García Márquez

The Man and His Work

Gene H. Bell-Villada

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807895382
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most influential writers of our time, with a unique literary creativity rooted in the history of his native Colombia. This revised and expanded edition of a classic work is the first book of criticism to consider in detail the totality of Garcia Marquez's magnificent oeuvre. In a beautifully written examination, Gene Bell-Villada traces the major forces that have shaped the novelist and describes his life, his personality, and his politics. For this edition, Bell-Villada adds new chapters to cover all of Garcia Marquez's fiction since 1988, from The General in His Labyrinth through Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and includes sections on his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and his journalistic account, News of a Kidnapping. Moreover, new information about Garcia Marquez's biography and artistic development make this the most comprehensive account of his life and work available.

Part One: Backgrounds

Chapter One: The Novel

“The second half of the twentieth century will be remembered as the era of the Latin American novel.” Only time will tell whether such a speculation, raised individually by critics Maurice Nadeau and Raymond Sokolov, is actually to be borne out. Still, it cannot be doubted that, beginning with Borges and Carpentier in the 1940s, and Rulfo and Cortázar in the 1950s, the explosion of narrative talent in Hispanic America constitutes a special period in the history of human creativity, a privileged moment when one sees a much-afflicted civilization actively producing and receiving its foundational classics of the literary imagination. And it is not only a question of a few sovereign and “universal” authors’ names—admirable though their writings may be—but also, among Latin America’s reading publics and intelligentsia alike, a sense that literature truly matters, that its assumptions and art belong to the larger sociopolitical debate and thus contribute in a vital way toward the life of Latin American nations.

To many foreign readers, this panorama of South American creativity has come to be symbolized by the figure of Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, whose work combines features both of Tolstoy the realist story teller of everyday life and of Dostoevsky the visionary fantasist and satirist. Of course the name García Márquez primarily conjures up his One Hundred Years of Solitude, that cultural phenomenon the like of which we see seldom in our times. Here is a great and complex book that, within its covers, includes every possible aspect of human life and, in its art and structure, demonstrates a sophistication and mastery the equal of Melville, Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, or Nabokov at their best. At the same time the book enjoys continued high sales in Colombia, in Latin America, and throughout much of the world. For such a confluence of high art and popular success one needs to go back to the nineteenth century, when entire French families would anxiously await the next installment from Balzac or Hugo, and Yankee audiences would pack the halls in order to see and hear Dickens in the flesh.

It would be impossible to overestimate the impact that García Márquez’s chronicle has had on the larger reading public. Some statistics and anecdotes should suffice to convey the extent of its influence. When the Argentine publisher Editorial Sudamericana issued the first edition of Cien años de soledad in 1967, initial projections were of gradual sales of ten thousand copies and an annual trickle thereafter. As it happened, the first printing of eight thousand copies sold out in a week, all of them at subway station newsstands in Buenos Aires. Soon the novel was taking the continent by storm, and to this day the pace has not abated, the number of copies sold in the Hispanic world long ago having surpassed the ten million mark.

Cien años de soledad has since been translated into over thirty languages (including pirated versions in Greek and Arabic). Among its fans is Bill Clinton—indeed, it’s reportedly his favorite novel. When in the White House, President Clinton lifted a three-decades-old U.S. travel ban on García Márquez, whom the State Department in the 1960s had deemed a dangerous element, placing him on the immigration “blacklist.” But they were unable to limit the American sales of his most famous book. There are millions of copies in print of the Avon and HarperCollins paperback editions, and on commuter trains, park benches, or Amtrak cars it is common enough to see a scraggly-bearded sophomore or a chic secretary fully engrossed in their One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In Soviet Russia the book sold a fast million copies in that country’s foreign literature magazine. A touching instance of the amazement it seems to have caused there is the story—often cited with delight by García Márquez—of the elderly Soviet woman who copied out the entire text of the novel word by word, in order to make sure that she had really read what she had read. On the other hand, the Russian version of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only translation from which García Márquez’s original sex scenes have been expurgated, suggesting that it is not only the author’s politics that can make a society’s custodians nervous.

But it is in Colombia and the rest of Latin America where the impact of the book has been widest and deepest, and where, as a result, the novelist himself enjoys the status of a kind of unofficial hero, is feted in a style more commonly reserved for athletes or movie stars. Of few serious writers today could it be said that most of his compatriots know of him and his writings, but in fact during my travels in Colombia I am constantly struck by the variety of casual strangers—nurses, salesmen, social workers, bankers, industrialists, government bureaucrats—who are joyfully acquainted with One Hundred Years of Solitude and with the man’s other works too. Readers as well as reporters often allude to García Márquez by his nickname “Gabo” and even the diminutive form “Gabito” (it is as if the New York Times were to refer to E. L. Doctorow as “Ed”); news headlines routinely echo phrases from García Márquez’s fiction or see events through his narrative plots and characters; in Barranquilla I have seen businesses bearing names like “Farmacia Macondo” and “Edificio Macondo”; and there has been a modern “Hotel Macondo” in the resort town of Santa Marta.

