Gabriel Garcãƒâa Mãƒâ¡rquez the Art of Fiction No 69
December v, 1982
A TALK WITH GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Past MARLISE SIMONS
he playful, imperturbable Gabriel Garcia Marquez was troubled and tense. His brown eyes and the big wart over his mustache seemed to accept shrunk. He had buried his hands deep in the pockets of his navy blueish overalls and paced his hotel room in this pocket-size Central Mexican town, where he had come to escape a avalanche of well-wishers and journalists.
''This is the time I'g supposed to be happier than always,'' he grumbled. ''I've just received the Nobel Prize. I'm going to Sweden. I'm famous. I don't have to work. And look at the state I'chiliad in.''
Garcia Marquez was fretting over the spoken communication he must deliver at the Nobel Prize honour ceremony in Sweden on Friday. He had already studied other Nobel speeches for length, tone and content. Researchers, whom he calls ''my ghostwriters,'' were digging up facts and statistics on Latin America, not to be used equally such just to give him ideas. ''It has to exist a political voice communication presented as literature,'' he sighed. ''I envy the chemists and the Peace Prize winners. They don't take to say a word and anybody applauds anyway.'' What's worse, he muttered on, ''I've heard that the Swedish University is a solemn clan out to make me over. And I have to clothing a tail coat, a colonial costume, an upper-class outfit from the 19th century. I will feel terrible.''
He was what a friend called ''being a Marquezian,'' perpetually spinning tales around events, inflating the pocket-size and diminishing the sacred to brand information technology less frightening, more than manageable. Those who know him well say he lives, talks and writes this fashion, taking a modest event of the day, tossing, polishing, repeating and expanding it until at the end of the week it has go an epos with a life of its own.
But this 54-yr-one-time homo of literature, the storyteller and novelist of the Latin American wondrous, is also a compulsive political leader. The politics of the left he practices are as unorthodox as his own freewheeling mind. They limited themselves in reactions and sentiments rather than as a coherent doctrine. They surface when he eats, drinks and debates with heads of state, cabinet ministers and guerrilla comandantes with whom he schemes and mediates. The purpose is to promote change, preferably revolution, peradventure in his native Republic of colombia, maybe in all of Latin America. When someone recently pointed to the paradox of his friendship with and support for both French republic's Francois Mitterrand and Cuba'due south Fidel Castro, he said, ''Information technology is logical. Progress in France lies with Mitterrand, in Latin America with Fidel Castro.'' In October he acted equally an intermediary betwixt Mitterrand and Castro to obtain the release of the jailed Cuban poet Armando Valladares. Mitterrand had been under pressure from conservative French intellectuals for maintaining close relations with the Cuban Government which had jailed the paralyzed poet.
For an writer who has long used his literary fame as a vehicle for his political sentiments, there may be few better political platforms than a Nobel award ceremony. Which is why he worried for much of the month of November. ''I take this nifty opportunity,'' he said. ''I must endeavour and interruption through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in means that have zip to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.'' Inevitably, perchance, the author whose recurrent imagery in his writings is that of solitude, was developing the theme of ''the solitude of Latin America.''
Why does Latin America's about famous author recall he was given the coveted Nobel prize? ''For my books,'' he rapidly replied, brushing aside suggestions that information technology may be related to politics or geography. ''Only I knew I had a strong godfather in that location, the poet Artur Lundkvist. He is the simply fellow member of the Swedish Academy who intensely cares about Latin American literature. For us Latin writers, he was always a fearful, remote deity who determined the fate of our letters. When I met him, he proved to be a very humorous onetime homo with a young heart. He once told me, 'I pass up to dice until they give that prize to y'all.' ''
We left the hotel and our car headed through the desert to Zacatecas where the managing director Ruy Guerra, a friend of Garcia Marquez, was filming his story ''Innocent Erendira.'' From the outset the writer, who has no pretense of erudition, had said, ''I am a bad theoretician and a bad critic. I prefer to tell anecdotes.''
He tells stories instinctively, with that aforementioned flow of the unexpected that runs through his written narrative. Looking at the unlikely sight of a shepherd actualization with his flock among the desert cactus, he said, ''Being a shepherd is always an art. But in Spain they say a shepherd is only good for one matter, for airplane accidents. If a plane crashes somewhere, there is always a shepherd who can tell y'all, 'It'due south over there, I saw information technology fall with my own eyes.' ''
Fame - in Latin America he gets a treatment halfway betwixt a moving picture star'south and a charismatic leader'south - to him is an unrelenting invasion of his privacy and an onerous force per unit area on his work. ''It has get more difficult to write. You cannot forget that everything you put down goes to an always larger number of people. Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day. It reminds me of Graham Greene, who said the terrible matter about bombings is that you get wounded - but the bombing goes on.''
Notwithstanding fame, and the perennial interviews brought on by it, also permits him to talk about the by he has poured into his novels and short stories. He never seems to tire of evoking or exploring information technology with nostalgia.
