GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Gabriel

Nationality: Colombian. Born: Aracataca, 6 March 1927. Education: Colegio San José, Barranquilla, 1940-42; Colegio Nacional, Zipaquirá, to 1946; studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, 1947-48; University of Cartagena, 1948-49. Family: Married Mercedes Barcha in 1958; two sons. Career: Journalist, 1947-50, 1954, and foreign correspondent in Paris, 1955, El Espectador; journalist, El Heraldo, Barranquilla, 1950-54; founder, Prensa Latina (Cuban press) agency, Bogotá, Havana, 1959, and New York, 1961; lived in Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, Spain, and Mexico; returned to Colombia in 1982; founder, 1979, and since 1979 president, Fundación Habeas. Lives in Mexico. Awards: Colombian Association of Writers and Artists award, 1954; Concurso Nacional de Cuento short story prize, 1955; Esso literary prize, 1961; Chianciano prize (Italy), 1968; Foreign Book prize (France), 1970; Gallegos prize (Venezuela), 1972; Neustadt international prize, 1972; Nobel prize for literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times prize, 1988. LL.D.: Columbia University, New York, 1971. Member: American Academy.

Publications

Short Stories

La hojarasca (novella). 1955; as "Leafstorm," in Leafstorm and Other Stories, 1972.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (novella). 1957; as "No OneWrites to the Colonel," in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968; with Big Mama's Funeral, 1971.

Los funerales de la mamá grande. 1962; as Big Mama's Funeral, with No One Writes to the Colonel, 1971.

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968.

No One Writes to the Colonel; Big Mama's Funeral, 1971.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada: Siete cuentos. 1972; as Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, 1978.

Ojos de perro azul: Nueve cuentos desconocidos. 1972.

Leafstorm and Other Stories. 1972.

Cuatro cuentos. 1974.

Todo los cuentos 1947-1972. 1975.

Collected Stories. 1984; revised edition, 1991.

Collected Novellas. 1990.

Doce cuentos Peregrinos. 1992; as Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1994.

Novels

La mala hora. 1962; as In Evil Hour, 1979.

Isabel viendo llover en Macondo. 1967.

Cien años de soledad. 1967; as One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970.

El negro qui hizo esperar a los ángeles. 1972.

El otoño del patriarca. 1975; as The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976.

El último viaje del buque fantasma. 1976.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada. 1981; as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982.

El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve: el verano feliz de la señora Forbes. 1982.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera. 1985; as Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988.

La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile. 1986; asClandestine in Chile. The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1987.

El general en su labertino. 1989; as The General in His Labyrinth, 1990.

Plays

Viva Sandino. 1982; as El asalto: el operativo con que el FSLN se lanzó al mundo, 1983.

El secuestro (screenplay). 1982.

María de mi corazón (screenplay) (Mary My Dearest), with J. H. Hermosillo. 1983.

Eréndira (screenplay, from his own novella). 1983.

Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man (produced 1988).

Screenplays:

El secuestro, 1982; María de mi corazón (Mary My Dearest), with J.H. Hermosillo, 1983; Eréndira, from his own novella, 1983.

Other

La novela en América Latina: diálogo, with Mario VargasLlosa. 1968.

Relato de un náufrago. 1970; as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, 1986.

Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (essays). 1973.

Chile, el golpe y los gringos. 1974.

Cuba en Angola. 1977.

Operación Carlota. 1977.

De viaje por los países socialistes: 90 días en la "Cortina de Hierro." 1978.

Crónicas y reportajes (essays). 1978.

Periodismo militante. 1978.

La batalla de Nicaragua, with Gregoria Selser and Daniel WaksmanSchinca. 1979.

García Márquez habla de García Márquez (interviews), edited by Alfonso Rentería Mantilla. 1979.

Los Sandinistas, with others. 1979.

Así es Caracas. 1980.

Obra periodística, edited by Jacques Gilard. (includes vol. 1: Textos consteños; vols. 2-3: Entre cachacos; vol. 4: De Europa y América (1955-1960) 4 vols., 1981-83.

El olor de la guayaba, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (interview).1982; as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.

La soledad de América Latina; Brindis por la poesía. 1983.

Viva Sandino. 1982; as El asalto, 1983; as El secuestro, 1983.

Persecución y muerte de minorías: Dos perspectivas polemicas, with Guillermo Nolando-Juárez. 1984.

El cataclismo de Dámocles = The Doom of Damocles. 1986.

Textos costeños. 1987.

Diálogo sobre la novela latinoamericana, with Mario Vargas Llosa. 1988.

