BackGabriel Garcia Marquez: The magician from Aracataca
Gabriel Garcia Marquez knew how to let the story float from the fragment of reality into an unknown but magical terrain
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Like Ernest Hemingway before him, Gabriel Garcia Marquez learned his craft through journalism. If the lesson Hemingway drew from reporting was to sharpen his prose, stripping it bare, removing the adjectives and adverbs that clutter the scene, so that the clear, sparkling beauty of the sentence shines through, showing the reader and not telling him what he wanted them to see, the lesson Garcia Marquez drew from journalism was different. He learned to use the reality as the launching pad to let his imagination soar and see how high it could reach, and how different the world looked from that height!
The resource that Garcia Marquez relied on is what many of us have: the folklore, the legends, and the stories our grandmothers tell us. Garcia Marquez listened intently to those stories, and painted a vivid landscape peopled with ordinary folk caught in grotesque circumstances, and emerging out of intractable situations as if a miracle had occurred.
The massacre which plays such a central role in One Hundred Years of Solitude was not something Garcia Marquez had dreamt up. It had occurred in Cienaga near Santa Marta back in 1928, soon after his birth, when workers had gone on a strike at the banana plantation of the United Fruit Company.
A month later the Colombian government sent troops and the massacre followed. The Colombian government was acting under American pressure. There are no records of how many people died—estimates range between 47 and 2,000, and later, as the story got told more often, the number rose to 3,000. That’s the figure Garcia Marquez used—not because he was an alarmist, nor because he was a radical, and certainly not because he wanted to incite further violence, but because he was a fabulist, and what interested him were not simply the facts, but also the deeper and larger truth. Magic reality was not fantasy; it was never a fairy tale.
It showed another way of looking at reality, making the ordinary seem bizarre, so that the bizarre appears to be ordinary. In his universe, we were at once the blind men of Hindustan trying to figure out an elephant; the characters of Rashomon who would see the same incident differently and came back with varying interpretations where each sought to serve a specific agenda. Garcia Marquez took out our blindfolds; he had the gift to turn the clock back so that we could see exactly who did what in Rashomon.
Facts and truth—two words that appear to say the same thing but often do not. Facts are incontrovertible, but truth is malleable. Facts are supposed to be objective; truth can be an interpretation. Facts offer precision which helps convey a larger truth.
As Garcia Marquez told his interviewer Peter H. Stone in The Paris Review: “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you…The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it’s believed."
It was essential to weave a fantastic scenario to make the reality more palatable.
A man steals a baguette from a baker—that’s the plain fact, but it does not tell us much more than that. He could be hungry; or that he wants to feed the birds in a pond in a public park; or the baker won’t sell him the baguette because he is the baker’s neighbour and his rooster wakes up the baker at odd hours and the baker is annoyed with him and they don’t talk to one another; or something entirely absurd, like he wants something hard to squelch the bumblebee that hovers around him, reminding him of a distant afternoon when a helicopter came and strafed his village to kill the drug-dealing guerrillas and instead killed his parents who were poor campesinos. The possibilities are limited by the writer’s imagination. And Garcia Marquez knew how to let the story float from the fragment of reality, so that the story would take the readers into an unknown but magical terrain.
And yet, that leap was not one of faith alone.
At its base was a hard, solid fact. He didn’t simply make up things—that would have been too easy. In the world that Garcia Marquez has left us, and which we inhabit, it all happened—the sexual slavery, the massacres, the spring of love in the autumn of one’s life, the cannibalistic urges of a dictator, the lonely colonel waiting for the letter that nobody will write to him, the vivid recollections of a ship-wrecked sailor that nobody could believe but everyone seemed to want to, but also the yellow butterflies, the scent of bitter almonds, and the fragrance of the guava tree. Those images will stay in our minds, like that train that leaves Macondo but never stops travelling.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com.
To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi
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