Aracataca appears in his listen, his pocket-sized, hot and dusty hometown in Republic of colombia that became the Macondo of ''One Hundred Years of Confinement.'' So does the rambling house where he grew upward as the simply child amid grandparents and aunts, all of whom became characters in the novel'southward circuitous family relate. When Gabriel was an infant, his parents, who had 16 children, moved to another town where his father worked as a telegrapher, and Gabriel was left in the intendance of his grandparents. His grandfather, Garcia Marquez said, was ''a former colonel who told endless stories of the ceremonious state of war of his youth, took me to the circus and the movie theater and was my umbilical string with history and reality.'' Grandmother was ''always telling fables, family unit legends and organizing our life co-ordinate to the messages she received in her dreams.'' She was ''the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality.''
Nearly equally important perhaps were his days as a journalist in the coastal town of Barranquilla where he began his literary apprenticeship. He was 20 and then and wrote, read and debated every twenty-four hours with three other young reporters with literary aspirations. The inseparable quartet met each evening in a bookshop and went on to cafes, drinking beer and rum till deep in the nighttime. ''We would argue at the elevation of our voices over literature,'' recalled ane of the four, German language Vargas, to whom Garcia Marquez defended ''Foliage Storm,'' his first book. Along with their own piece of work, the iv read and dissected Defoe, Dos Passos, Camus, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, the American who has perhaps well-nigh influenced Latin American contemporary fiction. All four appear as friends - German, Alvaro, Alfonso and Gabriel - in ''1 Hundred Years of Confinement.''
''The whole notion that I am an intuitive is a myth I take created myself,'' said Garcia Marquez. ''I worked my way through literature, reading, writing, reading and writing -it'due south the but way.'' He read the Russians and the slap-up English language and American authors. ''I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway.'' Merely the ''tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism,'' he said. ''The key is to tell it straight. Information technology is done by reporters and by country folk.''
His stories, he recalled, often started from one initial visual prototype. '' 'Leaf Storm,' for example, began from a flash of myself equally a little male child, sitting on a chair in the living room,'' he said. The initial epitome for ''No Ane Writes to the Colonel,'' he went on, came ''when I saw an old man looking at fish in the market of Barranquilla.'' But ''One Hundred Years of Confinement,'' his most awe-inspiring work, ''traveled in $.25 and pieces through my head for 17 years. In the end I was able to talk the book. I walked around with its fragments until they burst. And so I sabbatum downwards and it took me 18 months to write.''
For ''The Autumn of the Patriarch,'' ''my only volume which I have not lived myself, I read everything I could virtually Latin American and specially Caribbean area dictators over a period of 10 years. On top of that I talked with whomever I could who had a related experience. Then I traed to forget everything and forced myself to piece of work purely from my imagination then that no event could be linked to a real one. Simply the dictator became the most autobiographical grapheme of all. Excluding the aspect of power, which I have not known, of course, many of my personal feelings, obsessions, ideas, nostalgias, superstitions, are attributed to the patriarch. No dubiousness in that location are affinities between power and fame. I call up the loneliness of power and the loneliness of fame are much alike.''
Everything in his books and stories has an origin he can identify; he knows what he associated with each prototype and how he put them together. Many incidents are little games he plays with his family or friends. He once recounted the origins of General Lorenzo Gavilan, a grapheme in ''I Hundred Years of Solitude'' who began as a character in ''The Death of Artemio Cruz,'' the novel by his shut friend, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. ''A careful reader had written to Fuentes that the fate of Lorenzo Gavilan, i of his characters, had been left unresolved. Fuentes checked and realized information technology was true. I told Fuentes it could be fixed. And so that is why Lorenzo Gavilan, with the belt buckle from Morelia, dies in the Macondo banana workers' strike.''
The years from age 20 to 30 for Garcia Marquez were a time of hawking manuscripts, of getting proficient reviews and poor sales. He spent near three of these years in Europe, a short fourth dimension in Rome, a longer period in Paris, writing and existence expressionless poor. ''The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.'' He is still writing stories well-nigh the Latin Americans he knew in that period. It has left him with a beloved-hate relationship with the French, yet he notwithstanding visits Paris every year.
Nothing exciting, he feels, is happening in West European fiction. The exceptions, he says, ''are Germany's Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass. The French are writing the aforementioned sort of books every year for the aforementioned Goncourt Prizes.'' Garcia Marquez, the anti-intellectual, barely disguises his distrust of French republic's intellectuals and their ''schematic mental games and abstractions.'' Like so many Latin Americans he looks on theory equally an enemy, a box that closes off perception and inhibits the heed. While he has a similar distrust for Communist apparatchiks, whom he calls ''communistoids,'' he voices this view simply privately so as ''not to play into the hands of the Correct.''
Latin American literature, he believes, is ''very much alive.'' He calls the late Pablo Neruda of Chile ''1 of this continent'south greatest poets.'' He admires the Mexican novelists Juan Rulfo and his friend Carlos Fuentes. But there are more 30 immature writers in Latin America, he says, who are doing interesting work and he has tried to use his influence to get their work published. Of Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges he once said that he ''deserves the highest merit because he has done more than than anyone for the Spanish language since Cervantes.''
