by Ilan Stavans
Anyone who reads Pedro Páramo will recognize the extent to which it inspired García Márquez’s masterpiece. Rulfo created a fictional town, Comala, where the novel’s protagonist goes in search of his father. The Homeric echoes of the short volume are stronger than any you will find in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and there is more psychologizing in it as well. The Faulknerian recreation of an alternative reality in the Latin American heartland mesmerized García Márquez. (Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti created the fictional town of Santa María, which features in The Brief Life [1950], among other books.) But Rulfo wasn’t a full-fledged endorser of magic realism. He was a slender, somewhat wooden, rather shy person who spoke little and socialized less. Discovering him, though, was a coup de grace for García Márquez: here was a writer of tantalizing talent who didn’t court public applause. Reading Rulfo made him aware of his own potential.
In 1964, García Márquez collaborated with Fuentes on a screenplay adaptation of Rulfo’s short story “El gallo de oro” (The Golden Cock), an experience that surely triggered his renewed enthusiasm for literature. Roberto Gavaldón was the director, and Gabriel Figueroa was the cinematographer. Set in rural Mexico, the plot contains similar motifs to those in García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel: Dionisio is a humble campesino who is given a dying rooster. Dionisio feeds the rooster and brings it back to health in order to enter it in a cockfight at the feria of San Juan del Río. The rooster beats an opponent from an important farm owned by Lorenzo Benavides, whose lover, Bernarda Cutiño, aka “La Caponera,” is impressed. Lorenzo tries to buy Dionisio’s rooster, but Dionisio refuses until La Caponera seduces him. The film’s cast included the famous Mexican actors Ignacio López Tarso, Lucha Villa, and Narciso Busquets.
García Márquez’s sojourn in the Rulfian universe had another chapter. Fuentes had written the screenplay of Pedro Páramo, but the movie’s director, Carlos Velo, didn’t quite like it and asked García Márquez to doctor it. A good number of people got involved, and García Márquez was never listed in the credits, which turned out for the best. Produced by Barbachano Ponce, the film Pedro Páramo was a flop. Subsequent adaptations were equally unsatisfying.
Adapting such a demanding work of literature for the silver screen is a daunting task. The novel is full of ambiguities. It is hard to tell, for example, who of the characters is alive and who isn’t, and whether incest is at the heart of the novel.
García Márquez was always conscious of his debt to Rulfo, whose work, in his view, he became well acquainted with as a result of his activities in the Mexican film industry. In an interview with Miguel Fernández-Braso, he openly admitted that he had lifted—i.e., plagiarized as a form of tribute—a sentence from Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. Since then, there has been enormous speculation about which sentence it was. Perhaps it is in chapter ten, where Remedios the Beautiful is described as “no era un ser de este mundo,” not a being of this world. In Rulfo’s novel, Susana San Juan is described as “una mujer que no era de este mundo.”10 In a speech entitled “Asombro por Juan Rulfo” (Astonishment for Juan Rulfo), delivered on September 18, 2002, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Burning Plain, García Márquez described the writer’s block he suffered after finishing his first four books, and how his discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 opened his way to the composition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He noted that, altogether, Rulfo’s published works “add up to no more than three hundred pages; but that is almost as many, and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles.”
One should take the diagnosis of writer’s block, as presented by García Márquez, with a grain of salt. The block was more conceptual than real. García Márquez felt that he had reached a certain limit with his stories and novellas and was ready for something larger and more ambitious. He might not have considered these highlights a true sign of productivity, but in those years García Márquez saw the publication of new editions of three of his books. He had kept the manuscript of In Evil Hour with him, from its inception in Paris, through his trips to Bogotá, Caracas, New York, and now Mexico City. He hoped his work in an advertising agency and in the movie industry would open the door of the publishing world to him, but nothing materialized and he was disappointed. So when Mutis and another friend, Guillermo Angulo, suggested that he submit the novel to the 1961 Premio Esso de Novela in Colombia, sponsored by the transnational oil company, he did.
The judges were surprised by the untitled anonymous manuscript. The Academia Colombiana de la Lengua, which administered the prize, awarded it to the book, thinking it had been authored by Mutis, who had worked for the oil company in Bogotá. Germán Vargas collected the $500 prize. But the experience turned traumatic. A pernicious editor in charge of overseeing the book through the production process had taken the liberty of changing its style, replacing the stylized Colombian rhythms with a Madrileño’s voice. When García Márquez received a copy, printed in the Madrid-based Imprenta Luis Pérez, he was furious. He wrote a letter to El Espectador declaring that edition, now titled In Evil Hour, an orphan. Only when the novel was reprinted (simultaneously with new editions of a couple of his other novellas), six years later, in Mexico City, by the elegant Ediciones Era, with its original voice reestablished, did he acknowledge its paternity. By then, he was already deep into the crafting of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez had a better experience with the publication of No One Writes to the Colonel, which was released in August 1961 in Medellín under the editorship of Alberto Aguirre. Thanks to Aguirre’s enthusiasm and to the support of some of his friends in El grupo de Barranquilla, the novel, in my mind a stunning masterpiece, received critical accolades and was embraced by the public. The third item by García Márquez to appear at the time (published in English in Esquire magazine) was the novella The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
In these three volumes García Márquez began to build a counterpart to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Elements continue reappearing as the reader goes from one narrative to another and beyond. For instance, as a motif (or better, as an obsession), the young woman pushed into prostitution by her grandmother was already present in his early work. In the short story “El mar del tiempo perdido” (The Sea of Lost Time, 1961), the character Herbert comes across an anonymous prostitute who, in order to pay a large debt, has to go to bed with hundreds of men. The story of Eréndira has precisely that theme. And in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a similar scene takes place.
