By writing news chronicles and short commentaries, Marquez neither pretended to, nor imitated, nor sought the approval of the literary world. The freedom of writing ordinary chronicles was transforming him into the writer that everyone would know. Because his chronicles for “El Spectador” were written only 13 years before the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
Russia Torres Duarte
Bogota – With short stories written in the 1940s and early 50s, and later collected in the book “The Eyes of a Blue Dog,” the late Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning writer, shows that he is still a young writer, with a style and subjects that may be atypical.
Stylistically, Merkez reached his peak with the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. At that moment, his style and essence took a chaotic course. He reached the level of novels that later became screenplays for films such as “Nobody Can Write for the Colonel”, or with the technical experiment in the novel “Gjethurinat”, the short anecdotal novel in “The Evil Hour”, or the exploration of politics in “The Funeral of the Great-Grandmother”.
Throughout, the skills that Marquez displayed were more those of a talented juggler. However, I think that his craft allowed his style not only to evolve more strongly, but became the nourishing source of the hyperbolic tone in the novels “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “The Autumn of the Patriarch” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”.
Wisdom, humor, irony
In the 1950s, Marquez cultivated two genres: light commentary on news (whether about the Argentine government, a film, or a funeral) and the dark chronicle. The former he pursued during the several years he worked at “El Universal” and “El Heraldo” (two Colombian dailies).
His comments, collected and studied by Jacques Gillard in his book "Coastal Texts, 1948-1952), represent an intelligent and insightful narrative, and are sometimes as magnificent as any passage in one of his great works.
In "La primera caída" (The First Fall), an article on the famous British playwright George Bernard Shaw, published in September 1950, he wrote that "at an age when most people are devoted to the tedious task of turning to dust, Mr. George Bernard Shaw says that he still takes regular, very brisk walks in his garden to keep his body in shape."
When Shaw died on All Souls' Day, as a result of that accidental fall, Marquez noted: "Mr. George Bernard Shaw chose to die on November 2nd, which is undoubtedly the most suitable day for that vexed task."
His light-hearted comments are sometimes as grand as a passage in one of his grand works. The irony in his observations (the “annoying task” of death) is not unlike this famous passage in the novella “The Autumn of the Patriarch”: “…One January afternoon,
we saw a cow watching the sunset from the presidential balcony. Imagine a cow on the balcony of the motherland…, just imagine how a cow could have reached that balcony, when everyone knows that cows cannot climb stairs today, even on stone stairs, and even less on carpeted stairs…”.
The same humor, sometimes tinged with sarcasm, is evident in the story “The Kiss: A Chemical Reaction.” After telling how a scientist named Mrs. Wilkinson suggested that kissing was a method discovered by ancient people to consume salt during the hot months of the year, Marquez writes: “From now on, there will be no need to invite anyone to come and observe the moon with us. The only thing we have to do is sit on a park bench and romantically eat half a kilo of salt.”
The same dark humor is used to describe (in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude) a man who falls from a roof to see the beautiful Remedios. Marquez writes in “Possibilidades de la anthropofagia” (The Possibilities of Cannibalism) that “it would not be strange if one of these days, when all supplies are exhausted, the sale of sacrificial victims were legalized.”
Cultural traditions and mythical geographies
In the story “A Luis Carlos López con veinte años de mueste” (To Luis Carlos López, 20 years after his death), he writes that a necessary condition for knowing the poet López personally was “to be at least 30 years old.” The choice of a common but dissonant detail (30, and not 32 years old) would return years later at the beginning of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
As a chronicle journalist at “El Espectador”, he expanded the potential of this register by laying the foundations of fantasy and realism. It is no coincidence that his first chronicles were dedicated to La Sierpe, a legendary city on the Colombian Atlantic coast.
“La Marquesita de la Sierpe” begins with the story of a man in a doctor’s office, waiting to be rescued from the monkey he was carrying in his womb. He had been impregnated by the witchcraft so often used as a punishment around La Sierpe. His chronicles, which report on a fantastic geography and its animals, describe winged or dead bulls coming from the underworld, gently striking a coffin.
Marquez's love of hyperbole and wit finds broader and more fruitful ground in the world of cultural traditions and mythical, public and inherited fantasies, than in the slippery terrain of current affairs.
From reality to fiction
Interestingly, the style that allowed Marquez to process many of his real-life experiences is more closely identified with his work in the media than his early attempts to write fictional stories.
Despite the mastery that characterizes such books as “The Evil Hour” and “The Revenants,” it seems that Marquez found in his fantasy born of everyday events a basis from which he could rise as a great storyteller. Aspiring writers tend to seek the approval of the literary world through imitation of models and artificial depiction of emotions.
I think that by writing news chronicles and short commentaries, Marquez neither pretended, nor imitated, nor sought the approval of the literary world. The freedom of writing ordinary chronicles was transforming him into the writer that everyone would know. Because his chronicles for “El Espectador” were written only 13 years before the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. / “Worldcrunch” – Bota.al
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