Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

To the left of Gabriel García Márquez

Criollismo [1] and avant-garde: in the middle of last century a generation of writers who broke both traditions which then flooded the publishers emerged in Latin America and the Caribbean.

These writers – who grew up in the midst of dictatorships, civil wars and the promise of development – distanced as much from indigenous and folk literature as from the provincial cosmopolitanism of the great cities of the region.

Gabriel García Márquez belongs to that generation of founders of the modern literature with Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Salvador Garmendia, Ernesto Sabato, Juan Carlos Onetti and one hundred writers who did not have the same editorial recognition. But they also allowed the recognition of writers prior to their generation as Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier.

In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, for example, novelists like Hector Rojas Herazo and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio didn’t have the same space in the history of universal literature as Gabriel García Márquez, but the Nobel Prize made visible previous authors as José Félix Fuenmayor or Manuel Zapata Olivella.

Modernity aside

A common material molded their books – the everyday stories of their villages, either from Macondo, Santamaria or the Parisian cafes – and assumed new tools such as literary journalism and American modern fiction, specially from William Faulkner. That means, telling stories that remained in the oral tradition, in the light of the literary tradition.

Most of these writers did not come from large urban centers but from their surroundings; the training of Gabriel García Márquez was supervised by the journalists Manuel Zabala Clemente and Hector Rojas Herazo in the newspaper El Universal, published in Cartagena, and later in El Heraldo, published in Barranquilla, by Ramon Vinas and the proclaimed Barranquilla Group.

An example of what the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama called ‘new regionalism’ is the book La Hojarasca (whose common translation is Leaf Storm), first novel by García Márquez, published in 1955. It’s the story of the death of a lone doctor, whom the entire village refuses to bury because he failed to attend the wounded of the Bananera slaughter. Three narrators, in the best Faulknerian and biblical style, tell the story, which makes clear references to Sophocles’ Antigone tragedy.

Like any author, García Márquez had a vision of the world; Gabo’s [2] can be summarized in the nostalgia of traditional society that is destroyed by the progress, the crisis of the patrician society and solitude of men and women who – from a house or a dictatorship – see their power waning. Not surprisingly, after Macondo – as posed by the researcher Jorge García Usta – nineteenth-century Cartagena was his second fictional universe.

These novels show that the universality of the stories are neither in the criollismo that borders the pamphlet literature nor in the vanguardism, a neighbor of the intellectual careerism. Hence the literary value of the generation known as the Boom in Latin America and the Caribbean, because they could romanticize their daily tragedies – urban or rural – from their diverse world views, without falling into any of these two trends that arose as ‘elitist’ or ‘popular’, but actually obeyed oral and written traditions at the back of the modern literature.

To the left of Gabo

Beyond his work, Gabriel García Márquez, as most of these writers, professed sympathy with progressive and reformist governments of Latin America and the Caribbean, undertook solidarity campaigns and put his voice in support of these causes. Gabo, who was a founder of the Alternative Magazine and the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, was exiled several times, first due to the persecutions of the Turbay Ayala government and then by the insecurity in his country (Colombia) where he felt he could be kidnapped.

On April 17 we learned the news of his death in Mexico City and his name again flooded the headlines of the international press. His friendship with leaders such as Fidel Castro or Bill Clinton, his editorial achievements, the precarious situation of his native Aracataca and his economic rise have earned him criticism from many quarters.

A parliamentary right-wing, attached to the livestock sector, a major responsible for the paramilitaries in Colombia, María Fernanda Cabal commented on a social network a photo of García Márquez with Fidel Castro: ‘Soon they will be together in hell’. Similarly he has received criticism from other sectors for making fortune or for failing to use his influence to help his hometown Aracataca.

But the importance of the work of Gabriel García Márquez and his generation, as a writer and journalist, is not just showing a ‘reality’ of our people but for having taken the continental literature from the literary parochialism that Criollismo and avant-garde had sank it, while facing objections from local socialist realism and telluric nostalgias written from the capital cities, on one hand, and the cosmopolitan entertainment of the intellectuals living in their cool ivory towers, on the other.

For writers and artists we may ask them for ‘political correctness’, but their work will always be more crucial to mankind.

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[1]Criollismo: Preoccupation in the arts and especially the literature of Latin America with native scenes and types; especially nationalistic preoccupation with such matter (www.merriam-webster.com). It’s considered equivalent to regionalism in the USA literature. It is based on realism to describe the scenes, customs and manners of the country the writer is from.

[2]Gabo: Gabriel García Márquez’s nickname.

Translation: Marcos Margarido

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