Gabriel García Márquez

Solitude and Solidarity

Michael Bell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781350317734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

Much good criticism of Mrquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction has been striving. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude then stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as untypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Mrquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.

1

Introduction

Given his world-wide popularity, it is not surprising that an enormous amount has been written on García Márquez. Much of the commentary is illuminating and I do not wish to repeat it except by way of necessary synthesis.¹ Nonetheless, the way in which I now wish to view his œuvre is partly by reconsidering this criticism and, through that, the nature and meaning of his popularity. For, as with Dickens, the deliberately popular note of the fiction has often successfully disguised its underlying complexity.

Much of the best commentary on Márquez came, naturally enough, in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude which was, and remains, his great popular and critical success. The understandable tendency at that point was to see this work as the imaginative goal to which his whole career had been striving. I believe this novel is, indeed, his most substantial work to date and that it is in many ways summative of the Marquesian themes. But in the light of the varied works produced over the two following decades, it emerges as increasingly untypical. It also lends itself to sentimentalised reading. One can, therefore, readily understand the attitude of grateful deprecation with which Márquez came to view it.² One can also understand the desire of critics to insist on its weight and complexity. But this is where the difficulty arises: what weight exactly should we give to its dark, if not pessimistic, historical vision; its mythopoeic allusions and structure; and, above all perhaps in terms of critical focus, to the pervasive and disarming humour which encompasses even the authority of the narrative form itself?

I wish to consider these questions, in the first instance, by placing One Hundred Years of Solitude within a close reading of Márquez’ other fiction. In particular, I believe there is an implicit dialogue between his longer works. This internal dialogue does not necessarily resolve the ambiguities and ambivalences which thoughtful readers have found in the individual works. It does something more important. It enables us to understand why these qualities are of the essence. Where a concentration on Hundred Years makes ‘magical realism’ into an artistic goal, my reading suggests this is itself only a particular vehicle for a more pervasive and fundamental concern for the nature of literary ‘truth’.

Two principal schools of thought have grown up around One Hundred Years of Solitude. One stresses the fictive, mythopoeic and alchemical dimensions of the book and has therefore tended to universalise its significance.³ The other readings, usually by regional specialists, emphasise the condensed accuracy of its historical vision which the former reading is likely to blur and sentimentalise.⁴ In a general way it is evident that these readings are not incompatible and that the meaning of the book lies in their combination within the humorous spirit of the whole. But for a more precise sense of how this works it is well to be clear about such terms as ‘myth’, ‘history’ or ‘realism’ within the given imaginative context. The word ‘myth’ in particular has long acquired, whatever its anthropological and cultural implications, some specifically literary inflections. It can hardly be adduced as a fictive structure in the late twentieth century without a consciousness of its radical and programmatic significance for influential modernist writers such as James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

For this reason, I believe it is now most useful to see Márquez within a broader context of twentieth-century fiction around the world. His fiction was formed in immediate reaction to the Latin American writing of his early years but it also contributes to larger international developments. The distinctive imaginative modes, the political and historical themes, and the world-wide popularity of Márquez all make him a significant point from which to look back on previous generations which he, among others, enables us to see intelligibly as previous generations. The present study, therefore, has a comparative emphasis arising from the double sense in which it is necessary to ‘locate’ Márquez. Part of his meaning lies in his implicit place on a literary historical map of the century and part of it lies, in a deeply connected way, in his location on a map of the world.

In fact, the conflict, if it is one, between the universal and the local is a primary dialectic of Márquez’ own writings. The critical conflict to date has been too often a symptomatic reflection, rather than an explication, of this dialectic. Márquez’ œuvre is a sustained meditation on this very question: what is the relation between the local and the universal? These are clearly two aspects of a whole cloth. It is a kind of aspect blindness, as Wittgenstein put it, to see them as separable.⁵ Nonetheless, as aspects, they are distinct and their difference can be important. Everything about Márquez’ experience, including the sudden shift from an essentially local reputation to world popularity after the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, encourages meditation on the ironies and involutions of this question. His twin themes of solitude and solidarity might even be seen as the extreme poles of this dialectic.

