Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014, 87 Years Of Genius And Wonder
Gabriel García Márquez's magical realist novels and short stories exposed millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, he achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
Almost any appraisal of Gabriel García Márquez's impact as a writer, artist, and public intellectual seems today both an exaggeration and an underestimation. He was a prolific novelist, a journalist, a screenwriter, a playwright, a political activist, and an international celebrity who became a cultural statesman for the Latin American left.
with his death and nearly fifty years after the beginning of his extraordinary Literary career, it is difficult to imagine a more original, enchanting, or courageously provocative Latin American artist.
As part of the generation of the Latin American boom, García Márquez both expanded and exploded the idea of the novel in Latin America. Following in the wake of writers like Alejo Carpentier, who wrote about Haiti and called for a use of the "marvelous real" to invoke the experience of the Americas, García Márquez used traces of the fantastic to signal the improbable dimensions of Latin American history. He used traces of the marvelous in an otherwise "realistic" narrative style to underline the enormous ruptures and violence that conventional storytelling could not address and that history had forgotten, and to signal how Latin Americans lived with unbelievable experiences and memories.
His most famous novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," was published in 1967, and tells the story of a town called Macondo and of a family that lives through a century of Latin American history. The novel was an extraordinary success in Latin America and, once translated became an international bestseller that exposed English-speaking and global audiences to Latin American literature and helped to encourage the translation of other "Boom" writers. It also unfortunately became known as a founding prototype for "magical realism" as a form of writing from Latin America or the global South, with publishers vying to find and publish other works that might mirror its extraordinary market success. Writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, whose works differ widely from García Márquez's were framed for a global market by being labeled magical realists, or successors to García Márquez. In this way one aspect of his legacy persisted even as it became a distorting prism for other writers.
Although "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is his most famous novel, many consider "The Autumn of the Patriarch" his greatest literary accomplishment. In a more experimental and relentless narrative style, the novelist tells the story of a Latin American dictator whose power, resilience, and isolation resonate with a number of real latin American leaders from Trujillo to Castro. The novel invokes and perhaps kills off the Latin American genre of "the dictator novel" with its style and fables, and its refusal to settle into any single model for this persistent and pernicious Latin American symbol.
García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, and his speech itself became famous: in it he counted repression, ethnocides, military dictatorships, civil wars, and state terror that forced millions of Latin Americans from their homes and left hundreds of thousands dead. The fabulist of families and the marvelous insisted on the disproportionate scale of violence and death that afflicted Latin America as it became the battleground for global cold wars.
And indeed, by the time he gave the speech, García Márquez had become a superstar author and a cultural statesman who was friends with Fidel Castro and defended Castro's Revolution and took very definite and polemic sides in a critique of U.S. power in the hemisphere. The author's enormous charisma and eloquence made him an important public figure in Latin America, and sometimes a polarizing presence, who loyally defended the causes of the Latin American left and stood with Cuba even in the face of evidence of repression there in the sixties and seventies. He famously broke with fellow writers and intellectuals over the repression of dissidents in Cuba, maintained a home in Havana, and remained a loyal friend of Fidel Castro to the end of his days. But García Márquez was also a friend of Bill Clinton, Fidel's former adversary, and at some point served as a kind of messenger between the two leaders. He was also instrumental in bringing global attention to the decimation of civil society during Colombia's civil wars and as a defender of human rights and civil institutions.
García Márquez, who began his career as a journalist, was also a keen defender of a vibrant free press at a moment when journalists were being killed or threatened and journalism were at risk in Colombia and Latin America. His Foundation for New IberoAmerican Journalism continues to support important work covering Latin America.
García Márquez's extraordinary literary production and global reputation sometimes obscured the work of other Latin American writers. His use of the marvelous or fantastic, minted as "magical realism" created a demand for publishers for similar books with fantastic elements, which was rarely forthcoming among latin American writers working in a variety of narrative forms. Despite García Márquez's own varied style, "magical realism" was identified with Latin American literature and created many misapprehensions in readers for whom his most famous novel served, falsely, as a kind of guidebook to the Latin American imagination.
García Márquez also worked in forms like the novella, the story, reportage and screenplay and autobiography, but for younger Latin American writers growing up in his shadow, he became identified as a master of a dying form: t he magisterial and totalizing novel. In the nineteen nineties a turn away from the monumental novel was evident among Latin American writers, and forms like literary journalism, creative non fiction (the crónica form), and fragmented or modest forms of literary writing were a clear reaction to García Márquez's disproportionate influence and visibility as Latin American novelist on global literary market.
But the legacy of García Márquez's work, and the afterglow of his literary superstardom have been resilient and were periodically invigorated with developments like Oprah's BookCclub, new academic appraisals, or films made as adaptations of his stories. They were also kept alive by his charismatic appeal and his work as a free floating cultural statesman. His contribution to the life of the novel cannot be underestimated, and indeed when the writer Roberto Bolaño began to be famous and globally translated in the last decade, his narrative style and his prolific production, which gave him a posthumous renown, seemed an echo of the way that Gabriel García Márquez became a literary superstar.
Brilliant, charismatic, prolific, a model of a Latin American writer as a public intellectual, García Márquez also embodied a hallowed historical model for the Latin American man of letters, a figure who wielded enormous power in societies where literacy, education, and access to print culture or media were scarce resources, and where individuals spoke in defense of collective interests against corrupt institutions. García Márquez occupied this position in a unique way during the era ofCold Wars and state terrorism in Latin America, and kept the world attuned to its realities even as he turned them into fables. As Latin America changed, so did the relevance of such a figure. But with his death and nearly fifty years after the beginning of his extraordinary literary career, it is difficult to imagine a more original, enchanting, or courageously provocative Latin American artist.
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