Where the Fiction Is Fantastica

By R.Z. Sheppard

Gabriel Garcia Marquez spearheads Latin American writing

An electrician called at my house at eight in the morning and as soon as the door was open, he said: "You have to change the electric iron's cord." Immediately realizing that he had come to the wrong door, he apologized and left. Hours later, my wife connected the iron, and the cord caught fire. There is no need to go on. It is enough to read the papers, and open one's eyes, in order to feel willing to shout along with the French college students: "Power to the imagination!" --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, commenting on art and life

Sometimes imagination is not enough. During his tour of Latin America late last year, President Reagan generously offered to prepare a Brazilian astronaut for a seat on a U.S. space-shuttle flight. There was one small problem. Brazil has no astronauts. Facts must be faced: most North Americans neither know nor care to know too much about Latin America unless, of course, someone shouts, "The Russians are coming!"

This is not an attractive prospect, perhaps not even for the Russians. Should they arrive, book lovers among them might experience a sense of dej`a vu. From Mexico to the islands of southern Chile and Argentina, there is a burst of literary energy reminiscent of the age of Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Great differences exist between the writers of 19th century Russia and 20th century Latin America, but so do profound similarities. Both groups have had to face provincialism, political suppression and foreign influences that threatened to drown out their native voices.

There is also Latin America's isolation and mournful history: the rise and fall of great pre-Columbian cultures, Spanish colonialism, wars of liberation and the unquiet peace of countless dictators. Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez addressed this past last year when he accepted the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish Academy: "A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us ... and nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty." The problem, said the novelist, was how to tell the story. The region's writers found solutions in aesthetic imports: French surrealism, the journalistic devices of Dos Passes and Hemingway, and the narrative techniques of cinema.

Latin America has seldom been short of renowned poets, notably Peru's Cesar Vallejo and Chile's Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. But in the 1960s, North America began to encounter the names of novelists and essayists who would be associated with El Boom. The term suggested the sudden discovery of Latin American talent rather than its slow growth. Says Gregory Rabassa, the distinguished translator of many Hispanic writers: "El Boom is not quite right. I would prefer something a little stuffier, like fomento." The word means a gradual development.

Mexican Poet and Critic Octavio Paz broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study that described a New World nation improvising a future from indigenous traditions and revolutionary ideals. Paz's dynamic countryman Carlos Fuentes measured the distance between Mexican dream and reality in two impressively executed novels, Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz.

The fabulous diversity of Latin America inspired a flowering of unconventional expression. Jorge Luis Borges, a scholarly Argentine, exerted an international influence with metaphysical teasers called simply fictions. Joao Guimaraes Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands introduced a Brazilian outlaw who galloped through streams of consciousness. Julio Cortazar, an Argentine who lives in Paris, bedazzled critics with Hopscotch and other works that undermined conventional notions of time, place and character. The Obscene Bird of Night by Chilean Jose Donoso concerned the hallucinatory observations of a man pretending to be a deaf mute. Guillermo Cabrera Infante combined documentary and snippets of fiction to convey a history of Cuba from Columbus to Castro. Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, author of last year's deceptively lighthearted autobiography-as-novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, began a versatile career as a brooding realist.

The 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Miguel Angel Asturias, a Guatemalan diplomat whose phantasmagorical novels managed, among other things, to get Mayan mythology and the United Fruit Co. in the same ring. But what Latin American fiction needed was a book that would bowl over critics and readers alike.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude struck with incalculable force. Set in Macondo, a fictional territory on Colombia's Caribbean coast, the novel was hailed as an epic and a metaphor for the isolation and outsize realities of Latin America. Macondo, stage for a century-long family saga, was founded in an age of miracle and innocence, corrupted by civil wars and banana fevers, and eventually wiped away by deluge, drought and devastating winds. Despite the heavy overtones, One Hundred Years of Solitude was great fun to read. Small-town gossip roots the book in social reality, while a woman sails to heaven on spinnakers of laundry, a priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate, and a baby is born with a pig's tail.

Since its 1967 publication in Argentina, Cien Anos de Soledad has been translated into more than 30 languages and has sold more than 12 million copies. It assured an eager audience for Garcia Marquez's other books, Leafstorm, No One Writes to the Colonel, Big Mama's Funeral, In Evil Hours and The Autumn of the Patriarch, a dreamlike portrayal of the decay and loneliness of a Latin American despot. More important, Solitude focused broader interest on Latin American fiction and led the way to the author's Nobel Prize.

