Gabriel García Márquez

by Ilan Stavans

According to the same transcripts, during his first year he did well in all his courses, except statistics and demographics. Boredom appears to have taken the upper hand; García Márquez’s transcript for the second year reveals him to have been frequently absent, which resulted in the failure of various courses.11 Years later he would say that instead of attending classes, he read novels. In other words, it was the educational system that disappointed him; his interest in knowledge—especially in literature—remained strong.

  His passion for literature (which he called the “sarampión literario,” the literary chickenpox) dates to this time. He read the European classics. “My literary education began [then],” he told a journalist. “I would read bad poetry on the one hand, and Marxist texts lent to me secretly by my history teacher, on the other. I would spend Sundays in the school library to stave off boredom. So, I began with bad poetry before discovering the good. Rimbaud, Valéry . . .”12 García Márquez enjoyed “popular poetry, the kind printed on calendars and sold as broadsheets. I found I liked the poetry as much as I loathed the grammar in the Castilian text which I did for my secondary school certificate. I loved the Spanish Romantics—Núñez de Arce, Espronceda.”13

  Although poetry was an essential component in his literary apprenticeship, it seldom makes an appearance in his oeuvre. On occasion—in Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons, and his autobiography—García Márquez includes quotes from favorite masters he had read in his youth. Decades later, after he had achieved international renown, García Márquez, in collaboration with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, published in Cuba a calendar that included riddles he’d written about fruits. There’s hardly any more evidence. Still, his discovery of poetry was auspicious. “My most salacious form of entertainment (at the time) was to sit, Sunday after Sunday, on those blue-paned trams that took you back and forth from the Plaza Bolívar to the Avenida de Chile for five cents—desolate afternoons which seemed to promise nothing but an interminable string of other empty Sundays to come. I’d spent that entire journey of vicious circles reading books of poems, poems and poems, getting through about one slim volume for each city block, until the first street lamps would light up in the never-ending rain. Then I’d roam the silent cafés of the old town searching for someone who’d take pity on me and discuss the poems, poems, poems I’d just read.”14 Those volumes of poetry were by writers who, as Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza put it, were politically committed and sought to produce a literature that was clear and accessible to “the simple people.” Among them were Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pablo Neruda.

  To a large extent, García Márquez’s understanding of literature was shaped by his discovery of Franz Kafka’s writings. “I must have been around nineteen (on other occasions, he said he was seventeen) when I read The Metamorphosis,” García Márquez recalled in 1982. The transformation of Gregor Samsa astonished him. He remembered the first line with astonishing precision: “‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought. ‘My grandmother used to talk like that.’ I said to myself, ‘I didn’t know you could do this, but if you can, I’m certainly interested in writing.’” He decided to read the most important novels ever written.15

  Kafka had a significant impact on García Márquez’s generation, but it took some time for the Czech Jewish author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924, to gain a presence in Latin America. The translation of Die Verwandlung that García Márquez read has been at the heart of a heated debate for years. For some time, it was believed to have been done by the Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges, who had been infatuated with Kafka since 1938. He translated the parable “Before the Law” for the journal El Hogar, and, as critic Efraín Kristal notes in his book Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, the Argentine also included a number of his renditions of Kafka in the famous Anthology of Fantastic Literature, which he edited with his friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo.16 However, Borges himself cast doubt on having translated The Metamorphosis. The novel was first translated into Spanish in 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, and published in Revista de Occidente, the intellectual magazine based in Madrid and edited by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The translator was probably Galo Sáez, although others attributed it to Margarita Nelken. In 1945 that translation was published in book form by the Editorial Revista de Occidente, in a series called Novelas extrañas (Strange Novels). Borges purportedly translated The Metamorphosis in 1938 for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, in a series entitled “La pajarita de papel,” the paper bird.17

  Which translation did García Márquez read? It is impossible to know. What is unquestionable is that it was a trigger. Years later, he said that he wouldn’t have been able to write his early story, “La tercera resignación” (The Third Resignation)—dated September 13, 1947, when he was twenty—had he not read Kafka’s novel. The story, which first appeared in English in the New Yorker, is García Márquez at his most self-conscious. It chronicles the impressions of a nameless narrator, much like Gregor Samsa, as he lies in his coffin, a man “ready to be buried, and yet he knew that he wasn’t dead. That if he tried to get up, he could do it so easily.”18 The middle-class angst and the bizarre condition in which the protagonist finds himself seem to be an homage to Kafka’s narrative.

