even notice! I only read the first halves of words. I think this is sometimes reflected in my typing.
Also: Jones, I’m confident that in real life you’re exactly what you are on the internet.
All right, Graham, you win. I’ve wasted my time, again.
Ack, I thought we’d settled down, but instead…
I’m going to close comments for the night, just on the off chance that the break will spread amity and cheer to all, and that when we come back folks will want to talk about Narcos, which seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.
On the off chance that that’s possible…I guess I’d note that Narcos seems of a piece with a lot of quality television in the way that violence/gritty unpleasantness is seen as validating. Interesting too that it uses real events in its creation of realism; wonder if that’s something we’ll see more of.
Pingback: Foxnewspolls.com : What “Narcos” Gets Wrong About the War on Drugs
Pingback: Where Does Cocaine Come From |