"Gabo," as he is known to his family and friends, was a popular Nobel choice. The man who once dreaded that he might become "the third-rate Faulkner of the Third World" was hailed as its leading magical realist. This label has been casually slapped on many Latin Americans who added an extra twist of fantasy to their believe-it-or-not history. Garcia Marquez's speech in Stockholm contained a few real-life examples: the Mexican dictator who staged an elaborate funeral for the leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War, and the Honduran general whose statue in Tegucigalpa is actually the figure of Napoleon's Marshal Ney, bought secondhand in Paris.

Fiction too is the artifice of transforming old realities into new ones. A textbook case is Garcia Marquez's latest novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, to be published next month by Knopf and already printed in full in the maiden issue of the new magazine Vanity Fair. First the historical facts: on Jan. 22, 1951, in the Colombian town of Sucre, a man was murdered because it was thought he had been the lover of another man's new bride. The victim was an acquaintance of Garcia Marquez, then a young newspaperman in the city of Barranquilla. The men connected to the killing were the bride's two brothers. Both spent only a few years in prison for what was generally regarded as a crime of honor.

Now the fiction: Chronicle of a Death Foretold is about twin brothers who butcher the man they believe deflowered their sister before her marriage. Like the real bride, the young woman of Garcia Marquez's story is dumped back on her parents after the wedding night. By the end of Chronicle's first line, the reader knows that the victim will die before nightfall. So do most of the people in town. Garcia Marquez is aware that there can be as much suspense in foreknowledge as in the unknown. Warnings are withheld, paths fail to cross, backs are inopportunely turned. Even the killers would welcome a way to save the family name without bloodshed. Unsuspectingly, the doomed man's amblings lead to a door that should not have been locked. It becomes the altar on which he is hacked to pieces, a sacrifice to the ritual code cloaked by the bright folkloric surface of the narrative.

The narrator of Chronicle is Garcia Marquez himself, moving back and forth in time, reinventing the past and smoothly meshing journalism and fiction. The brilliant, unobtrusive translation is by Gregory Rabassa, who produced the English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Author and translator seem to have been born for each other. Says Rabassa: "Garcia Marquez writes the most natural Spanish prose since Cervantes." Says a magnanimous Garcia Marquez: "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original."

Chronicle of a Death Foretold has had extraliterary effects. The 1981 Colombian edition of the novel drew a swarm of journalists to Sucre. They were eager to interview anyone who had anything to do with the old scandal. Stories appeared and lawyers followed. A Bogota weekly, Al Dia, was sued for 20 million pesos by one of the men who had been jailed for the murder. A Colombian judge called Garcia Marquez at his home in Mexico City to ask what he knew about the case.

Fiction feeds on fact and fact bites back. A writer must be careful, though. Garcia Marquez is sure about one thing: "The townsfolk gave a lot of feeble excuses for not stopping the murder. They believed it was a private affair, but their doubt that a real sin had been committed made the matter even worse."

Such moral centers of gravity can be located in most of Garcia Marquez's work. One Hundred Years of Solitude is frequently praised for its fantasy and elegiac tone at the expense of its social realism. But the descriptions of the bloody strike at the North American-owned banana plantation, the militia's "chancre of blind obedience" and the lawyers' "sleight of hand" are as graphically indignant as a Diego Rivera mural.

Many of the events described in Solitude and the atmosphere of Chronicle belong to the history of the Colombian coast where Garcia Marquez was born 55 years ago, the son of a telegraph operator and a woman from the small Caribbean town of Aracataca. Gabriel was raised there, in the home of his grandparents. His grandfather told him stories about Colombia's civil wars and introduced the boy to the daily life of the town. Macondo was actually the name of a local banana plantation. The author credits his grandmother with his earliest literary influence: her way of talking naturally about the supernatural would become the secret of convincing magical realism.

At eight, Garcia Marquez was sent to school in Bogota; he remained in the city to study some law before becoming a journalist. He wrote editorials and saw his early short stories printed in the literary pages of Bogota's El Espectador. Recalls Garcia Marquez: "The editors complained that my style was too literary, and the critics complained that my style was too journalistic." With the encouragement of friends, he published his first novel, La Hojarasca, in 1955. Called Leafstorm in English, the book planted the idea of the Macondo that would ripen in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The process took twelve years. During that time the author worked as a correspondent in Europe before returning to South America to marry his Colombian sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha. The couple settled in Mexico where they had two sons. Although Garcia Marquez has been a critic of Colombian governments, he is more an expatriate than a political refugee. Says he: "My children are Mexican, and I love Mexico very much. That is why I came here."

