Gabriel Garcia Marquez & the history that inspired "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
1982 Nobel Prize for Literature
The most famous writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature between 1982 and 1988 was Gabriel García Márquez, the great ‘magical realist’ Colombian novelist.
My approach in these weekly posts of the 120 Nobels Challenge has been to cover seven writers each week. But I am changing the transmission pattern this week.
For the record, the winners between 1982 and 1988 were:
1982 Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombia
1983 William Golding (1911–1993) Britain
1984 Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) Czechoslovakia/Czechia
1985 Claude Simon (1913–2005) France
1986 Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) Nigeria
1987 Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Soviet Union/Russia
1988 Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) Egypt
I have read them all this week. But I have not completed articles on all. It made me think.
What would suit you as a reader better?
seven writers in each long weekly post or
one writer in each shorter weekly post?
When I conceived this challenge, part of the challenge for me was to read all 120 writers, if only a little bit, before 10 October 2024 when the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced. But I am finding it hard to make each post on each writer as high quality as I would like with all the research required. If I do one writer per week, I wondered, it might take longer but each week would be better and more enjoyable for you as a reader.
Would it be more enjoyable for you, as a reader, if I go at a more leisurely pace and make each post shorter and more focussed?
Let us try a poll. Please tell me about your preference over the next week.
I will implement a new posting schedule from next week in response to your feedback. I will continue the YouTube channel with seven shorter summaries weekly to finish before the 2024 Prize. My own preference is to move down to one writer in a more focussed shorter post each week. But please let me know what you think in the poll.
For an experiment and out of practical necessity, this week’s post is on just one writer, Gabriel García Márquez, the great ‘magical realist’ Colombian novelist.
Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk.
1982 Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombia
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist and journalist who came to symbolise Latin American writing itself. The label attached by critics to his work was ‘magical realism’. But Márquez transcended that label. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century.
‘Magical realism’ may be a good place to start. It was the term applied by Western critics to the group of writers who emerged in the Latin American boom of the 1960s. Miguel Asturias, the Guatemalan 1967 Nobel Prize winner was part of this group. Borges and later Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa were also key members. But García Márquez became the most famous symbol of this style. Magical realism is understood to be the blending into ‘realist’ narratives of elements of magic, fantasy, premodern perceptions of realities, dreams, and the aspects of experience that do not correspond to modern, Euro-Atlantic perceptions of ‘reality’.
In truth, many forms of literature do exactly that. What is a fairy tale? What is Beowulf? What happens in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis? García Márquez is more fairly understood as a modernist who worked with the pluralities of cultures that Latin America inherited from its history.
García Márquez placed himself in that literary tradition. He read Kafka, Borges, Faulkner, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna and emulated them in his writing, especially the Nobel Laureate of his youth, Faulkner (1949) and the enigmatic Prague Jew who wrote in German, Franz Kafka. Indeed, García Márquez recalled that when he read as a youth Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), in which Gregor Samsa wakes metamorphosised into a bug, he decided to become a writer. If novelists could radically transform reality, and perceptions of the boundaries of reality, then García Márquez was all in for this real magic.
The beloved features of García Márquez are his adaptation of modernism to his pluralist Latin American inheritance. It emerged not through studies of the theories of modernism, but through engagement with the writers. It displays the formal innovation, the fragmentation, the fictionalised reader, and multiple narrators, the many languages and plural perspectives within a story, the breakdown of rational causality while still searching for orderly meaning, the multiple perspectives, plural voices, and faces of human experience. But García Márquez’s modernism was different to the Euro-Atlantic modernism from which he learned. There is more use of oral culture, expressive of García Márquez’s own experience of storytelling. The plural cultures represented in his fiction are not those of European historical traditions, such as in Joyce’s Ulysses. They are the inheritance of the societies and cultures that survived in Latin America after the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, and the many visitors to the continent since first contact including African and Arabic cultures.
