Archives: Slavery

Magic is real — The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

I forgot I had to do a blog post… Sorry!

The Kingdom of This World is an interesting novel, and I’m still in the midst of digesting it and trying to get into the “magical realism” of the story. I read The Chronicles of A Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in high school and loved it, though the magical realism element still confuses me somehow.

I guess this blog post is more of what magical realism is, since it’s sort of difficult to explain and even though my english teacher tried his best to explain it, I have no clue what he’s talking about. What is magical realism? Magic into reality, reality into magic, but it’s subtle and because everything is blended into each other so well there isn’t a way to discern between the two at some point, but then when you think back on certain ideas, it seems ridiculous. This is my grasp on what magical realism is, though I still have trouble trying to figure out what elements are magical realism within the novel… Perhaps I read it too quickly.

Time to reread the novel.

Cherie

Everyone’s disappearing… Take me too, maybe? –– The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Between trying to study for my mid-terms and trying to finish reading The Master and Margarita I have to admit I’ve become very confused; everything is just mixing together in this one big container labelled “brain”.

And while this mixing is going on, certain aspects of George Orwell’s 1984 surfaced and made me cringe because I did not particularly enjoy that reading from high school, though I have to admit a lot of what happens here in The Master and Margarita is similar to that of the dystopian world of 1984. Everyone is spying on everyone, everyone is suspicious of everyone, and everything is the same for everyone. Kind of boring, except there’s supposed magic and sorcery in this, which piked my interests a little. That and it’s just downright creepy what happens to some of the characters in this novel.

During the lecture today, the idea of choice was mentioned, and that lead me to think about one particular slogan used in 1984, “Freedom is slavery”. Whether or not the citizens of Moscow had a choice of which radio channel to listen to, is it not all controlled by the government either way? “Freedom is slavery”; the illusion of freedom results in the slavery of the people. They think they have a choice, but they are actually controlled by the government in the choices they make.

This leads to another thought, of whether this form of control is present in our society today. In a sense, we are slaves of choice as a representation of freedom. I say this because we are constantly having to make choices through our everyday lives. Starbucks or Tim Hortons? Tea or coffee or hot chocolate or latte or cappuccino? Don’t all these small decisions in our lives enslave us to consumerism and capitalism, aiding the economy and the government as well?

The regulation of the population in The Master and Margarita also highlights this, in that people supposedly have a freedom to do as they please, but they do not, in fear for the secret police and the mysterious disappearances. Maybe I’m not articulating this very well since I am just wondering around aimlessly on this train of thought and will just disappear now amongst the studying and readings I have to do.

*Abra-Kadabra*

— cherie.