  García Márquez claimed that “Kafka, in German, told stories in the exact same way my grandmother did.”19 While Kafka’s absurdism resonated with many in Europe, especially after World War II, his initial reception in the Spanish-speaking world was mixed—in spite of the enthusiasm of Borges, García Márquez, and a few others. There are ardent followers of Kafka in the Americas (Calvert Casey, for instance), but they aren’t numerous. And then there are writers, such as the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964) who are Kafkaesque without necessarily being Kafkian, i.e., they might not be aware of the debt they owe to the author of The Castle, yet it is obvious.20

  Equally significant, although for the opposite reasons, was García Márquez’s relationship with Borges himself. Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires of British and Argentine stock, the author of “The Circular Ruins,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Funes the Memorious,” and other fictions was a Europeanized poet and essayist known, until the late fifties, only among a small cadre of intellectual devotees. A voracious reader, Borges’s cosmopolitanism and his disdain for politics often put him at odds with the Latin American left. Borges was of a diametrically different ideological mindset. While he opposed, even ridiculed Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón, he was an intellectual dandy in the tradition of Oscar Wilde. He had little interest in the indigent. His view of the world was based on philosophical disquisitions and metaphysical constructions.

  Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Uruguayan critic and Yale professor who befriended both Borges and Neruda and wrote biographies of each (rather mediocre ones, filled with psychoanalytic interpretations), once asked Borges, sometime in the seventies, if he had heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that everyone was talking about. Borges, with acumen, said he had never heard of it. Except that with Borges it is always difficult to know if he was being honest. Had its author not been a left-leaning intellectual, had it been written elsewhere on the globe, maybe even in the nineteenth century, the Macondo saga would probably have hypnotized the Argentine man of letters. But the model of the writer as an artist engaged with the world that García Márquez represented was antithetical to Borges.

  The English novelist Graham Greene—author of The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana, and other books—was another strong influence on García Márquez. Ironically, it was through Greene that García Márquez learned to appreciate his own environment. “Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics, no less. To separate out the essential elements of a poetic synthesis from an environment that you know all too well is extremely difficult. It’s all so familiar you don’t know where to start and yet
you have so much to say that you end by understanding nothing. That was my problem with the tropics. I’d read Christopher Columbus, Antonio Pigafetta and the other chroniclers of the Indies with great interest. I’d also read Emilio Salgari and Joseph Conrad and the early twentieth century ‘tropicalists’ who saw everything through Modernist spectacles, and many others, but always found an enormous dichotomy between their visions and the real thing. Some of them fell into the trap of listing things and, paradoxically, the longer the list the more limited the vision seemed. Others, as we know, have succumbed to rhetorical excess. Graham Greene solved this literary problem in a very precise way—with a few disparate elements connected by an inner coherence both subtle and real. Using this method you can reduce the whole enigma of the tropics to the fragrance of a rotten guava.”21

  But the most significant literary influences on García Márquez, at least according to critics, were three writers from the United States: John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. He admired the three for dramatically different reasons. Dos Passos studied the infrastructure of capitalism in all its excesses. Hemingway had a succinct, almost telegraphic style. His language was simple yet polished. But it was Faulkner who left the deepest, most defining mark on him. The novels Sartoris, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom! Absalom! showed García Márquez the capacity of literature as a tool for revisiting history, and, through history, society as a whole. Macondo as an autonomous reality, with its geographical boundaries, its vegetation, and its genealogical lines, was inspired by Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, which was modeled after Lafayette County, Mississippi.