Tales abound of the effect that One Hundred Years of Solitude has had on readers across Latin America. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s best-known novelist, likes to remark that his own cook reads García Márquez. The Colombian himself has told of an Argentine maid who refused to get back to work until she had finished the last page of the history of Macondo. García Márquez also recalls warmly that visit he made to rural Cuba in the early 1970s, when a group of peasants he was chatting with asked him what he does for a living. And he answered, “I write.” To the question, “What do you write?” he replied, “I wrote a book called Cien años de soledad,” at which point the peasants cried out as one, “Macondo!”

One of the most dramatic instances of the sheer power that García Márquez’s book has to seize the Latin American consciousness is this personal recollection by the U.S. novelist and journalist Ron Arias:

I remember riding a crowded bus one day in Caracas, and two women who looked like secretaries on their lunch break were laughing over certain episodes they’d read in Cien años de soledad. I joined in; then it seemed half the bus did. This was in 1969 and it was the year’s bestseller. Everyone who had read it was bringing up his or her favorite character, and we were all howling together. The book as a whole had struck a common chord with us all, since historically we had all come from Macondo . . . , we all had a tío [uncle] or two in a revolution, and I’m sure there were people in our lives chasing more than butterflies.¹

Arias is right in tracing the direct appeal of One Hundred Years among Latino audiences to its broad array of Latin character types: the old tío sitting on the house doorstep; the revolutionary evoking past campaigns; the unrelenting womanizer; or, in archetypal Úrsula, the steadfast and endlessly toiling mother figure. With hindsight, the fable of Macondo’s spectacular success can be further attributed to its lucid and accessible prose style, its attitude of serene wonder, its rapid-fire narrative of action and adventure, its compelling tales of romantic love, its exuberant episodes of bawdy sex, its humorous sequences of popular myth and fantasy, its muralistic intimations of the entirety of a continent’s failed past, and, last but not least, its ribald and generous sense of humor. From start to finish in One Hundred Years of Solitude there is an underlying tone of irreverence toward officialdom, the perspective being not so much that of a society’s victims or les misérables as of ordinary townsfolk who find themselves set upon by powerful forces and who, through struggle, play, and eroticism, through work, esoteric studies, love, and just living, somehow resist—even if in the end they are all resoundingly defeated.

By creating a narrative of ordinary Latin folk that is without a hint of insincerity or condescension, and by articulating a kind of history “from below” that is nonetheless joyous and shuns the dual traps of either idealized heroes or piteous victimization, García Márquez has given poetry, magic, and dignity to Latin American daily life and can thus be thought of in all justice as a “people’s writer.” For all its modernistic sophistication, his novelistic art springs organically from local values and experiences, much as the art of jazz, however many lessons it may assimilate from Bach, Ravel, or Stravinsky, grows “naturally” out of the musical concerns specific to African-American culture. The way in which American jazz buffs will speak affectionately of “Thelonious” or “the Duke” can be likened to the references to “Gabo” one finds readily in Hispanic conversation and media.

This intimate relationship of García Márquez to the people of Latin America became most manifest in the spontaneous outpourings of public sentiment and jubilation with which, on the morning of 21 October 1982, the news of his Nobel Prize was greeted. “GABO NOBEL DE LITERATURA,” said a succinct newspaper headline in Colombia, where many a celebration was taking place in the streets.² Back in Mexico City, where García Márquez has had a home since 1975, the entire student population of an elementary school arrived in front of his house in El Pedregal and greeted him with a congratulatory chorus.³ Later in the day, needing a respite from the constantly ringing telephone, the author went out for a drive; on the road strangers honked their car horns and nodded at him respectfully, and when his BMW stalled at a stoplight and he had some trouble getting it to start again, a voice from a nearby vehicle shouted, “Hey, Gabo, the only thing you’re good for is getting the Nobel Prize!”⁴ To an unprecedented extent, then, García Márquez went beyond his original status as novelist to become a mass phenomenon, a special kind of public figure whose work inspires not only admiration and respect but personal warmth and affection from most all. Seldom in our time does the higher art of literature gain so broad a following.

These human-interest accounts would add up to little more than idle gossip were it not for the special genius and achievement of the man himself. García Márquez’s Nobel Prize in literature came in official acknowledgment of many things, among them the author’s global readership (notably in the Third World) and also his radical humanitarianism, a key criterion in the Alfred Nobel legacy. At the same time the Swedish Academy’s statement bows respectfully to high aesthetic norms and observes that “each new work of [García Márquez] is received by expectant critics as an event of world importance.” And in further recognition of his having created an entire human geography, fully inhabited by an array of characters who reappear from book to book in a variety of situations, the Nobel Committee compared the breadth and stature of García Márquez to those of past masters such as Balzac and Faulkner. Moreover, they praised the Colombian’s “wild imagination” for having fashioned an art that successfully “combines the fantastic and the realistic.”

One normally does not rely on the press releases of prize committees as a starting point for literary reflections, but in this case the Nobel people did raise pertinent issues by evoking the distinctive aspects of García Márquez, the man and the writer—such items as his broad literary canvas, his creative use of fantasy, his political leftism, his immense popularity, and of course his undeniable artistic greatness. In recent years this specific combination has been in short supply, in both advanced capitalist and socialist cultures. Today in the North Atlantic countries there are but a handful of novelists of whom it could be said that they exhibit enduring artistry, produce an oeuvre of totalizing vision, enjoy worldwide readership, participate in progressive causes, and crystallize new ways of applying the fantastical imagination to human experience.

