Gabriel García Márquez

by Ilan Stavans

  An example of this attitude is clear in an interview he gave years later to Raymond Leslie Williams. “There’s no doubt that the author’s vision of his or her books is very different from the vision of the critic or of the reader . . .” he stated. “Readers don’t tell you why they liked the books, nor do they know why, but you feel that they really liked them. Of course, there are also people who say they don’t like the books, but in general my readers seem to be swept away. And my books are sold in enormous quantities, which interests me, because that means that they are read by a broad public. They are read by elevator operators, nurses, doctors, presidents. This gives me a tremendous security, while the critics always leave the writers with a spark of insecurity. Even the most serious and praiseful critics can go off on a track you hadn’t suspected, leaving you wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. Besides, I understand the critics very little. I’m not exactly sure what they are saying or what they think.” He wanted to go back to the source, to be truthful to the art of story-telling. In the same interview, García Márquez added: “Everything comes from inside or is in my subconscious or is the natural result of an ideological position or comes from raw experience that I haven’t analyzed, which I try to use in all innocence. I think I’m quite innocent in writing.”35

  Hollywood quickly became interested in a screen adaptation. In a newspaper column many years later, García Márquez wrote about all the invitations he had received throughout the years to turn the novel into a movie. He described a request by Anthony Quinn, offered during a dinner party around 1977, to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude into a fifty-hour TV series. He quotes Quinn as saying, “I offered him a million dollars and he didn’t want them, because García Márquez is a Communist, and he doesn’t want anyone to know he has received a million dollars. Because afterwards, once the dinner was over, he came and told me: How could you offer me that money in public? Some other time you can offer it to me without any witnesses nearby.” The story is more complicated. Quinn had arrived in Mexico City with the offer, which he announced to the media before he presented it to García Márquez. The Colombian told the media that he would do it not for one but for two million, one for him “and the other for the Latin American revolution.” To which Quinn responded, “I’ll give him one million. The second million he can get it from someone else.” Anthony Quinn’s offer wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last. Some years before, a consortium of North American and European producers had offered García Márquez two million dollars. There were rumors, apparently unfounded, that Francis Ford Coppola, who directed The Godfather series, was also interested in an adaptation.36

  Still in his forties, García Márquez was at his apex. He was considered a living treasure, and he occupied a place on the shelf of world literature.

  Afterword

  A man’s life is filled with unexpected twists and turns which shape his destiny. What would have happened if, by chance, García Márquez had not completed One Hundred Years of Solitude? Or if, in a burst of terrible luck, all four copies of the manuscript had been lost? Less farfetched is the possibility that a single mishap in García Márquez’s life could have kept him one morning from returning to La Cueva de la Mafia to finalize his all-consuming literary endeavor. What then?

  The idea is atrocious. It is easier for me to understand the world without a Greek island than without this essential novel.

  Cyril Connolly, in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise, states that a writer’s purpose is to create a single masterpiece. Everything must be geared in that direction. García Márquez was forty when he reached his audience. His age is crucial: it is roughly the time when, after much struggle distilling one’s own style, the writer either shows the extent of his talent by stamping his vision in a single oeuvre whose value will outlast him—or he doesn’t. This middle-class Colombian journalist from “un moridero de pobres,” a God-forsaken Caribbean town, accomplished this task. Everything he did before the Buendía saga is mere preparation. Macondo had been gestating in his imagination since childhood, ever since his grandmother filled his head with bizarre, entertaining stories. Its traces began to appear in fictional narratives he composed during his tenure as a newspaper reporter.

  Today the reader recognizes those early references to Macondo, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the banana workers’ massacre, and other details in stories such as “One Day After Saturday” or “Big Mama’s Funeral,” or in the novellas No One Writes the Colonel and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

  The literary sleuth looking for earlier drafts of Macondian history is intrigued.

  For instance, “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” is a first-person account of a deluge in the mythical town. That rainstorm plays a prominent role in One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the piece is written in an existential mode. Although it doesn’t quite foretell any specific action to come in the Buendía chronicle, it served as a trigger: it enabled García Márquez to start visualizing the map of his imaginary habitat.

  García Márquez’s accomplishment is obvious from the response to his novel, one of universal adoration. What is mind-blowing is his reaction thereafter. Having reached his apex in 1967, what then? This isn’t an academic question. As it turned out, he had not yet reached his midpoint, what Dante, in the first canto of “Hell,” the opening third of the Divine Comedy, described as “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” What should a writer do with the rest of his allotted time? How should he maximize it without repeating himself?