  Unquestionably, there are similarities between Faulkner’s native state of Mississippi in particular and the Deep South in general, and Macondo and Colombia. The loss the South experienced during the American Civil War and the depth and breadth of the trauma left by numerous victims is comparable to the aftermath of Colombia’s Thousand-Day War and successive civil wars. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, a year after the assassination of Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá. Spanish translations of Faulkner’s stories had appeared in literary magazines and cultural supplements, and Spanish translations of books were published in the late thirties. (Borges translated The Palm Trees.)22 Throughout the forties, he was read with reverence in intellectual circles.

  Juan Carlos Onetti, whose readings of Faulkner defined him, once described how he discovered the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre.

  The recollection speaks not only for Onetti but for an entire generation of starstruck Latin American readers.

  One afternoon, after I left the office where I worked, I stopped by a bookstore and bought the last issue of Sur, a magazine founded and supported by Victoria Ocampo . . . Looking back, when I remember that I opened the issue on the street, for the first time in my life I encountered the name of William Faulkner. An unknown writer had written the introduction, which was followed by a story poorly translated into Spanish. I started reading while continuing to walk, beyond the world of passers-by and automobiles, until I decided to enter a café to finish the story, happily forgetting that someone was waiting for me somewhere. I reread it again and the bewitchment increased. It increased and every critic agrees that it is enduring.23

  On September 13, 1947, at the age of twenty, García Márquez published his first short story, “La tercera resignación” (The Third Resignation), in the evening newspaper El Espectador, one of Bogotá’s most important dailies. It appeared on page eight, in the section Fin de semana (Weekend) edited by Eduardo Zalamea Borda. It would be the first of eighteen short stories he would write before publishing his first book, Leaf Storm. A little over a month later, his second and third stories, “Eva está dentro de su gato” (Eve Is Inside Her Cat) and “Tubal Caín forja una estrella” (Tubal Caín Shapes a Star), were published in the Fin de semana supplement.

  García Márquez wrote for long hours, secluded from everyone else, on a typewriter. In an article entitled “El amargo encanto de la máquina de escribir,” he discussed the difference between writing in longhand and typing. He suggested that the former had an aura of mystery but that the latter was the inevitable outcome of modern life. “Truth is that everyone writes in whatever way possible, because the hardest thing of this arduous business isn’t how one handles tools, but the way one succeeds in putting one word after another.”24

  Although it is essential to recognize the value of translation in García Márquez’s literary education, it would be wrong to suggest that all the influences on his oeuvre were foreign. All artists are shaped by their provenance, and García Márquez was no different. Equally important, if only for its aesthetic consistency, was the work of Colombian authors. García Márquez responded to nineteenth-century romantic and naturalistic novels, but he sought ways to create something fresh and different, to be a new voice that would allow Colombian literature to be viewed beyond its regional confines and to be embraced by the international literary community.

  The Colombian novel is defined by its geography. The coastal narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude belongs to a tradition shared by other Caribbean nations. Not surprisingly, García Márquez is often compared to baroque authors such as Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima. That coastal tradition is represented by Juan José Nieto’s novel Ingermina (1844). As Raymond Leslie Williams, a scholar of the Colombian novel, has mapped it out, other national traditions include the narrative based in the interior highlands, such as Eugenio Díaz’s Manuela (1858) and Eduardo Caballero Calderón’s El buen salvaje (1963); the Antioquian tradition, evident in Tomás Carrasquilla’s Frutos de mi tierra (1896) and Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s El día señalado (1964); and the Cauca tradition, encompassing works that range from Jorge Isaac’s María (1867) to Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal’s El bazar de los idiotas (1974).25

  While studying law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, a crucial moment took place that served as a catalyst in García Márquez’s apprenticeship as a writer. In 1948 the populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a charismatic, immensely popular leader of the Liberal Party and a presidential candidate, was assassinated during a riot in Bogotá; he was fifty years old. García Márquez remembers that day as a watershed moment in his life.

  Trained in the law at the Universidad Nacional, Gaitán had been mayor of Bogotá and minister of education. Gaitán was killed during a period known as La Violencia, in which violent clashes between liberals and conservatives resulted in the death of several hundred thousand people. In a speech he gave the year he died, Gaitán said, “If I am killed, avenge me!”

