Gabriel García Márquez Remembered

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n April 17, Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico City at the age of eighty seven. After suffering from Lymphoma cancer and Alzheimer’s for many years, he was hospitalised this year, later dying from an infection.

“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”

From The Paris Review Interviews, Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69

My first encounter with Márquez was, as for many of his readers, with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I fell in love with the ‘magical’ setting of Macondo and the fascinating way in which Márquez tells the story of the birth and death of successive generations of the fictional Buendía family. I use the term ‘magical’ tentatively, because in Márquez’s world of ‘magical realism’, unbelievable occurrences are accepted as commonplace by the brilliantly eclectic and bizarre narratives. Márquez himself often playfully dismissed any associations with the genre, once stating that ‘surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America’.

One Hundred Years of Solitude gives countless examples of this surrealist reality; an ancient Sanskrit text is brought to the town by the gypsy Melquíades and precisely predicts Macondo’s tragic future, the first matriarch of the family lives to be over a hundred and fifty years old, and Remedios the Beauty, who, ‘too beautiful for this world’, without explanation ascends into the sky one day whilst arranging some bed covers. Márquez’s ability to position these absurdly comical occurrences alongside the passions and hardships of his characters is a testament to the skill of his writing and is what makes it so interesting and widely celebrated, with love, death and loss and solitude comprising his main recurrent themes.

Born in Colombia in 1927, García Márquez grew up in the small Caribbean town of Aracataca, mainly raised by his maternal Grandmother Dona Tranquilina Iguaran Cortes, who became the inspiration for Solitude’s Ursula Iguarán. Although Márquez moved from Aracataca to Bogota at a young age, and was taken to far-flung European destinations such as Paris and Barcelona by his success, his hometown undoubtedly left a lasting impression and influence.

There are striking similarities between Márquez’s hometown and the Caribbean coastal settings of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Márquez frequently employed the use of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical material in his narratives. Moreover, the Caribbean culture and religion at Aracataca, comprised of a combination of African, indigenous and European influences, manifest themselves in the juxtaposition of gypsy mysticism and European Catholicism in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even Chronicle of a Death Foretold is based on  Márquez’ youth, with the murder of the protagonist Santiago Nasar based on the murder of his good friend Cayetano Gentile Chimento in Sucre, Colombia in 1951.

Márquez, known fondly as ‘Gabo’, has had success quite unlike any other Latin American writer. Second only to Cervante’s ‘Don Quixote’, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the highest grossing Spanish language text ever, with over 30 million copies sold, and Márquez hailed as ‘perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote’ by Pablo Neruda. Gabo, the Nobel winning novelist, literary critic, film critic and screen-writer was one of the leading figureheads of the Latin American literary boom of the sixties and early seventies. Alongside writers and critics such as Jose Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa, he completely revolutionised Latin American fiction. Gabo helped create a literary style reflected the unique voice of post-colonial Latin America, breaking away from simple emulation of their contemporary modernist European counterparts.

Whilst Márquez was widely recognised as the father of Latin American literature, his career began at a time when it was difficult to be published, and texts that were published were not well distributed. Márquez began his career as a political journalist in the late 1940’s and 50s, after abandoning a law degree at the National University of Columbia. He wrote for publications such as El Universal in Cartegena and for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla (also Shakira’s hometown).

It was at this point he joined the literary Barranquilla Group, and in this environment Marquez was given an important introduction to the literary world through reading modernist works such as Faulkner and Kafka and working alongside inspirational writers and philosophers  Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and Germán Varga. At this point Marquez began to align himself with the Communist party. He remained an avid left wing voice, distrusting the dictatorial regimes in many Latin American countries, and assisting at the Venezuelan coup d’état where the dictator Jiménez  was exiled.

It was in 1959 that he met Fidel Castro for the first time, forming a life-long friendship with the revolutionary leader. This is a friendship which has been widely speculated upon but also criticised, leading to a feud with Márquez’ contemporary author Vargas Llosa (who gave him the nickname ‘Castro’s Courtesan’), infamously culminating with what biographer Gerald Martin noted was “the most famous punch in the history of Latin America”. The friendship was not only criticised by other Latin American writers on the basis that Cuba was not allowing social and intellectual freedom, but also led to García Márquez being refused entry to the US for many years.

[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]Many of his works can be read both as symbolic allegories of the political events of the time and as emblematic for the history of Latin America.[/pullquote] When I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was largely unaware of the bold political allegory Márquez makes with the mythical town of Macondo. The events of the book, including the military massacre of striking workers and the corporate hegemony of the ‘gringo’ food companies which disrupt the socio-economic system of the town, can be read as tracing Colombia’s national history. Márquez not only celebrated Latin America but was also unapologetically committed to exposing the damaging Western, particularly American, desire to control the continent economically. This is achieved through his portrayal the struggle of a people trying to emerge from a history of poverty and colonial rule, oppressed by their own governments and also by the aftereffects of colonialism. In his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Márquez utilised the international platform to make a series of statements discussing the future of Latin America:

“Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration”

Márquez’s life does not do justice to the vivid images his texts evoke, the lucidity and dream-like quality of the narratives in which the reader is often brought back to a past trauma, or forward to a point where ‘present’ anxieties seem hardly relevant. This individual ability to create rich visual images and a scenography is reminiscent of film. Indeed, Márquez was passionate about cinema, founding and serving as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana and writing screenplays such as Tiempo de morir (1966) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988).

[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]There can be no greater confirmation of Márquez’ legacy than the sheer volume of articles, obituaries and media interest over the last couple of days. [/pullquote] The attention is particularly poignant at a time when media interest is often not concerned with the literary or artistic world beyond supercilious comments and side-lined coverage. There is a strong sense of the place Márquez is held by a global community; this is felt particularly in Latin American and especially in Columbia, where his death has been followed by three days of national mourning. A private man, witty and warm in interviews, Márquez will be missed for creating a world which so beautifully represents the joys and pains of the modern condition; his work transcends boundaries and genre conventions, and will surely be loved and read for generations to come.

“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”

Love in the Time of Cholera

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  What’s your favourite Márquez novel?

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