In the New Republic, Martin Kaplan praised Innocent Eréndira: “García Márquez’s fictional universe has the same staggeringly gratifying density and texture as Proust’s Faubourg Saint-Germain and Joyce’s Dublin. As his friend Mario Vargas Llosa said of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez’s is ‘in the tradition of those insanely ambitious creations which aspire to compete with reality on an equal basis, confronting it with an image and qualitatively matching it in vitality, vastness, and complexity.’” Kaplan added that since the death of Neruda in 1973, García Márquez was arguably “the best of the Latin Americans; as testimony from both the United States and Europe accumulates, his early reception as a great regional writer is giving way to a climate in which Proust and Joyce can be invoked by enthusiasts without worried sidelong glances at the critrical pack.” But Kaplan saw Innocent Eréndira as a minor work. “‘For me, literature is a very simple game, all the rules of which have to be accepted,’ [García Márquez] has said, and for the twenty years that he’s stuck to that conviction he has beggared Houdini. The early stories, with their O. Henry punch lines, purple atmosphere, and ‘experimental’ ambitions, are simply less fun—and less haunting—than the later work.”11
Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, two interviewers who visited him (the former would be instrumental in helping García Márquez find a publisher for One Hundred Years of Solitude), asked him how a story took shape. He writes,
they stated, “without a set plan, in a sort of total alert, registering imponderables. He has no cut-and-dried recipe by which to perform.” “I have firm political ideas,” he told them. “But my literary ideas change according to my digestion.” Harss and Dohmann added that García Márquez tells a story “less to develop a subject than to discover it. Theme is less important than wavelength. His facts are provisional, valid not as statements but as assumptions, what he feels today he may discard tomorrow. If in the end not everything adds up to a net result, it is perhaps because we must subtract, not add, to reach a final balance. His world has no beginning or end, no outer rim. It is centripetal. What holds it together is inner tension. It is always on the verge of taking concrete shape, but remains intangible. He wants it that way. Its relation to objective reality is that of an eternally fluctuating mental portrait where resemblances at any given moment are striking but tenuous.”12
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* For instance, in El Universal in Cartagena, García Márquez wrote mostly about Hollywood and European cinema in September 1948. In his column “La Jirafa” in El Heraldo in Barranquilla, which he wrote under the pseudonym Septimus, he discussed an adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, among other notes on film. In El Espectador in Bogotá he had a regular weekly section on film, including reviews of Mervy LeRoy’s Quo Vadis?, Edward Dmytryk‘s The Caine Mutiny, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, and Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
Chapter 7
Sleepless in Macondo
In the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, first published in 1980, Alberto Manguel and Giovanni Guadalupi catalog the nonexistent geographies invented by literati, such as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky Wood, Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe Island, Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Jules Verne’s Saknussemm’s Corridor. Each of these places is surveyed in a succinct, provocative entry. The following describes Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Macondo, a Colombian village founded in ancient times by José Arcadio Buendía, whose boundless imagination always stretched farther than the inventiveness of nature. The founder had placed the houses in such a way that the inhabitant of each could reach the river and then fetch water with exactly the same degree of effort as his neighbor; and the streets had been planned in such a manner that all houses received the same amount of sunshine throughout the day. For the benefit of the population he built small traps to catch canaries, robins, and nightingales and in very little time the village was so full of their singing that the gypsy tribe which every year visited Macondo to show the inhabitants the newest eighth marvel of the world would let themselves be guided by the music.
Toward the east Macondo is protected by a high and forbidding range of hills; toward the south by marshes covered with a kind of vegetable soup. The marshes rise toward the west and become a large body of water in which cetaceans of delicate skin, with the face and torso of a woman, lure sailors with their firm and tempting breasts. To the north, many days’ march away through a dangerous jungle, lies the sea.
From a small village of some twenty mud and bamboo huts, Macondo became a town with shops and a marketplace. The prosperity made José Arcadio Buendía free all the birds he had carefully trapped and replace them with musical clocks which he had obtained from merchants in exchange for parrots. These clocks were so synchronized that every half-hour the town would shake with a sound of ringing bells and every midday a musical explosion of cuckoos and waltzes would glorify the beginning of the siesta. Buendía also replaced the acacias lining the streets with almond trees and found a system of giving them eternal life. Many years later, when Macondo became a city of wooden houses and zinc roofs, ancient almond trees still bloomed in the older streets, though there was no one in the town who could remember having witnessed their planting.