  The events took place on April 9. The nation’s capital was hosting the Pan-American Conference, which was devoted to trade issues, although politics occupied center stage. President Mariano Ospina Pérez was at a meeting with the secretary of state of the United States, General George Marshall.

  Gaitán and a few colleagues left his office at around 1:05 P.M. Witnesses heard three gunshots, then a fourth. Gaitán was hit in the back; the bullet tore though his lungs. Another lodged in the back of his head. He lay on the ground for at least ten minutes before being taken in a black taxi to the Clínica Central, five blocks away. He reached the clinic at around 1:30 P.M. A historian described the scene: “There was an inexorable finality about what had happened. The leader was gone for all who witnessed the shooting. It mattered little that he had been rushed to a clinic, where doctors would try to save his life. The assassination had been on everyone’s mind. It was too predictable. His death was inevitable. He was too dangerous and too feared by the leaders of both parties.”26

  The assassination was a pivotal event in modern Colombian history. In Bogotá the news quickly spread. People screamed, “¡Mataron a Gaitán! ¡Mataron a Gaitán!” and took to the streets in anger. Radio broadcasters cautioned Bogotanos to stay home. The minister of the interior went on the air to deny that Gaitán had been shot. But to no avail. People marched to the palacio on Calle Re
al. Revolution was in the air, but no one was at the helm. A crowd of workers and middle-class folks carried off the body of Gaitán’s alleged assassin. There is still confusion regarding the true identity of the perpetrator.

  The role of the media was critical. Radio station Últimas noticias, managed by Gaitán supporters, made the following broadcast minutes after the assassination: “Últimas Noticias con ustedes. Los conservadores y el gobierno de Ospina Pérez acaban de asesinar al doctor Gaitán, quien cayó frente a la puerta de su oficina abaleado por un policía. Pueblo ¡a las armas! ¡A la carga!, a la calle con palos, piedras, escopetas, cuanto haya a la mano. Asalten las ferreterías y tomen la dinamita, la pólvora, las herramientas, los machetes . . .” An English translation: Últimas Noticias is broadcasting to you. The conservatives and Ospina Peréz’s government have just assassinated Doctor Gaitán, who collapsed in front of his office after being gunned down by a policeman. People, take arms! Be ready to battle! Go on the street with sticks, stones, muskets, anything at hand. Assault the hardware stores and take away the dynamite, the gun powder, the tools and machetes.

  The broadcast instructed people to make Molotov cocktails. The crowd on Calle Real was organized, but in other parts of the city it was amorphous, massive, and dangerous. People shouted, “Down with the Conservative government!” On the Plaza de Bolívar, busses were set on fire. President Mariano Ospina Pérez believed “the republic would fall into the hands of rioters whose prime objective was control of the nation’s government.”27

  Gaitán’s assassination was known as El Bogotazo, the period preceding the event as la convivencia, in which people with opposing ideological views—liberal and conservative—tried to coexist. El Bogotazo led to a long spell of violence. “Gaitán had taken his followers from a life in which they were excluded from the decisions that affected them to another in which they felt they participated in those decisions,” a historian recounted. “His death thrust them instinctively back to the sacrosanct old hierarchies and to their lowly, deferential, and reviled place in society. As the crowd lost contact with the convivialistas, the old anonymous world with distant and sporadic leaders materialized again. The actions of the crowd in Bogotá on the afternoon of April 9 were a sign of the people’s refusal to return to the past, to retrace the distance already traveled. But the crowd could not undertake the rest of the journey without Gaitán. How was it suddenly to take power? The idea was never even there. Unwilling to move back and unable to move forward, the anger and frustration of the rioters had only one outlet: the destruction of a society in which they could no longer live. From the feeling of loss that enveloped Gaitán’s followers at the moment of his death, from the sense of pride and cohesion that he had offered them, and from the hatred he had shown for the convivialistas, the crowd delivered the courage, and the need, to destroy.”28