In class this afternoon we discussed García Márquez’s short story, “Blacamán el bueno: vendor de milagros”. Amazingly textured, it is heavily packed with material for discussion. With every reading I encounter new details and bits of humor that for some reason had gone unnoticed before.
Orphaned by a father who sells himfor not much, Blacamán becomes a figure with no familial or social affiliations. He has no place of origin, nor a fixed destination. Without delusion or greed, he desires to be a fortuneteller, able to read the future, any future. Though he is never blessed with the fortune to tell the future, he does, in a single moment filled with only rancor (for Blacamán el malo), gain the ability to cure, even to the point of reversing death. Mythological at its core, “Blacamán el bueno” does not subscribe to notions of absolute finitude or irreversible end. Everything, even death, can be undone, and thus cyclical temporality becomes the diegetic force of the narrative as well as embodied by the tragic malo. El bueno cures, heals, brings normality to broken, damaged, and ravaged bodies. His miracles turns inordinate selves of decrepitude into a faceless, nameless populace of utter ordinariness. Countless people come to him, and as long as they pay, Blacamán el bueno administers his miracle most effectively.
In my comments in class I emphasized the character’s radical aloneness to suggest that the story told by B. el bueno cannot be read within the occidental nation-state paradigms that undergird most boom narratives. He, I suggested, stands outside the paradigm as he neither confirm nor denies it. Now, I am not so sure that such was the most nuanced analysis. The figure of B. el bueno, after all, evokes in many ways the solitary, renegade figure of the gaucho, which since the 19th century has been deployed dogmatically in the service of the the binary epistemology of civilización y barbarie.
I suppose that one counterargument to ascribing the civilización y barbarie frame to Márquez’s story is that what the island represents both confirms and confounds the various archetypes that form Sarmiento’s dichotomy. Blacamán el bueno, and by extension the island, is a place of difference marked by its resistance to modernizing science, and yet not entirely or capriciously. The resistance or rejection extends just enough to leave sufficient space for what civilized eyes categorize as otherness and the magical realist portrays as locality imbued with magic. B. el bueno opposes the presence of the foreign marines not in the name of any antiliberal ideology or any other form of abstracted politics, but rather in the name of practicing daily life, of what he has come to embrace as his everyday craft: his miracles.
The story stages wonderfully how the senses are not distributed in a stark dichotomous fashion. Thus, if the interpretive exercise happens aided by critical ideas that move the reading practice from such hermetic conceptions of knowledge and culture production, a complex surface of overlapping and shifting senses show that B. el bueno and his island offer yet another example of how infertile yet intoxicating binary can be as a mechanism of thought. The boom narratives are wonderfully equipped to offer not only tantalizing tales but also a wealth of material to reflect upon the making and breaking of those tales.
Realism 