For the past 20 years the author has lived in Mexico Urban center. He went in that location ''because there was piece of work for him,'' recalled the poet Alvaro Mutis, his friend of 32 years. Here in the 60's Garcia Marquez wrote movie scripts and magazine pieces for a living and fiction in his spare fourth dimension.
Merely he feels about at ease, he never ceases to say, in the Latin Caribbean, in coastal Republic of colombia rather than in the country's highlands. When he left the coastal town of Aracataca to become to schoolhouse in a Colombian mountain town, Zipaquira, and later went to Bogota, the capital, he said, ''I became a foreigner.'' Those highlands were part of a Spanish colonial culture - ''solemn, greyness and very common cold'' - and felt similar another land to him. They were contrary realms, the highlands, where people are introverted and silent, and the Caribbean, a domain of sensory profusion, of calorie-free, heat and quick repartee, a region where facts and reasons embody none of the virtues ascribed to them in the colonial world. In this realm, truth is regarded equally ane more than illusion, just one more version of many possible vantage points and people change their reality by irresolute their perception of information technology.
Information technology is from and well-nigh this Caribbean condition of mind that he writes. ''People here sense the presence of phenomena or other beings, fifty-fifty if they are not at that place,'' he said. ''These must be influences of aboriginal religions, of Indians and blacks. This world's full of spirits you find all over, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in Brazil. In Santo Domingo and in Vera Cruz.''
Given his zipper to the Latin Caribbean, information technology is not like shooting fish in a barrel to explain why Garcia Marquez feels so irresistibly attracted to its apparent antithesis, the United States. This fascination began more thirty years agone when the Barranquilla foursome not only studied American literature but also avidly examined the styles of American journalism. ''In Republic of colombia, journalism was very heavy then, academic, classic, very Spanish. Due north American journalism, specially after its experiences in the Second World State of war, was new and different.''
American open up-mindedness and pragmatism appeal to him. He likewise unabashedly declares that North America'south authors are ''the literary giants of the 20th century'' and ''New York is the greatest miracle of our time.'' In the same breath he defends Fidel Castro'south strange policy and scorns Washington'southward.
His admiration for the United States makes it all the more than painful for him that he has had great difficulties obtaining a visa to enter the country since 1960, due to his political views. He has sent his elderberry son Rodrigo to written report history at Harvard. ''At that place is no way one can relate to contemporary cultural life without going to the United States,'' he said. Ironically that is the place ''with the most serious students and the best analyses of my work. Yet the State Department plays this game with me in which I may or may not be able to go there.''
Why does this homo of literature invest and so much energy in the political activism that has caused the controversies? ''If I were not a Latin American, maybe I wouldn't,'' he said. ''But underdevelopment is total, integral, it affects every part of our lives. The problems of our societies are mainly political. And the commitment of a author is with the reality of all of club, not just with a small-scale part of information technology. If non, he is as bad as the politicians who disregard a large part of our reality. That is why authors, painters, writers in Latin America get politically involved. I am surprised past the little resonance authors have in the Usa and in Europe. Politics is fabricated there just past the politicians. The era of Sartre and Camus has definitely passed.''
Adjacent month, later on the Nobel Prize dust has settled, Garcia Marquez hopes to become dorsum to writing his new novel. Like his last 2 books it is already taking shape equally a rumor, slowly creating a vanguard of its own. ''1 Hundred Years of Confinement'' was preceded by the publication of small-scale, provocative fragments and became a myth before information technology came out. ''The Chronicle of a Death,'' which is scheduled for publication in the United States next Apr, was heralded by a publicity extravaganza worthy of a bear witness business scandal. Garcia Marquez has said that he showed the manuscript to Fidel Castro before submitting information technology to his publisher; ''Castro,'' he said, ''is a very cultured, well-read human, with a keen heart for spotting contradictions in a law-breaking story like this.''
Critics of the author ascribe the brouhaha around his publications to his mastery of the calculated special issue. His friends say it is created by the hordes of reporters who are forever seeking him out. But even his friends concede that the writer's claim, widely reported in the mid-70's, that he would turn down to publish until Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet barbarous, fits into the category of ''calculated effects.'' Of his work in progress he is willing to requite only a hint. It is ''a happy dear story,'' he suggests, which may brainstorm with ii octogenarians in bed one morning talking and making beloved.
Next year the author also plans to fulfill a dream when he launches his own newspaper in Colombia. The projection clearly appeals to his sometime yearning for the globe of newspapers and to his newer ambition for power through political influence. His own explanation is that he wants to set new standards and train young people for his paper. ''I accept always been pulled by the globe of journalism. And I am notwithstanding fascinated past the relationship betwixt journalism and literature.''
Marlise Simons reports for The Times from United mexican states and Central America.
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