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Bibliography:

García Márquez: An Annotated Bibliography 1947-1979 by Margaret Eustella Fau, 1980, and A Bibliographic Guide to García Márquez 1979-1985 by Margaret Eustella Fau and Nelly Sfeir de Gonzáles, 1986; Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986-1992 by Nelly S. Gonzalez, 1994; Repertorio crítico sobre Gabriel García Márquez by Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, 1995.

Critical Studies:

"The Short Stories of García Márquez" by Roger M. Peel, in Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1), Winter 1971; García Márquez by George R. McMurray, 1977; The Presence of Faulkner in the Writings of García Márquez by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1980; García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland by Regina Janes, 1981; The Evolution of Myth in García Márquez from La hojarasca to Cien años de soledad by Robert Lewis Sims, 1981; García Márquez by Raymond L. Williams, 1984; Special García Márquez Issue, Latin American Literary Review 13, January-June 1985; Critical Perspectives in García Márquez edited by Bradley A. Shaw and Nora Vera-Goodwin, 1986; Critical Essays on García Márquez, 1987; García Márquez and Latin America edited by Alok Bhalla, 1987; García Márquez and the Invention of America by Carlos Fuentes, 1987; García Márquez: New Readings edited by Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 1987; García Márquez, Writer of Colombia by Stephen Minta, 1987; García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction edited by Julio Ortega, 1988; Understanding García Márquez by Kathleen McNerney, 1989; García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Michael Wood, 1990; García Márquez: The Man and His Work by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 1990; García Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1991; Home as Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experiences in the Literary Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Agustín Yáñez, and Juan Rolfo by Wilma Else Detjens, 1993; The Influence of Franz Kafka on Three Novels by Gabriel García Márquez by Hannelore Hahn, 1993; Gabriel García Márquez by Sean Dolan, 1994; The Presence of Hemingway in the Short Fiction of Gabriel García Márquez by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1994; Intertextuality in García Márquez by Arnold M. Penuel, 1994; García Márquez and Cuba: A Study of Its Presence in His Fiction, Journalism, and Cinema by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1995.

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Gabriel García Márquez received the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his creativity in the short story, the novel, and journalism. In all of his fiction he is a social critic espousing a leftist ideological position, but he is never doctrinaire in his writing. Universal characteristics are evident in all of his fiction, and he has always contended that the revolutionary role of the writer in the twentieth century is to write well.

If García Márquez had never written a single novel, he would still merit an important niche in literary history for his short fiction, which is often judged to be exemplary. A close reading of his early prose provides an overview of his emerging style and shows the broad vision of the mythical world behind his short stories and novels. The early writings contain the themes and methods that recur throughout his fiction. He starts from the reality of everyday events in Latin American life, events so surreal that he does not have to invent hyperbole. He writes about simple people in the remote reaches of the Caribbean littoral, imbuing them with a literary soul in much the same way William Faulkner dealt with the inhabitants of his mythical Yoknapatawpha County.

The principal theme of many of García Márquez's early short stories is death, and his reading of Kafka, Hemingway, and Woolf is clearly visible. His first short story, "The Third Resignation," appeared in 1947 in the Santafé de Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. It pulsates with the agonizing fear of death and clearly demonstrates his devotion to Kafka. By the mid-1950s García Márquez had established his reputation as a writer of short stories in the national press as well as in his native coastal region, first in Cartagena de Indias and later in Barranquilla. Written as it was during a period of great national chaos subsequent to the 1948 assassination of the liberal political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, this early fiction shows how the common people of Colombia reacted to the violence and censorship of the time. Above all else the works affirm the writer's dedication to aesthetic principles and to the precept of writing well.

Many of García Márquez's best short stories are in the 1962 collection published under the title Los funerales de la mamá grande (Big Mama's Funeral). His first three novels together with the short stories of this volume are the antecedents of his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). Most of the short stories in the collection concentrate on the vicissitudes of life in the closed environment of a small Colombian town, often called Macondo or sometimes simply el pueblo (the town). This microcosm is clearly based on the village of Aracataca, where García Márquez was born and where he spent the first eight years of his life. The short stories represent a transitional work between the early fiction and his more mature writings, yet the use of recurring characters, family clans, and episodes shows the continuing influence of Faulkner. García Márquez deals with the problems of human dignity and the plight of the poor, as well as with the political violence during the decade after Gaitán's assassination. "One of These Days" is a case in point. It focuses on the unwilling visit of a small-town mayor to a dentist who is his bitter political enemy. Kathleen McNerney has suggested that in this story war and civil repression are both understated or unstated, a technical stratagem García Márquez learned from his study of Hemingway's iceberg theory. Other themes seen in the collection are the problem of class differences ("Montiel's Widow") and the role of the artist in society ("Baltazar's Marvelous Afternoon"). Throughout the volume the struggle of the humble to maintain their personal dignity as they face the power structure above them is constantly in evidence.