Márquez himself has identified the central theme of his work not as myth, or love, or politics, but solitude.⁶ This is the continuing thread which links everything and I believe it remains the most helpful thread with which to enter his personal labyrinth; not least because solitude is itself a term of labyrinthine ambivalence. Solitude, for example, was central to the existentialist thinking of Sartre and Camus which had its ascendancy in France during Márquez’ time in Paris. Márquez, like many Latin American writers, saw Paris as an effective cultural capital and he doubtless assimilated the existentialist emphasis on solitude as fundamental to the human condition. But Márquez always kept a critical distance from European culture and another, more immediately pertinent, discussion of solitude is Octavio Paz’ volume of essays on Mexican history and character entitled The Labyrinth of Solitude.⁷ In Paz, the starting point is a recognition of solitude as a peculiarly Mexican and Latin American experience; or rather perhaps that there is a peculiarly regional experience of solitude. And for Paz solitude was not simply negative. He saw it as a necessary part of human experience and as the traditional prelude to great action or creativity. In other words, within Márquez’ formative horizon there was a strong awareness of universal, tragic solitude in modern literature at large along with a peculiarly local, and potentially creative, inflection of it.

It should also be noted that some of the characteristics Paz identified as Mexican and regional are ultimately part of the complex inheritance from Spain in Latin America. Like Paz, Márquez subjects this aspect of his own culture to a searching but inward critique. For both of them, solitude has a Hispanic as well as an American aspect.⁸

Paz argues that solitude may be experienced historically. The past, in other words, may seem to lack an intelligible or fruitful relation to the present. This too is a recurrent recognition in Spanish literature. The Spanish writer ‘Azorin’ in 1905 followed the route of Don Quixote three hundred years after the original publication of Cervantes’ masterpiece.⁹ Many later Latin American writers, including Márquez, have looked consciously behind the European realist novel to find a pertinent inspiration in the period, and in the specific figure, of Cervantes. They too have followed the route of Don Quixote to find him both remote and near. The example of Cervantes is not merely ‘literary’, it has an abiding historical pertinence.

As a modern Spaniard, ‘Azorin’ was struck, among other things, by the similarity of the life, the landscape and the people of present-day La Mancha to those described by Cervantes. At one level this was rather charming, at another level it was shocking. It was as if life had not moved on. And ‘Azorin’ develops this thought through a mutual metaphor of history and landscape. As he looks on the sun-baked, rocky terrain around him, there are no traces of human impact between himself and the horizon, which is to say there are no signs of historical activity within it.

And we, having made our way for hour after hour across this plain, feel overcome, annihilated, by the unchanging flatness, by the transparent, infinite sky, and by the inaccessible distance. And now we understand how Alonso Quijano had to be born in this land, and how his spirit, unbound, free, had to take its frenetic flight through these regions of dream and illusion.¹⁰

Whether in time or in space, there is virtually no humanly significant middle-ground. The eye passes from here to the horizon, or from the present to the eternal, without a middle area of activity in which their starkness can be absorbed.¹¹ Don Quixote is the story of a man for whom eternal archetypes and the immediate present clash with a disastrous absence of historical mediation. Cervantes’ stroke of genius was to find a fictional form in which to enact this theme.¹² The achievement of several Latin American writers, including Márquez, was to adapt his form to their own historical experience. Where Don Quixote, the mad persona of Alonso Quijano, madly conflates the chivalric past and contemporary life, several Latin American writers have felt the weight of a past maddeningly compressed into their present.

Because of his multilayered significance formally, historically and philosophically, Cervantes remains a tutelary presence in this discussion of Márquez. But he is not the only point of reference. It is necessary to see Márquez in a number of historical and comparative literary contexts simultaneously. For although he does not generally wear his metafictional concerns on his sleeve, his works are an intelligent digestion of, and an implicit commentary on, a variety of literary possibilities. Like Cervantes, he found himself at a historical and literary historical crossroads. As a further aspect of this, he is very self-consciously a local author with a world viewpoint, and while a regional readership will have a special insight into his work, the wider readership may ultimately be best placed to appreciate his significance. For example, ‘magical realism’ has acquired a strongly Latin American flavour but it is also a way of addressing fundamental questions about the nature of fiction.

