The Spectre of Magical Realism Comes to TexasGabriel García Márquez
When he died last April at age 87, he had for a half century been a candidate for “world’s greatest living writer.”
Author of short stories and novels, including his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1972 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in Literature in 1982. He was a fierce critic of the United States and had a friend in admirer Fidel Castro, with whom he sometimes shared notes on his works-in-progress. He was banned as a “subversive” from entering the U.S. for several decades until President Clinton lifted the travel ban in 1995. But great art always has a way of prevailing over petty politics in the end. It was announced this week that Márquez’s archives of extant manuscripts and other writing-related items will become a part of the prestigious Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. His papers will be in good company with those of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Márquez was the creator of a literary style that came to be emulated by many other writers throughout Latin America.
It’s called “magic realism,” reflecting the surreal quality of lives lived in the perpetually unstable and volatile nations south of the U.S border. When life so often balances between life and death on the edge of a razor, passions become more intense, fear is a constant companion and life itself takes on a dream quality more palpable than actual reality. This is why “Gabo” is so beloved—for being able to capture this in his tales. His characters’ lives are “realist” narratives of the brutalities they must endure to survive, yet ancestors speak from their graves and moments of magic occur with no indication that they might be supernatural, hallucinated or even odd. For Márquez and his Latin brethren, the surreal running memory in their heads that is their life is as “real” as any documentarian’s or journalist’s “facts.”
Evaluating one’s life in terms of an ever-shifting personal story narrative made up of memories interwoven with dreams and fantasies is something that rubs North Americans the wrong way. But it is the glorious and most human way to perceive one’s existence in this cruel and disappointing world of serial tragedies, according to fans of Márquez and his magical literary world. Márquez was a writer who painted tantalizing portraits and beautiful if dangerous landscapes with his words – and in a way that many will continue to be inspired by and try to emulate (some quite successfully, like Isabel Allende with her “House of the Spirits”). But there will forever be only one “Gabo,” the recognized heart and soul of Latin American literature (and dream culture). Rest assured, his recent death won’t keep him from stopping by for a visit from time to time.
About Artists on Writers
Writers will always find inspiration in the visions of artists, always feeling compelled to tell the stories behind the moments captured in artists’ unforgettable images,
Just as,
Artists will always find inspiration in the words of writers, always feeling compelled to lend visual reality and habitat to the characters described in the scribe’s haunting words.
A Quote From Gabriel Garcia Márquez
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
— Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Gabriel Garcia Márquez Inspired Artwork
A Hundred-Year Old CurseA hundred years
Of solitude, of tears
Of desperation
It all seems odd to me
From generation
To generation
A curse
That will kill them
The fear
The tremor
Of a child with a pig's tail
That will die from the bites of various ants
It was all predicted
And written
By an old gypsy-man
Who was friends with the first who was cursed
It was all made up
By a brilliant author
Who used real-life incidents
And added a pinch of magic
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
There is always something left to love.
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Quotes from Gabriel García Márquez
“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
Annie's ViolinIn the evenings
when the stars hid behind
the smog and the haze,
Annie would play the violin.
Annie lived one floor below.
I don't know if she knew
that I could hear her.
It sounded like crying
but often it sounded
like laughter and it always
sounded like pleasure.
One night, I lounged in my room,
typing up a storm and
smoking a crumpled cigarette.
She started playing, and I stopped.
I stopped typing. With each
smoke stained breath... I...
I felt something slick. Something.
Something wet. The tempo quickened.
She was playing with so much anger...
or was it joy or sorrow?
I would never know. But it felt good.
My hand wandered between my legs
and I stifled my groans.
They followed her wild beat
to its inevitable crescendo.
As I came, I thought of her,
violin tucked beneath her chin,
and naked. Her black hair
fanned out around her and her
lips
formed a knowing smile.
I never asked her out for coffee.
Or offered to catsit Mopsy.
I still wonder why.
The Funeral of Icarus
The girl who found Icarus washed up on the shore thought she'd found a fallen angel. When she saw the heap of pinions and clothing lying in the shallows, she straightened where she stood among the rocks and put one hand to her brow.
It might have been the greatest gull she'd ever seen. But there, that was an arm, pale and outstretched beneath the sun. Gathering her skirts against the wind, she moved down to the sand. No sooner had her toes touched its softness then she broke into a run.
And as she drew upon it, she put her hands to her face and turned her eyes away.
For his body was bloated and green, his eyes dried jelly in their sockets. Tiny crabs, blue as pearls, clung to his matted locks. Garlands of seaweed entwined his fingers and stuck to his torn shirt; they swirled in the surf where the water pooled around him. And there were the scraggly remains of feathers, salt encrusted and jutting out like broken birds.
Her basket fell, the clams she'd gathered sent scattering into the foam. She ran screaming; her skirts were forgotten as they dragged through the dirt on the path to the nearest house. There a fisherman's wife found her inconsolable at the door.
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez
Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.
ApopheniaApophenia: the perception of or belief in connectedness among unrelated phenomena
Apples falling from the trees,
Pushing out ideas from overflowing minds.
Oranges plop down and there's all of a sudden-a
Plague of ants that carried away our child, but it was a demon anyway,
Hell-kissed, and Hell-bent fruit of incest.
Earth never saw such demons and such miracles when the
Nectarines burst from their branches
Itching to be as knowledgeable as the
Apples that taste like ideas.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
Questions For the Reader
- What is your favorite aspect of the genre of Magical Realism?
- What is your favorite Book or Film with Magical Realism as it's main theme?