"Big Mama's Funeral," the title story of the collection, is a classic example of hyperbolic humor, a technique García Márquez came to use extensively in later works. Many critics believe it to be his most accomplished piece of short fiction, and it has been more widely examined than any of his other short stories. This raucous tale of the death of Big Mama, Macondo's absolute sovereign, including the subsequent consternation it caused in the nation as well as in the ecclesiastical realm, opens the door to a world of florid exaggeration and satiric comedy within the framework of the folktale. It likewise creates a myth of enormous proportions as it lambastes political and social institutions and the Colombian semifeudal system of land tenure. At the same time the author takes giant steps in what David William Foster calls the conceptualization of the fictionalized reader. The story uses the technique called magic realism that requires readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the possibility of a new, extraordinary reality. The technique, so prominent in this story, informs much of García Márquez's subsequent fiction.

In 1972 a collection of seven short stories came out under the unusually long title La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother). As was the case with the collection including "Big Mama's Funeral," the title story contains characters who reappear from earlier stories in the same volume. The collection represents a transition from the earlier fiction of Macondo to central themes seen in García Márquez's later writings: exploitation on both a personal and national scale ("A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and "Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles"), the extraordinary power of the human imagination ("A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and "Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship"), and the use of the sea as an enduring metaphor ("The Sea of Lost Time"). In most of the stories a kind of carnivalization takes place, a concept first delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin theorizes that the carnivalization technique constitutes or reinforces a radical disequilibrium in life patterns, thereby offering the potential for transformation, after which life may either continue as it was before or be indelibly altered. The potential for change, however, is a welcome hiatus in everyday life, even if the change lasts only for the duration of the festivity.

The title story at the end of the collection has as its central theme the exploitation of Eréndira by her heartless grandmother, but there are suggestions of similar exploitation by the church, by foreign powers, notably Spain and the United States, and by the military establishment. There are frequent references to characters and situations in the first six stories in the collection. The tale is told by an omniscient narrator up to the sixth section, at which point the narrative shifts to the first person and is directed to a fictionalized reader. The story of Eréndira begins when she forgets to extinguish a candelabra and the wind causes it to fall, thereby destroying her grandmother's house and all of her belongings. Eréndira is obliged to repay the entire debt by working as a prostitute under her grandmother's tutelage. This paradigm of exploitation produces a myth with both classical Greek prototypes and modern archetypes.

Twenty years passed before García Márquez published his next volume of short fiction, Strange Pilgrims (Doce cuentos peregrinos). The 12 tales were written during the period from 1974 to 1992. After the appearance in 1975 of the novel El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), García Márquez began to jot down random ideas for a future novel. He soon decided, however, that this would be his fourth collection of short stories. All 12 are set primarily in Europe, and many of the protagonists are Spanish-American expatriates. There are frequent autobiographical references in some of the tales, and at times they are narrated in the first person. The principal cities that serve as settings are Barcelona, Geneva, Rome, and Paris. In an effort to update his recollection of these four cities, García Márquez made a rapid visit to all of them in 1991 to verify his memory before completing the volume for publication. While his earlier fiction focused primarily on the reality of life in the Caribbean, where the supernatural is a part of everyday existence, these short stories reflect a lesser degree of magic realism, due perhaps to the fact that the settings are primarily European. "I Only Came to Use the Phone" ("Solo vine a hablar por teléfono") is a gripping tale of a woman whose car breaks down outside Barcelona. As she searches for a telephone, she comes in contact with a bus driver who offers her a ride. It turns out that all of the occupants are mental patients, and when the bus arrives back at the asylum, she is forced to become a "patient," even though she protests that she is sane. Years later she is still in the asylum and has found the solace she had previously not known in her relationships with her husband and lovers. "The Saint" ("La santa") appeared as a film under the title Milagro en Roma (Miracle in Rome). The tale and the film it inspired describe a dedicated father's journey to Rome with the body of his young daughter in a wooden case. The body has miraculously not decomposed despite the fact that the girl has been dead for 12 years. The short story ends with the father still seeking a way to have her canonized, but the film terminates with the daughter coming to life before the eyes of the joyous father, thereby fulfilling the miracle promised in the film's title.

There is a clear relationship between García Márquez's short fiction and his novels. His concern with solitude and death gradually evolves, as does his interest in the irrational forces that control his protagonists. He seeks a utopian world in which it is possible to celebrate the power of human imagination.

—Harley D. Oberhelman

See the essays on "No One Writes to the Colonel," "Tuesday Siesta," and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."