The writer survived there mainly as a freelancer and continued to tilt at the memories that would unlock the big novel. He heard the click while driving in Acapulco in 1965. It was the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the most tantalizing openings in all fiction. "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Today the author ponders such memories in a studio next to his Spanish colonial-style house in the prosperous Pedregal section of Mexico City. The building, about 30 ft. long and 15 ft. wide, is comfortably furnished, with a living room area at one end and an office at the other. A large desk is covered with the writer's usual clutter: books, magazines, clippings and correspondence. On the shelves are works of many novelists, including Hemingway and "my master Faulkner." There are also the writings of Jose Marti, the 19th century Cuban patriot and poet, and a set of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

A man could find peace and quiet in these surroundings, but these days Garcia Marquez can locate scarcely ten minutes of solitude. "The phone rings six times an hour," he says, shortly before taking an international call from his friend, Novelist Carlos Fuentes. As a former newspaperman, Garcia Marquez is warm and patient with journalists, though he tires of answering the same questions. Years ago he thought he had a solution: "I decided that the best way to put an end to this avalanche of useless interviews is to give the greatest number possible, until the whole world gets bored with me and I'm worn out as a subject."

That is unlikely. Since winning the Nobel Prize, Garcia Marquez has aroused even more curiosity. He is an unaffiliated socialist who sympathizes with the nationalist aspirations of the Third World. He was a close friend of Panama's Populist leader, General Omar Torrijos, who died in a 1981 plane crash, and he is a familiar figure in Havana, where he stops to chat with Fidel Castro. "Politics," says Garcia Marquez, "is not the main topic of conversation. Castro is a very cultured man, a great reader and very knowledgeable about seafood." The premier author of Latin America usually arrives bearing a stack of books, and the premier citizen of Cuba usually lays on a lobster feast.

Garcia Marquez readily combines a life of writing and public affairs. He jetted to Paris last month for Culture and Development, the meeting of intellectuals and economists sponsored by another friend, French President Franc,ois Mitterrand. This month the schedule calls for a trip to New Delhi's conference of non-aligned nations. "I will attend as a journalist," Garcia Marquez admits, "but I'm actually going to try to get Colombia into the organization." He has also started a new Bogota newspaper called El Otro (The Other), which he describes as an alternative to the country's conservative press. Garcia Marquez plans to spend about six months in his native country getting the paper organized and staffed. "The people who write for El Otro will all be under 30," he says. "I want to get them before they develop any journalistic vices."

The U.S. is one of the few places where the novelist's busy wings have been clipped. His visa privileges are restricted, largely because of his Cuban ties, which included a job in 1959-60 with that country's official news agency. To enter the U.S., Garcia Marquez is required to list a specific purpose, like giving a lecture or accepting an honorary degree. Meanwhile, his books are permanent residents.

Present or not, the author and his agent, Carmen Balcells of Barcelona, drive a hard bargain in New York. Chronicle of a Death Foretold was sold to Ballantine and Knopf with a stipulation that they could keep the book for only ten years. Usually the right to publish continues as long as the publisher maintains the work in print. Harper & Row, Garcia Marquez's previous New York house, rejected a similar contract that also demanded time limits for Solitude and the author's other books on Harper's backlist.

Garcia Marquez's success and critical reputation have undoubtedly boosted the fortunes of younger Latin authors like Brazil's Marcio Souza (Emperor of the Amazon), Colombia's Jaime Manrique (Colombian Gold) and Argentina's Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman). Notes New York Translator and Agent Thomas Colchie: "In 1979, Souza sold Emperor of the Amazon for only $2,000. His forthcoming book, Mad Maria, went for $5,000, and his third has just been signed for $10,000." Colchie adds that Armando Valladares, the Cuban poet who was recently released after 20 years in a Castro prison, has a $25,000 contract with Knopf to write a memoir.

Some of this new literary attention can also be traced to the current troubles in Central America and the lingering concern for people who have vanished in Chile and Argentina. Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentine now living in New York City, caught the mood in Strange Things Happen Here (1979). From a droll story titled The Best Shod: "An invasion of beggars, but there's one consolation; no one lacks shoes, there are more than enough shoes to go around. Sometimes, it's true, a shoe has to be taken off some severed leg found in the underbrush, and it's of no use except to somebody with only one good leg. But this doesn't happen very often, usually corpses are found with both shoes intact.' Valenzuela's tone is a far cry from fantasy. Says she: "Magical realism was a beautiful resting place, but the thing is to go forward." The way is now clear. After 100 years of solitude, Latin writers are demanding and getting more than occasional solicitude. -- R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.