  For years I thought that—paraphrasing Hamlet, whose famous last words were “The rest is silence”—the best García Márquez, the eponymous Libertador of Latin American culture, could do after that climax was disappear. I believed that, perhaps, for him the rest was silence, too. What else could an avid readership expect after such a bold, masterful act of invention?

  I was wrong, of course.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. The quote is from Ana María Ochoa’s essay “García Márquez, Macondismo, and the Soundscapes of Vallenato,” Popular Music, vol. 24, num. 2 (May 2005): 207–208. A number of scholars have explored the topic of Macondismo, among them José Joaquín Brunner in “Traditionalism and Modernity in Latin American Culture,” in Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery, Hispanic Issues vol. 28, edited by Emil Volek. New York and London: Routledge, 2002: 3–31.

  2. This ambivalence is explored by Kelly Hargrave and Georgina Smith Seminet in “De Macondo a McOndo: Nuevas voces en la literatura latinoamericana,” Chasqui, vol. 2 (November 1998): 14–26.

  1 Aracataca

  1. Los diez mandamientos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1966. The translation is mine. García Márquez’s piece was also published as “Desventuras de un escritor de libros,” in the Magazín Dominical of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador (August 7, 1966).

  2. For instance, Raymond L. Williams, in Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984, offers 1928 as the birth year. Among others, Mario Vargas Llosa, in García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971, makes the same mistake.

  3. “Ni yo soy diablo ni Gabito es santo: Luis Enrique,” in Silvia Galvis, Los García Márquez. Bogotá: Océano and Arango Editores, 1997: 133.

  4. See Dasso Saldívar, García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997: 86, and Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009: 29. Saldívar gives the exact time of the writer’s birth a half hour earlier: 8:30 A.M.

  5. Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life: 40.

  6. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, translated by Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1983: 52.

  7. García Márquez, “Caribe mágico,” in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 59–62.

  8. The sentence serves as the epigraph to Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Mad
ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

  9. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971: 14.

  10. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003: 14–15.

  11. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, no. 82 (1981), reprinted in The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II, edited by Philip Gourevich, prologue by Orhan Pamuk. New York: Picador, 2007: 190–191.

  12. Gabriel García Márquez, foreword to La Casa Grande by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, translated by Seymour Menton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991: xi.

  13. Silvia Galvis, Los García Márquez. Bogotá: Océano Arango Editores, 1997: 259.

  14. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 19.

  15. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 188.

  16. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 189.

  17. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 18.

  18. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 68.

  19. Pete Hamill, “Love and Solitude,” Vanity Fair (March 1988): 131. See also Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 89–90.

  20. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 70.

  21. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 79–90.

  22. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 19–20.

  23. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 20.

  24. García Márquez, “Vuelta a la semilla,” published on December 21, 1983, in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 643–646. See also Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life: 103.

  25. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 17.

  26. See Ilan Stavans, “Sangre y origen,” El Diario (New York), April 14, 2009.

  27. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1970: 135.

  28. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de una deicidio: 28.

  2 Apprenticeship

  1. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 136.

  2. When I wrote my essay “The First Book” (included in Art and Anger. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996) for The Washington Post Book World in 1995, I had a long debate with the newspaper’s fact checker who pointed out that Emilio Salgari didn’t exist because his name doesn’t appear in the Library of Congress catalog. To my dismay, I realized he was right once I checked the source. How come such an influential young-adult author had no footing in the English-speaking world? It’s a mystery . . .

  3. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 137.

  4. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 96.

  5. Registered at the Ministerio de Educación, in Folio 345, Libro 18.

  6. Pete Hamill, “Love and Solitude”: 130.

  7. Pete Hamill, “Love and Solitude”: 130.

  8. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: 379.

  9. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 39.

  10. For instance, Silvia Galvis, The García Márquez: 73–106 and 133–156. Also, Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 75–128.

  11. Jacques Gilard, Gabriel García Márquez: Obra periodística, vol. 1 Textos costeños. Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1982: 7–8.

  12. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 48.

  13. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 48.

  14. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 41.

  15. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 30, 49. “Bloody Hell” is the same type of expression used by Úrsula Iguarán in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, upon discovering the corpse of her son José Arcadio Buendía in the house he shared with Rebeca.