García Márquez did not just learn his style from European masters. He learned how to tell magical realist stories by listening to the oral tales of his grandmothers and aunts. It was from them that he absorbed many of those plural cultures that persisted in Colombia. They first inspired him to transform reality with stories.
But the stories García Márquez sought to tell were not mere children’s fairy tales. He sought to transform historical reality with his fiction. He was committed to leftist politics that would confront the imperial exploitation of the people of Latin America. He followed the Sartrean idea of the engagé writer. He often said he was a journalist at heart. His magical novels need to be understood against the background of the real, historical tragedies of Latin America and his nation of Colombia.
Colombia occupies a critical strategic position in South and Central America. It has a long history of vexed relationships with the USA, that through the Monroe doctrine had long claimed dominion over Central and South America. In 1950 the USA government secretly put the issue plainly:
The geographical position of Colombia on the Caribbean and Pacific approaches to the Panama Canal makes it unusually desirable that the best of relations be maintained. There is still some resentment over the part the US played in the events leading up to the separation of Panama from Colombia”
The story of the Panama Canal is extraordinary but will have to wait for another day. Suffice to say, that the USA meddled in and exploited Latin America. In Cold War USA any lingering Colombian resentment towards this empire in denial was attributed to “Communist groups on the one hand and university undergraduates on the other.” Among those complainers, disparaged by the CIA, was Gabriel García Márquez.
The 1950 State Department statement on Colombia referred (with coded phrases that are still used routinely) to events that would shape García Márquez’s and Colombia’s political experience.
Events in Colombia during recent months have somewhat shaken our faith in Colombian democracy and have presented an obstacle in achieving our objectives. … the election of a leader whose friendship for the US and whose devotion to democratic ideals are suspect, country-wide political violence which has not entirely ceased, and a wave of religious persecution, are not factors to inspire confidence.
In 1948, on the threshold of García Márquez’s adult life, the Colombian Government was overthrown, following a dispute between Liberal and Conservative parties which culminated in the assassination of the Liberal Presidential candidate. It led to a civil war between 1948 and 1956, known as La Violencia. Riots and violence resulted in over 300,000 deaths, up to 800,000 injuries, and one million displaced persons. One fifth of Colombia’s population was affected by La Violencia. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla established a military dictatorship, and a highly repressive regime. The establishment parties negotiated an end to the communal violence and civil war. But many underlying grievances were overlooked, including the overlordship of the USA and its commercial empire. These grievances fuelled the armed rebellion FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army) that began in 1964 and continued until a final peace settlement in 2016, with a few splinter groups returning to violence even up to 2024.
This political experience made García Márquez’s politics very different to European modernists like Eliot, Pound or Knut Hamsun. His views were shaped by Neo-Marxism, Sartre’s political vision, the experience of colonialism and the American post-colonial empire, and the Soviet Union’s criticism of the colonialism of the Euro-Atlantic empires newly gathered together under the American umbrella of NATO. Indeed, in 1955 the Colombian dictator, Rojas Pinilla, closed the newspaper for which García Márquez was the Paris correspondent. It threw García Márquez into unemployment, adding personal to political grievance; but making a great novelist.
García Márquez travelled to Moscow and Prague. He celebrated the Cuban revolution of 1958. Nor was García Márquez merely a pontificating writer. Between 1982 and 1986, with the prestige of the Nobel prize and his Conservative friend Belisario Betancur as President, García Márquez played a mediatory role in peace talks with FARC. His long opposition to American imperialism, however, made the USA authorities suspicious of the successful magical realist and political leftist. The USA state denied García Márquez a visa to enter the USA until the 1990s, long after his commercial success with books like One Hundred Years of Solitude.
This novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is widely considered a masterpiece. It contained a crucial incident in relations between Colombia and the USA that shaped García Márquez’s outlook and how he told stories of history. In 1928 the United Fruit Company, the USA firm that dominated Latin and Central America, which we have met in the articles on Asturia (1967) and Neruda (1971) broke a strike of banana plantation workers. The US State Department supported its commercial partner and claimed the workers were ‘Communist’. Together they prevailed on the Colombian Government to send in hundreds of Colombian military troops. They killed up to 2,000 people in a massacre to break the workers’ will. The massacre, however, was covered up by complicit North and South American authorities. It was not more broadly known until a novel in 1962 by García Márquez’s friend lvaro Cepeda Samudio, La casa grande (1962). García Márquez then fictionalised the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad).
Section fifteen of the novel (about three-quarters of the way through the book; my edition does not number the ‘chapters’) portrays this massacre that was a decisive event in the novelist’s experience. Through the eyes of José Arcadio Segundo, García Márquez wrote:
“After his shout something happened that did not bring on fright but a kind of hallucination. The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous invulnerability.” (p. 311)
After this eerie moment in the eye of the storm, the people start to die.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those books that I have wanted to and tried to read for decades, ever since García Márquez’s Nobel Prize on the cusp of my own adulthood. But every time I tried, I failed.
This year will be different. I know the story that animates the emotional and political soul of the book. I feel closer to García Márquez. He is not a strange magical realist. He is a modernist writer about history. His experience with the banana massacre and how authorities, including historians, scrubbed it from Colombia’s public narrative taught him to find alternative ways to write history. As a leading expert on García Márquez wrote:
Thus, from an early age, García Márquez learned to be sceptical of the government representation of things, and also to question the work of professional historians. At the same time, he remains willing to trust in the possibility of finding the real truth in the knowledge of the common people and the voices of fiction writers. For him, for Fuentes, and for many writers of his generation, writing fiction was, among other things, a search for an historical truth and a revision of official histories; these writers’ fictions can be more truthful than the written record of supposed ‘facts’.
RL Williams A Companion to Gabriel García Márquez, p.17.
Perhaps, García Márquez was not a magical realist, but rather a magical historian? In any case, his form of modernist fiction was historical storytelling in a world of lies that preceded our “post-truth” world.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was the last in a cycle of novels set in Macondo, an imaginary place a lot like his Colombia. In 1975 García Márquez declared that he would not write another novel until after the fall of General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator brought to power by the USA. The killing or coerced suicide of Allende, the massacres of his supporters by CIA-backed troops, and the suspicious death of 1971 Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda brought back bad memories to García Márquez. Latin America was suffering again at the hands of the United Fruit Company and its USA and local elite collaborators, just like the banana plantation workers on the Costa in 1928.
But, fortunately, he returned to novels including Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His journalism was collected a few years ago in a fine collection, The Scandal of the Century and other writings, which was kindly given to me. Now, thanks to the 120 Nobels Challenge, when I can look beyond the mirage of magical realism, I can at last deeply appreciate the real stories, plural cultures, and magical histories of this great modernist writer.
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Nobel Laureates YouTube Archival Footage Links
What was the Banana Massacre (short documentary)?
Gabo, la creación de Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez) Full Film Colombian Documentary film, also known as Gabo, The Magic of Reality
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize Speech (1982) in Spanish
Jeff, I am late on seeing this post or I would have linked to it in my own article this week. I enjoyed reading the historical perspective behind the story.
I fell for the propaganda that "magical realism" was poor. I realise now how much the US propaganda is taken up by the British Press, who have become little more than mouthpieces for our governments, and totally pro-America. I have missed out on reading South American literature because of this anti-communist blether. Since reading Gorbachev, I have realised what nonsense the Americans talk. Recently, when Obama was in, we had to hear his plans for medicare in the US compared to "the British NHS, a Communist organisation". When Johnson was PM, they Americans wanted a trade deal as long as we allowed them access to NHS as commercial partners. This was the point at which mistrust tipped over into actual desire for us to loosen the American yoke.
Anyway, I'm off to source some of Marquez's books. Thanks for a deep, insightful look at Marquez, and I'm hoping this is the start of more indepth articles about the Nobel Prize. I think it will be less pressure on you, and more informative for us.