in Literature | April 18th, 2014 Leave a Comment
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“Our independence from Spanish domination did not
put us beyond the reach of madness,” said Gabriel García Márquez in his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. García Márquez, who died yesterday at the age of 87, refers of course to all of Spain’s former
colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean, from his own Columbia to Cuba, the
island nation whose artistic struggle to come to terms with its history
contributed so much to that art form generally known as “magical realism,” a syncretism of European modernism and indigenous art and folklore, Catholicism
and the remnants of Amerindian and African religions.
While the term has perhaps been overused to the
point of banality in critical and popular appraisals of Latin-American writers
(some prefer Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso,
“the marvelous real”), in Marquez’s case, it’s hard to think of a better way to describe
the dense interweaving of fact and fiction in his life’s work as a writer of
both fantastic stories and unflinching journalistic accounts, both of which
grappled with the gross horrors of colonial plunder and exploitation and the
subsequent rule of bloodthirsty dictators, incompetent patriarchs, venal
oligarchs, and corporate gangsters in much of the Southern Hemisphere.
Nevertheless, it’s a description that sometimes
seems to obscure García Marquez’s great purpose, marginalizing his
literary vision as trendy exotica or a “postcolonial hangover.” Once asked
in a Paris Review interview the year before his Nobel win about the difference between the
novel and journalism, García Márquez replied, “Nothing. I don’t think there is
any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the
resources and the language are the same.”
In journalism just one fact that is false
prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is
true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it
lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so
long as he makes people believe in it.
García Márquez made us believe. One would be
hard-pressed to find a 20th century writer more committed to the truth,
whether expressed in dense mythology and baroque metaphor or in the
dry rationalist discourse of the Western episteme. For its multitude of
incredible elements, the 1967 novel for which García Márquez is best known—One Hundred
Years of Solitude—captures the
almost unbelievable human history of the region with more emotional and moral
fidelity than any strictly factual account: “However bizarre or grotesque some
particulars may be,” wrote a New York Times reviewer in 1970, “Macondo is no never-never land.” In fact, García
Márquez’s novel helped dismantle the very real and brutal South American empire of
banana company United Fruit, a “great irony,” writes Rich Cohen, of one mythology laying bare another: “In college, they call it
‘magical realism,’ but, if you know history, you understand it’s less magical
than just plain real, the stuff of newspapers returned as lived experience.”
Edith Grossman, translator of several of García
Márquez’s works—including Love in the Time of Cholera and his 2004 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para Cotarla)—agrees. “He
doesn’t use that term at all, as far as I know,” she said in a 2005 interview with Guernica‘s Joel Whitney: “It’s always struck me as an easy,
empty kind of remark.” Instead, García Márquez’s style, says Grossman, “seemed
like a way of writing about the exceptionalness of so much of Latin America.”
Today, in honor and with tremendous gratitude for
that indefatigable chronicler of exceptional lived experience, we offer several
online texts of Gabriel García Márquez’s short works at the links below.
HarperCollins’ online preview of García Marquez’s Collected Storiesincludes the full text of “The Third Resignation,”
“The Other Side of Death,” “Eva Is Inside Her Cat,” “Bitterness for Three
Sleepwalkers,” and “Dialogue with the Mirror,” all from the author’s 1972 collection Eyes
of a Blue Dog (Ojos de perro azul).
At The New Yorker, you can read García
Marquez’s stories “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1976) and his 2003 autobiographical essay “The Challenge.”
Follow the links below for more of García Marquez’s
short fiction from various university websites:
“Death Constant Beyond Love” (1970)
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1955)
Visit The Modern Word for an excellent biographical sketch of the
author.
Finally, see The New York Times for
“A Talk with Gabriel Garcia Marquez” in the year of his Nobel win, an essay in which
he recounts his 1957 meeting with Ernest Hemingway, and many more reviews and essays.
As we say farewell to one of the world’s
greatest writers, we can remember him not only as a writer of “magical
realism,” whatever that phrase may mean, but as a teller of complicated,
wondrous, and sometimes painful truths, in whatever form he happened to
find them.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Follow him at @jdmagness
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Fuente:Open Culture http://www.openculture.com/http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/10-short-stories-by-gabriel-garcia-marquez.html
