The
Magus of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez — who died on Thursday
at his home in Mexico City, at the age of 87 — used his fecund
imagination and exuberant sleight of hand to conjure the miraculous in
his fiction: plagues of insomnia and forgetfulness, a cluster of magical
grapes containing the secret of death, an all-night rain of yellow
blossoms, a swamp of lilies oozing blood, a Spanish galleon marooned in a
Latin American jungle, cattle born bearing the brand of their owner.
Such
images were not simply tokens of his endlessly inventive mind, but
testaments to his all-embracing artistic vision, which recognized the
extraordinary in the mundane, the familiar in the fantastic. In novels
like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Autumn of the Patriarch”
and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Mr. García Márquez mythologized the
history of an entire continent, while at the same time creating a
Rabelaisian portrait of the human condition as a febrile dream in which
love and suffering and redemption endlessly cycle back on themselves on a
Möbius strip in time.
A García Márquez Sampler
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper & Row (1970)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Translated by Edith Grossman, Alfred A. Knopf (1988)
Of Love and Other Demons
Translated by Edith Grossman, Alfred A. Knopf (1995)
Transactions
between the real and surreal, the ordinary and the fabulous, of course,
are a signature device of the magical realism that flourished in the
second half of the 20th century in places like Latin America, where the
horrors and dislocations of history frequently exceeded the reach of
logic, reason and conventional narrative techniques. What he called the
“outsized reality” of Latin America’s history — including the period of
civil strife in Colombia known as La Violencia, which claimed the lives
of as many as 300,000 during the late 1940s and ’50s — demanded a means
of expression beyond the rationalities of old-fashioned narrative
realism.
As
Mr. García Márquez’s memoir “Living to Tell the Tale” made clear,
however, his fascination with the phantasmagorical was as rooted in his
own childhood and family history as it was in the civil wars and
political upheavals of his country. His grandfather painted the walls of
his workshop white so that the young boy, nicknamed Gabo, would have an
inviting surface on which to draw and fantasize; his grandmother spoke
of the visions she experienced everyday — the rocking chair that rocked
alone, “the scent of jasmines from the garden” that “was like an
invisible ghost.”
His
childhood home was in the remote town of Aracataca, a Wild West sort of
place, subject to dry hurricanes, killing droughts, sudden floods,
plagues of locusts and “a leaf storm” of fortune hunters, drawn by the
so-called banana fever fomented there by the arrival of the United Fruit
Company. Aracataca would provide the seeds for the imaginary town of
Macondo in “Solitude,” just as Mr. García Márquez’s own sprawling family
would help inspire the story of the prolific and amazing Buendía clan
memorialized with such ardor in that novel. Macondo is a place where the
miraculous and the monstrous are equally part of daily life, a place
where the boundaries between reality and dreams are blurred. It is, at
once, a state of mind, a mythologized version of Latin America and a
reimagining of the author’s boyhood town through the prism of memory and
nostalgia.
For
that matter, the magic in Mr. García Márquez’s work always remained
grounded in a carefully observed reality — a skill honed by his early
years as a reporter. From that start, Mr. García Márquez slowly
developed his own distinctive voice — a voice with the sinuous rhythms
of Faulkner and Joyce, the metaphorical reach of Kafka, the dreamlike
imagery of Borges. In later years, the fevered flights of fantasy that
distinguished “Solitude” and “Patriarch” would give way to a somewhat
more muted sorcery, an appreciation — demonstrated in works like “Love in the Time of Cholera”
and “Of Love and Other Demons” — of the everyday, combined with a
recognition that the extremes of human love and suffering could be found
in the seemingly most ordinary of lives.
“Love
in the Time of Cholera” was a sort of Proustian meditation on time and
an anatomy of love in all its forms — giddy adolescent love, mature
love, romantic love, sexual love, spiritual love, even love so virulent
it resembles cholera in its capacity to inflict pain. At the same time,
it was also a kind of tribute to his own parents’ courtship and
marriage.
The
personal gave way to the historical in some novels that dealt on an
epic level with the tortuous history of Latin America. “The Autumn of
the Patriarch” created a hallucinatory portrait of a tyrant who seems
like a mythic composite of every dictator to strong-arm his way to power
on that continent: a once-feted hero, who sells out his country to the
gringos, murders his opponents, rewards himself with medals,
unimaginable wealth and the modest title “General of the Universe,” and
who ends up completely isolated, discovered dead in his palace, pecked
at by vultures.
As for “The General in His Labyrinth,”
it performed a kind of free-form improvisation on the life of the
19th-century revolutionary Simón Bolívar, who becomes in Mr. García
Márquez’s telling a close relative of many of his fictional heroes — a
spoiled dreamer, torn between martyrdom and hedonism, extravagant
ambitions and crashing disillusion.
In
the end, it’s not politics, but time and memory and love that stand at
the heart of Mr. García Márquez’s work. How the histories of continents
and nations and families often loop back on themselves; how time past
shapes time present; how passion can alter the trajectory of a life —
these are the melodies that thread their way persistently through his
fiction, reverberating in novel after novel, story after story. In later
works, like the stories in “Strange Pilgrims” and the novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,”
Mr. García Márquez wrote about older characters, falling under the
shadow of mortality, but then, death had long been a focal point in his
work, going back to his early novella “Leaf Storm,” and on through
novels like “The Autumn of the Patriarch.”
Mr.
García Márquez once wrote that, as a young man, he believed his bad
luck with women and money was “congenital and irremediable,” but he did
not care, “because I believed I did not need good luck to write well,”
and “I did not care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was
sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.” He learned, in
reading the works of the masters like Faulkner and Joyce, he said, that
“it was not necessary to demonstrate facts,” that it “was enough for the
author to have written something for it to be true, with no proofs
other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice.”
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