Other literary forms

Besides his short fiction, including short stories and novellas, Gabriel García Márquez (gahb-ree-EHL gahr-SEE-ah MAHR-kays) has also written full-length novels, such as his masterpiece and best-known novel, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). In addition, during his long career as a journalist he has written numerous articles, essays, and reports on a variety of topics, particularly relating to Latin American life and politics. Among his nonfiction works is Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping, 1997), an account of the nefarious activities of drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1990.

Achievements

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s highly acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared and was immediately recognized by critics as a masterpiece of fiction. As a work of high literary quality, this novel was unusual in that it also enjoyed tremendous popular success both in Latin America and in translation throughout the world. This work made García Márquez a major figure—perhaps the major figure—of contemporary Latin American literature.

García Márquez’s work has been praised for bringing literary fiction back into contact with real life in all of its richness. His combination of realism and fantasy known as Magical Realism (realismo mágico) sets the stage for a full spectrum of Latin American characters. His stories focus on basic human concerns, and characters or incidents from one work are often integrated into others, if only with a passing reference.

García Márquez won the Colombian Association of Writers and Artists Award in 1954 for the story “Un dia despues del sabado.” The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude garnered the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Italian Chianciano Award, and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallego Prize. Awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, the Nobel committee compared the breadth and quality of his work to that of such great writers as William Faulkner and Honoré de Balzac. In 1988 García Márquez won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, for El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988).

Biography

Gabriel José García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a town near the Atlantic coast of Colombia, on March 6, 1927. His parents, Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio Márquez, sent him to live with his maternal grandparents for the first eight years of his life. He attended school in Barranquilla and Zipaquirá and went on to law studies at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá.

His first short story was published in 1947 in the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. The literary editor praised the work, and in the next five years several more short fictions were also published. When his studies were interrupted by political violence in 1948, García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena, but he never received his degree. Instead, he began his career as a journalist, writing for El Universal. He soon had a daily column and became friends with the writers and artists of the “Barranquilla group.” In 1950, he moved to Barranquilla and in 1954 to Bogotá, continuing his work as a journalist. During this time, he also published Leaf Storm, and Other Stories and received a prize from the Association of Artists and Writers of Bogotá.

In 1955, he was sent to Geneva, Switzerland, as a European correspondent. When El Espectador was closed down in January, 1956, García Márquez spent a period of poverty in Paris, working on the novel La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour, 1979) and writing some freelance articles. In the summer of 1957, he traveled through Eastern Europe before moving to Caracas, Venezuela, as a journalist. With the prospect of a steady job, he married Mercedes Barcha in March, 1958.

Interested since his university days in leftist causes, García Márquez worked for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina in Bogotá after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, and he later worked in Havana, Cuba, and New York. After leaving the agency, he moved to Mexico City, where he worked as a journalist and screenwriter with Carlos Fuentes during the period 1961-1967. In 1962, In Evil Hour was published and won the Esso Literary Prize in Colombia. That same year, a collection of stories, Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, also appeared. Then, in a spurt of creative energy, García Márquez spent eighteen months of continuous work to produce his best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which won book prizes in Italy and France in 1969. In order to be able to write in peace after the tremendous success of this book, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he met Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. In 1972, he won both the Rómulo Gallego Prize in Venezuela and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The money from both prizes was donated to political causes.

García Márquez left Barcelona in 1975 and returned to Mexico. That same year, El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), about the life of a Latin American dictator, was published, and in 1981, his novella Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982), appeared. His news magazine, Alternativa, founded in 1974 in Bogotá to present opposing political views, folded in 1980, but García Márquez continued his activism by writing a weekly column for Hispanic newspapers and magazines. His Nobel Prize speech in 1982 made a strong statement about conditions in Latin America yet sounded the note of hope in the face of oppression.

García Márquez continued his literary production after receiving the Nobel Prize, publishing, among other works, El general en su laberinto in 1989 (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), based on the life of South American revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar. He also continued his political work, appearing at conferences with, variously, Colombian, Venezuelan, Mexican, and U.S. presidents on such issues as civil war and drug trafficking. In 1999 he fell ill in Bogotá, in one of his seven houses, and was diagnosed with and treated for lymphatic cancer. His illness went into remission, and he continued to write, publishing the novel Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005) and the first volume in a proposed trilogy of memoirs, Vivir para contarla (2002; (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003).