Among the most notable events which form the history of Macondo is the unusual insomnia epidemic that struck the town. The most terrible thing about it was not the impossibility of sleep—because the body would not tire itself either—but the gradual loss of memory. When the sick person became accustomed to staying awake, memories of his childhood would start to vanish, followed by the names and concepts of things; finally he would lose his own identity and consciousness of his own being, sinking into a calm lunacy without a past. Bells were set up around the village and whoever passed them would give them a tug to prove that he was still sane. Visitors would be advised not to eat or drink in Macondo, because the illness was supposed to be contagious. The inhabitants soon became accustomed to this state of affairs and dispensed with the useless activity of sleep. In order not to forget what the different objects around them were, they labeled each thing with its proper name: “pail,” “table,” “cow,” “flower.” However, the inhabitants realized that even though the names of things could be remembered in this fashion, their utility could nevertheless be forgotten and a more extensive explanation was added on the labels. For instance, a large placard on the cow informed the onlooker: “This is a cow; it is necessary to milk her every morning to produce milk and the milk must be boiled and then added to coffee to produce coffee with milk.” At the entrance to the village the inhabitants erected a sign that said “Macondo” and, a little farther on, another saying “God exists.”
The inhabitants of Macondo also invented an ingenious system to counteract the effects of their strange illness and learned to read the past in the cards, as before the gypsies used to read the future. Buendía also created a memory machine into which every morning he would record the past events of his life. In this way, at any point, he would make the machine work and recall his whole past day by day. The epidemic reached an end when the gypsy Melquíades—who had been dead but had returned because he could not stand the loneliness of death—brought to Macondo an insomnia antidote in the form of a sweet liquid in little bottles. The inhabitants drank the potion and immediately were able to sleep.
Another important event in the history of Macondo was the proposed building of a huge temple organized by Father Nicanor Reyna, who was traveling throughout the world with the intention of establishing a sanctuary in the center of impiety and envisioned a temple full of life-sized saints and stained-glass windows. However, the people of Macondo, who had lived for so many years without a priest, had established a personal contact with God and were free of the stain of the original sin. They could levitate some twelve centimeters off the ground after drinking a full cup of chocolate. Seeing that Macondo was not the center of impiety he was searching for, Father Reyna continued on his travels.
In more recent years Macondo saw the creation of an American banana plantation on its land, and the town was linked to the rest of the world by a railway. But due to a strike, heavy rains and then drought, the plantation was abandoned and it is said that Macondo’s prosperity was wiped off the surface of the earth by a violent cyclone.
Its inclusion in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places affirms that Macondo is not quite a parallel reality that imitates our own world in appearance and sophistication but is an extension of that world, with its own flora and fauna, its continents and nations, its record of social, political, and economic upheaval—in other words, its own metabolism. In their foreword, Manguel and Guadalupi described how they came upon the idea of putting together their encyclopedic volume: “We agreed that our approach would have to be carefully balanced between the practical and the fantastic. We would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler.” They were interested in places that, while imaginary, actually exist, “that they can indeed be visited and are mapped in the real world, that the authors looked upon real landscapes and installed on these landscapes their visions.”1
García Márquez’s Macondo possesses that immediacy. After reading the novel, one feels that the town isn’t an escapist’s dream but is within reach. And its metabolism, in my view, carries in it the DNA of Latin America.2 Or, as critic Edn
a Van der Walde put it, its imprint on the region’s psyche has turned “el macondismo como latinoamericanismo.”3 Mario Vargas Llosa, in his doctoral dissertation García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, defended at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and published in 1971, called One Hundred Years of Solitude a “total” novel. “The process of edification of the fictitious reality achieved is a culmination: this novel integrates in a superior synthesis the previous fictions [created by the author], builds a world of extraordinary richness, exhausts that world and is exhausted by it.”4
In the mid-sixties, García Márquez reached the conclusion that an author and a book are matched at birth. Work for the cinema helped him support his family, but it wasn’t altogether rewarding. He felt empty, in debt to his own talent. For years, he had been dreaming of writing a novel that could sum up not only his childhood experiences but his overall vision of the world. The more he let his imagination free, the faster he realized that no matter how many short and long stories he produced, they were all part of a single book, what Mallarmé had visualized as an all-encompassing volume that mirrored, even competed, with reality in all its complexity.
He told Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that in general, he thought “a writer writes only one book, although the same book may appear in several volumes under different titles.” García Márquez considered Balzac, Conrad, Melville, Kafka, and Faulkner as models of the one-book author. One of their books often stands out above the rest, giving the impression that the author is connected to a primordial work. He asked: “Who remembers Cervantes’s short stories? Who remembers The Graduate Who Thought He Was Made of Glass, for instance? But that can still be read with as much pleasure as any of his major works. In Latin America, the Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos is famous for Doña Barbara which is not his best work, and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias is known for El Señor Presidente, a terrible novel, not nearly as good as Legends of Guatemala.”5