What follows, therefore, is first a biographical summary concentrating on Márquez’ formative years. The general questions broached in these introductory comments are then unfolded as they arise in his principal works. My brief is to discuss the novels and as it happens a concentration on the longer works rather than the stories helps to bring out the underlying shape and implicit dialectic of the œuvre. Part of the effect will be to highlight the peculiar position of Hundred Years within Márquez’ œuvre; its being at once representative and untypical. Hence although the exigencies of exposition require me to lead up to and on from Hundred Years, the discussion may usefully be thought of as circling around this central text.

2

Biographical Summary

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez was born in 1928, the first child of a telegraph operator and the daughter of a retired colonel.¹ Partly in recompense for having married against their wishes, the couple allowed Gabriel, the first child, to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Aracataca in the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia. Márquez has repeatedly affirmed the formative importance of both his grandparents who gave him not only love but also time, the latter often in the form of stories and reminiscences.

At the age of seven he left to go to school and to live with his parents who eventually settled in the capital, Bogotá, up in the Andean central region. He never liked this city, which represented the abrupt end of his childhood. When he revisited his childhood home with his mother in young manhood, the grandparents were dead and the town itself was in decline following the banana boom. The memory of this lost childhood, itself mixed up with a sense of region and history, was of crucial creative importance to him.

During his teenage years he formed the ambition to write and has spoken of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ as the work which, in his student years, particularly brought home to him the power of imaginative literature. At university he studied law although he was distracted from the outset by writerly ambitions and soon started a career as a journalist. Between 1948 and 1949 he contributed many pieces to El Universal in Cartagena and then from 1950 to 1952, by now in his early twenties, he was living again in the Caribbean region, in the town of Barranquilla, and writing a regular whimsical column under the name of ‘Septimus’ for a local paper, El Heraldo.

His period in Barranquilla provided him with an important group of literary friends, including the older mentor figure Ramón Vinyes whom he was later to celebrate as the sage Catalan of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He discovered modern writers, such as Virginia Woolf, who were to be significant models. The most important was William Faulkner whose narrative techniques, historical themes and small town provincial locations were a crucial example to several Latin American writers. His column would sometimes consist of a short fiction in the mode of Kafka or Hemingway. He also produced notes and extracts for a projected novel, then entitled La Casa (The House), about a family called Buendía.

In Barranquilla Márquez in effect provided himself with an excellent literary education on a world scale while also responding to the popular culture of the Caribbean world. From this point of view the inland capital, Bogotá, seemed relatively provincial and an ironic relation to its capitolino culture was one of the recurrent motifs of his column. But he subsequendy moved to Bogotá and from early 1954 to mid-1955 he was a regular correspondent for El Espectador.

Here he took on two distinct functions both different from the humorous ‘Septimus’ persona. First, he was the regular film critic. This enabled him to develop his strong interest in film which remained important and became a primary and active concern again in the 1980s as he undertook teaching in the film school at Havana and became Head of the Latin American Film Foundation. His longer-term interest in film has a political dimension since it is a form which, in principle at least, could emulate the high periods of Greek and Elizabethan theatre when works of great power and subtlety reached the communal consciousness through large audiences, many of whom might be barely literate. His recent interest in television soap opera has a similar motive. The immediate importance of film to the early Márquez, however, was as part of a more general interest in narrative form and in the intelligent, artistic handling of popular material.

As well as film reviewing, Márquez now also took to investigative reporting. The ‘Septimus’ column had given him practice in developing a chosen theme economically, and usually with a need to hold the reader by the manner rather than the matter. Hence, as he turned to more factual, and often politically sensitive, subjects he brought to them a skilled consciousness of narrative presentation as in his account of an earthquake and avalanche at Medellin.² His most remarkable achievement in this respect was his series of columns telling the story in first person of a lone surviving sailor washed up after twelve days drifting at sea.³ A Colombian destroyer had gone down as a result of its illegal overloading with domestic goods on a return journey from Houston. These articles were an effective exposure of the Colombian navy, and Márquez and the pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Translation
• General Editor’s Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Biographical Summary
• 3 Journalism and Fiction
• 4 The Cervantean Turn: One Hundred Years of Solitude
• 5 The Magical and the Banal: The Autumn of the Patriarch
• 6 Male Tragedy/Female Novella: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
• 7 Not Flaubert’s Parrot: Love in the Time of Cholera
• 8 Solitude and Solidarity: The General in his Labyrinth
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index