Analysis

Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction is characterized by a thread of common themes, events, and characters that seem to link his work together into one multifaceted portrayal of the experiences of Latin American life. From the influences of his early childhood, when he learned from his grandmother how to tell the most fantastic stories in a matter-of-fact tone, to his later observations of the oppression and cruelties of politics, García Márquez captures the everyday life of the people of coastal Colombia, with its Caribbean flavor, as well as the occasional resident of the highlands of Bogotá. He has an eye for the details of daily life mixed with humor and an attitude of acceptance and wonder. His characters experience the magic and joy of life and face the suffering of solitude and isolation but always with an innate dignity. García Márquez’s vision touches real life with its local attitudes and values, and in the process it also reveals a criticism of politics, the church, and U.S. imperialism, as they contribute to the Latin American experience.

García Márquez’s body of work portrays a complete reality breaking out of conventional bounds. Characters from one story regularly show up or are mentioned in another, while his complex mix of fantasy and reality reveals a consummate storyteller capable of bringing to his work the magic of his non-European world. His impact as a writer lies in the fact that, although his work describes the Latin American experience of life, it also goes beyond to reveal a universal human experience.

Ojos de perro azul

García Márquez’s earliest stories have a bizarre, almost surreal tone, reminiscent of Franz Kafka. Collected in Ojos de perro azul, these stories represent an experimental phase of García Márquez’s development as a writer. They exemplify his new, or strange, realism, extending the reality of life into and beyond the experience of death. “La tercera resignación” (“The Third Resignation”), for example, deals with the thoughts and fears of a young man in his coffin. “Nabo, el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles” (“Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait”) tells of a man who is locked in a stable because he goes insane after being kicked in the head by a horse.

In Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo), García Márquez captures the atmosphere of a tropical storm through the eyes of his protagonist. Here, the world of Macondo, also used in his novella Leaf Storm and made world-famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is presented amid the suffocating oppressiveness of tropical weather. Here, as later, nature itself is often a palpable force in the fiction of García Márquez—often exaggerated and overwhelming in order to reflect the reality of Latin American geography and the natural forces within it. The repetition underscores the monotony of the continuing deluge, and the theme of solitude is reflected in the imagery, as well as in the personal relationship of Isabel and Martin: “The sky was a gray, jellyish substance that flapped its wings a hand away from our heads.”

No One Writes to the Colonel

After demonstrating his ability to capture the tropical atmosphere, García Márquez shows himself capable of capturing a portrait in words with his well-structured novella No One Writes to the Colonel. The central character is a dignified man with a deep sense of honor who has been promised a military pension. Every Friday, he goes to the post office to wait for mail that never comes, and then he claims that he really was not expecting anything anyway. He is a patient man, resigned to eternal waiting and hope when there is no reason to expect that hope to be fulfilled. “For nearly sixty years—since the end of the last civil war—the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.” His other hope is his rooster, which belonged to his son, who was executed for handing out subversive literature, but since he is too poor to feed the rooster, some townspeople work out an arrangement to provide food until after the big fight. The political background is introduced subtly as the story opens with the funeral of the first person to die of natural causes in this town in a long time. Violence, censorship, and political repression are a given, as is the pervasive poverty. The colonel continues passing out the literature in his son’s place and waiting for his pension. His dignity sustains him in the face of starvation.

The dialogues between the colonel and his practical wife of many years are woven through the novella and reach a climax at the very end of the story. She presses him to sell the rooster, asking plaintively and persistently what they will eat:

Los funerales de la Mamá Grande

The image of dignity is developed again in the first story of Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, entitled “La siesta del martes” (“Tuesday Siesta”) and also set in Macondo. Said to be García Márquez’s favorite story, it tells of a woman and her young daughter who arrive by train in the stifling heat at siesta time. The woman asks the priest to be allowed to visit her son in the cemetery. The young man was shot for being a thief, but she proudly claims him as her own with quiet self-control: “I told him never to steal anything that anyone needed to eat, and he minded me.”