  16. Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002: 186.

  17. Cristina Pestaña Castro, “¿Quién tradujo por primera vez ‘La meta-morfosis’ de Franz Kafka al castellano?,” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1999.

  18. Gabriel García Márquez, “The Third Resignation,” Collected Stories, translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1984: 5.

  19. Eligio García Márquez, Tras las claves de Melquíades: Historia de “Cien años de soledad.” Bogotá: Editorial Norma, 2001: 96.

  20. See Ilan Stavans, “Buffoonery of the Mundane,” The Nation (October 7, 2002). Reprinted as “Felisberto is an Imbecile,” A Critic’s Journey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

  21. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 32.

  22. See Ilan Stavans, “Beyond Translation: Faulkner and Borges,” in Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, edited with an introduction by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

  23. Juan Carlos Onetti, Confesiones de un lector. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995: 20–21.

  24. Gabriel García Márquez, “El amargo encanto de la máquina de escribir,” in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 362–365.

  25. See Raymond Leslie Williams, Ideology and the Novel in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Colombia: The Colombian Novel, 1844–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991: 20–51.

  26. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: 135.

  27. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: 149.

  28. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: 203.

  29. Gabriel García Márquez, “Bogotá 1947,” published on October 21, 1981, in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 218–220.

  30. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 185.

  3 Mamador de gallos

  1. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 185.

  2. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 55.

  3. Germán Vargas Cantillo, “García Márquez y el Grupo de Barranquilla,” El arte de leer a García Márquez, edited by Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2007: 46.

  4. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 55.

  5. Gabriel García Márquez, “El amargo encanto de la máquina de escribir,” in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 362–365. See Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 498.

  6. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 55.

  7. Peter S. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 189–190.

  8. Interview with Susana Cato, “Soap Operas Are Wonderful, I’ve Always Wanted to Write One,” Gramma (January 17, 1988). Reprinted in Gene H. Bell-Villada, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006: 148–153. Tracing the possible inspirations of One Hundred Years of Solitude has become a sport of sorts among academics. As I state elsewhere in this volume, the usual suspects are, aside from Diary of the Year of the Plague, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, William Faulkner novels about the Deep South, and Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. I place at the top of the list the source of sources: the Bible. Intriguingly, David T. Haberly, in his essay “Bags of Bones: A Source for One Hundred Years of Solitude,” MLN, vol. 105, num. 2 (March 1990): 392–3, suggests an unlikely option: Chateaubriand’s Atala, which is mentioned prominently in a predecessor of García Márquez’s novel in Colombia, Jorge Isaac’s María.

  9. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 59.

  10. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 59.

  11. Alfred Kazin: “Review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories,” New York Times Book Review, February 20, 1972: 14.

  12. Alfred Kazin, “Review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories”: 14.

  13. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 33.

  14. Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: Crónica del grupo de Barranquilla. Barranquilla: Ediciones La Cueva, 2006: 354. />
  15. Meira Delmar, interview with the author, Barranquilla, November 2007.

  16. Miguel Fernández-Braso, La soledad de Gabriel García Márquez. Barcelona: Planeta, 1972: 58–59.

  17. Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: 310.

  18. Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: 313.

  19. Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: 313.

  20. Miguel Fernández-Braso: La soledad de Gabriel García Márquez: 59.

  21. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 373.

  22. García Márquez: “El cuento del cuento,” published on August 26, 1981 in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 188–190.

  23. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: 393–394.

  24. Regarding the metaliterary devices, another point of coincidence—another tacit tribute?—between Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude is the recurrence of the palimpsest (etymologically, from the Latin palimpsestum, meaning scraped again, and defined as “a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible”). The narrator of Cervantes’s novel finds in Toledo, a town known for its academy devoted to translation, a scroll written originally in Arabic by the historian Cide Hamete Benengeli and asks a Moor he comes across on the street to translate it for him. In the last pages of García Márquez’s novel, the last Aureliano finds a series of parchments written by the Gypsy Melquíades that chronicles the Buendía saga and includes an italicized epigraph that reads: “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants” (One Hundred Years of Solitude: 420). In other words, the two texts have murky origins. Or, to go even further with the cultural connotations, both narratives aren’t only presented as spurious; furthermore, they have been composed by chroniclers (an Arab, a Gypsy) whose standing in Hispanic civilization is defined by rejection.