Remember how the “most handsome and well-mannered” Italian blond Pietro Crespi died in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)? On November second, he died, under the lights of innumerable lamps and amidst the mad concert of music boxes and all the clocks that struck an interminable hour, “at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his hand thrust into a basin of benzoin.”
Gabriel García Márquez once compared writing to carpentry. In an 1981 interview, he told Peter Stone, “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. Both are very hard work … both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work is involved … I never have done any carpentry but it’s the job I admire most, especially because you can never find anyone to do it for you.”
While recollecting his father’s memory, Rodrigo Garcia wrote that Gabo woke up every morning fearful of losing his path in the treacherous terrain of a novel and by breakfast he worried that “if today doesn’t go well, the whole novel might be a bust. If that’s the case I would abandon it”, but by the time of lunch, he would come out confident enough from his study to announce that “he was writing the best novel since the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century”.
Gabo used to be in a trance while working, his son recalls. “When my brother and I were children, my mother would sometimes send us into his study with a message, and he would stop writing and turn to us while we delivered it. He would look right through us, his Mediterranean eyelids at half mast, a cigarette going in one hand and another burning in the ashtray, and reply nothing … even after we walked away, he remained in that position, turned toward the door, lost in a labyrinth of narrative,” he says.
With that passion and persistence, Gabo became one of the prominent figures of 20th century literature that fractured our notion of reality. The literature of the last century was all about fracturing reality. Some fractured it with magic realism, some with surrealism, and some other with dystopian science fiction, but the question is, how did García Márquez fracture reality. What makes his writing so special?
It is partly because he was an avid reader from an early age. His shape of mind, moulded by the literatures of Kafka, Joyce, Wolf, Faulkner, and others, clearly reflects in the intricate folds of his narratives. One could discern the ghostly silence of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (a Mexican classic) echoing in the streets of Macondo (Gabo’s fictional village), the kind of intertextuality one finds in a well-read author’s narrative, but I believe this is only a part that made his writing special.
The other part lies in his style of telling a tale that he achieved from his journalism and undoubtedly from his grandmother who used to tell him absurd stories with a remarkable seriousness on her face.
Gabo used his journalistic style to wrap the reality in an enchanting magical cloak. He once said, “If you say that elephants are flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you, but if you say there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.”
This is the journalistic trick he applied to narrate One Hundred Years of Solitude. For example, the writer one day found a woman arguing with the wind so that it would not blow her sheets away. This spectacle led him to write the episode where Remedios the Beauty ascended towards sky. (Killing his characters must have been painful for him I reckon, because his son recollects the day Gabo destined Colonel Aureliano Buendía to death. One afternoon in Mexico city, his father came to his mother and announced, “I’ve killed the colonel” and the couple sat together in silence for hours.)
The other technique Gabo employed in his writing was the skill of portraying trivial incidents with precise details, which he inherited from his grandmother. Gabo once recalled how his grandmother used to describe with a serious face the electrician who often came to their house. She would say, “Every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies.” The electrician later emerged as Mauricio Babilonia in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez’s career as a writer, which began from the cheap rooms of a brothel and ended up on the prestigious stage of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, will inspire generations to come and will work as a mirror, reflecting the society for eons, but to sustain his works we need to develop a certain degree of intellectual acumen, so that we can decipher the reality, at times the brutal realities of South America, encoded behind the magic.
Gabo himself argued for this reality in his Nobel Prize lecture and Salman Rushdie argued by pointing out the ‘reality’ while delivering a talk on Gabriel García Márquez at Harry Ransom Center. We must remember that magic realism is a critically compound term, at times clever enough to confuse us. If we miss the latter, the former will reduce the texts to just a bunch of fairy tales and García Márquez’s works are not mere fairy tales!
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