The title story, “Los funerales de la Mamá Grande” (“Big Mama’s Funeral”), still set in Macondo, breaks the tone of the other stories into a technique of hyperbole, which García Márquez later used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to good effect. The opening sentence sets the tone:

The panorama and parody of the story mention Mama’s power and property in high-sounding phrases, many from journalism. The pageantry is grandiose to the point of the absurd for this powerful individual, a prototype of the patriarch who appears in García Márquez’s later work. She is a legend and local “saint,” who seemed to the local people to be immortal; her death comes as a complete surprise. The story criticizes the manipulation of power but also skillfully satirizes the organized display or public show that eulogizes the holders of power with pomp and empty words. The story ends when the garbage men come and sweep up on the next day.

Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories

Fantastic elements characterize the collection Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories. Two of the stories, “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”) and “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” (“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”), have adult figures who are like toys with which children, and other adults, can play. With the second story, García Márquez also tries a technique of shifting narrators and point of view to be used later in the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch.

A political satire is the basis for another story, “Muerte constante más allá del amor” (“Death Constant Beyond Love”). The situation that forms the basis for the satire is also incorporated into the longer “Innocent Eréndira.” Geographically, in this collection García Márquez has moved inland to the barren landscape on the edge of the Guajiro desert. Here, he sets a type of folktale with an exploited granddaughter, a green-blooded monster of a grandmother, and a rescuing hero named Ulises. Combining myth, allegory, and references from other works, García Márquez weaves a story in which “the wind of her misfortune” determines the life of the extraordinarily passive Eréndira. Treated as a slave and a prostitute by her grandmother, Eréndira persuades Ulises to kill the evil woman—who turns out to be amazingly hard to kill. Throughout the story, García Márquez demonstrates the ability to report the most monstrous things in a matter-of-fact tone. Some critics have pointed out that the exaggeration that seems inherent in many of his tales may have its roots in the extraordinary events and stories that are commonplace in his Latin American world.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, García Márquez blends his experience in journalism with his mastery of technique to tell a story based on an actual event that took place in 1955 in Sucre, where he lived at the time. Using records and witness testimony, he unfolds his tale on the lines of a detective story. The incident is based on the revenge taken by Angela Vicario’s brothers on their friend Santiago Nasar, who supposedly took Angela’s virginity, although some doubt is cast on this allegation. The story is pieced together as the townspeople offer their memories of what happened, along with excuses for not having warned the victim. Tension builds as the reader knows the final outcome but not how or why it will occur. The use of dreams (ironically, Nasar’s mother is an interpreter of dreams), the feeling of fatalism, and submission to the code of honor, all of which form a part of this society’s attitudes, play a central role in the novella, as do García Márquez’s use of vision and foreshadowing. Although the basis for the story is a journalistic report of a murder, the actual writing captures the themes of love and death, as well as the complex interplay of human emotions and motives in a balanced and poetic account, which reveals García Márquez’s skill as a writer.

Strange Pilgrims

Strange Pilgrims picks up the Magical Realism of the earlier short stories, organizing twelve works written between 1976 and 1982 so that seven stories, having to do with the death-force of life are followed by five stories that evoke the vitality of death. The opening story portrays a septuagenarian former president whose imminent death proves to be illusory; the seventh story depicts a septuagenarian woman, to whom the approach of death also proves to be illusory. In both stories, dying is detailed as a form of intensified living. The second and sixth stories deal with the supernatural, one through a corpse that does not putrefy and the other through a haunted bedroom, and both include Italian settings. The third and fifth stories carry fairy-tale variations: a sleeping beauty who, unkissed, awakes of her own volition, and a lady in distress who, imprisoned in a madhouse, transcends her incarceration. In the fourth story, the umbilicus of the seven, a woman, whose life consists of dreaming, awakens from her dreams only through death. The concluding five stories present, first, two stories of murder—between which is a story of suicide—and two stories dealing with strange fatalities. In one, the wave function of light drowns persons without diving gear; in the other, an apparently negligible rose-thorn prick on a young bride’s ring fingertip inexorably causes her death.

Bibliography