It was not too long ago that North American literary critics like Leslie Fiedler were making pronouncements to the effect that “the Novel is dead.” And indeed at the time a relatively barren narrative panorama in the West (Germany excepted), along with the electronic paradise then being sung by media visionary Marshall McLuhan, did seem to suggest that the glory days of prose fiction were over. In retrospect, however, the doomsayers seem to have misconstrued their poor home harvests for a universal drought, inasmuch as it was during that same decade that an entire constellation of Latin American writers were clearly demonstrating the formal and cultural renewability of the novel and its resources. And it was García Márquez who was doing the most to help save the novel from itself, to rescue it from the narrow little impasses and byways in which Euro-American prose fiction writers had taken refuge and set up their shop.

It might be helpful to recall the world situation of the novel in 1967, the year when the long chronicle of Macondo was being typeset and bound by its lucky Argentine publisher. In the United States, prose fiction was in a state of directionless anomie. Norman Mailer, only slowly recovering from the ideological attacks on his brilliant Barbary Shore (1951), had proved as yet incapable of replacing the grandeur of his first book, The Naked and the Dead (1948). Nabokov, the other United States postwar novelist of record, was sliding into the onanistic, cranky self-indulgences of Ada. Meanwhile both WASP and Jewish novelists had fully restored traditional realist narrative, though none seemed able or inclined to enrich that nineteenth-century form with the social knowledge, insights, and vision of the nineteenth-century Europeans. Instead they concentrated on suburban angst and on minutiae of the Self, producing a quasi-claustrophobic art best characterized as “solipsist realism.”

Saul Bellow’s one attempt at total narrative in The Adventures of Augie March had suffered from a pervasively flat, gray lifelessness, and John Updike’s portrayal of an entire town, in Couples, was to focus on a matter so trivial as sexual spouse-swapping (literally who’s sleeping with whom), veiled through the mists of New England religiosity. Clearly, from the heights of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, or even Henry Miller’s Tropics, a lapse had taken place. The richest and most powerful nation on earth was producing novels that were materially thin and formally impoverished. What Arthur Miller deplored about the American theater in the 1950s was perfectly applicable to the fictions of that decade: he complained of a “narrowing field of vision” and an incapacity to distinguish “between a big subject and a small one, a wide and narrow view.”⁵

In Soviet aesthetics, and among its defenders and imitators on the Western left, the problem was precisely the reverse—though there was one basic resemblance. What we know as “socialist realism” amounted alike to a restoration of the nineteenth-century genre, revived in this case through a state dictatorship, a rigidified sociocultural code, and a bastardized Marxism reflecting the narrow intellectual boundaries of Stalinism. With its search for a “positive hero,” socialist-realist fiction worked from a conception of character portrayal the very opposite of fine-grained subjectivism, a simplified psychology that, paradoxically, was appropriate less for realism than romance. This aesthetic came best argued, of course, via the programmatic critical writings of György Lukács, who, for all his awesome erudition and middle-European Kultur, remained ever obstinate in his distaste for modernist experimentation, his negation of narrative “inwardness,” and his personal dogmatic preference for fully rounded characters à la Balzac. On the other hand, those “critical realist” efforts whereby Soviet-inspired European and Latin American authors had hoped to denounce social ills resulted only in novels that (as García Márquez himself frequently observes) nobody reads and never overthrew any tyrants. In sum, Soviet-style aesthetics offered neither relief from nor alternatives to the wispy apolitical introspectiveness of U.S. cold war narrative.

In the British Isles and France only Samuel Beckett, the last of the great avant-garde purists, could be said to have broken genuinely new artistic ground in the novel. And it is no mean irony that he achieved this by fiercely paring down his material and experiential range, by rejecting the populous and panoramic Dublin of his compatriot’s Ulysses for the hermetically sealed jar of his own The Unnameable, by reducing fiction to the haunted voice and melodious murmurings of an isolated old man. Granted, there was the absolute perfection and beauty of his form and prose style, as well as an emotional register that masterfully encompassed everything from comic bawdy to pained nostalgia: the word “tragicomedy” describes his slender fictions as aptly as it does the Waiting for Godot to which it serves as subtitle. Nevertheless, the Malones and Morans and Mahoods of this Franco-Irish minimalist—with their ramshackle bikes and crutches and their travels through the mud—lead an existence that is as vividly and palpably textured as it is slim, desolate, and scanty. The remnants of reality in Watt and Molloy, while far more memorable than anything to be found in Updike or Bellow, only helped to underscore the profoundly solipsized nature of the world of Beckett’s choosing.

Not a few practicing critics in the 1960s were wondering what kind of up-to-date fiction could be possible in the wake of The Unnameable or Texts for Nothing. The sense of narrative art run aground in its straits seemed additionally confirmed by postwar literary developments in France, where the spirit of van...