Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Chronicle of a Death Foretold

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Background on Marquez

• Born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, a town in
  Northern Columbia
• Raised by his maternal grandparents
• Noble prize in 1982
• Began career as a reporter in 1955
• Still living and writing is memoirs
• Good friends with Castro

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Marquez and Castro

• Ironically, although he claims to be good friends
  with Castro- helped him edit Chronicle of a Death
  Foretold- he spent the late seventies writing a
  very harsh, very frank book about the
  shortcomings of the Cuban Revolution and of life
  under Castros regime.
• This book has not yet been published, and Garcia
  Marquez claims that he is holding it until
  relations between Cuba and the US are normalized.

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Marquezs Inspiration

• Marquez said that Faulkner was one of his biggest
  influences during the late forties and early
  fifties.
• He amazed him with his ability to reformulate his
  childhood into a mythical past.
• Faulkner taught him that a writer should write
  about what is close to him.

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Columbian Literature

• Colombian writers strive to explain the violence
  in Colombian history and society.
• Colombia's rich ecology has yielded three
  commodities, each steeped in conflict. First from
  the Amazonian jungle came rubber. Then came the
  bananas from the swampy coast and finally cocaine
  from the Andean highlands.

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Magical Realism, Surrealism, and Realism

• MR borrows its freedom from Surrealism by weaving
  in realist elements. We will look at how these
  three work together

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Magical Realism

• Literature of this type is usually characterized
  by elements of the fantastic woven into the story
  
• The term is not without a lot of controversy,
• Some claim that it is a postcolonial hangover, a
  category used by "whites" to marginalize the
  fiction of the "other."
• Others claim that it is a passé literary trend,
  or just a way to cash in on the Latin American
  "boom."
• Still others feel the term is simply too
  limiting, and acts to remove the fiction in
  question from the world of serious literature.

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• In MR distortion stumbles on truth and beliefs
  and metaphors become forms of fact, and more
  ordinary facts become uncertain.
• Key elements have no logical or psychological
  explanation. The Magical realist does not try to
  copy the surrounding reality (as the realists
  did) but to seize the mystery that breathes
  behind things (perfect depiction in Chronicle)

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• MR emerges from descriptions of living people
• Marquez says that MR is a technique particular to
  Central and South America Our reality is in
  itself out of all proportion. He refers to
  Latin America as that boundless realm of haunted
  men and historic women.

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What is Reality?

• In Marquezs own words
• reality isnt limited to the price of tomatoes
  and eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves
  that reality is full of the most extraordinary
  things.
• This is why Marquez is to be studied not for his
  MR, but because he offers reality in its several
  dimensions, the ones we are hard put to explain
  without recourse to naked formulas.

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Surrealism

• It insisted that there was higher truth than the
  truth offered by realism.
• Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior
  reality of certain forms of previously neglected
  associations.

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MR and Surrealism

• MR borrows its freedom from Surrealism. It moves
  surreal forward, away from the abstract, to a
  much more intimate relationship in literature
  between characters and their setting.

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1949

• In 1949 MR comes to be known as a narrative
  technique
• Not only does it depart from surrealism, but it
  also departs from the genre of fantasy literature

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Fantasy, Fairy tales- how do these fit?

• Fantasy is the sense of pure and simple,
  Walt-Disney style invention without any basis in
  reality.- Marquez
• Fairy tales cannot be considered Magical realist
  because they adhere to relatively uniform plot
  structures an inevitable moral resolution of the
  conflict of the characters, and a classifiable
  number of motifs that have been cataloged by
  folklorists.

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Similarities Between Literature of Fantasy and MR

• In both, the author describes events which are
  not likely to occur in everyday life. The
  fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged
  order. The same is true for MR.

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Oh, but the differences

• In fantasy, the entire story is governed by
  fantastic elements.
• In MR, the instances of supernaturalism are
  intermittent they arrive and disappear quickly,
  so that the reader is always returned to the
  world of social reality.

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• MR that Marquez practices
• Reader is asked to have total faith in the
  fantastic moment.
• Goes to great lengths to add specificity to his
  MR
• Characters accept the outlandish or the
  inconceivable as entirely natural with no
  explanation
• Fantasy confronts the reader with the dilemma of
  whether or not to believe in its departures from
  reality.
• MR also lacks the ambiguity about the
  supernatural that is often found in fantasy
  literature.
• MR never attempts to explain supernatural
  occurrences.

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Thematic differences between fantasy and MR

• Fantasy love, desire, romance and seduction
• MR is broader imperialism and colonialism, or
  history and racism
• Most memorable MR moments are satiric, exposing
  the cruelty of human experience

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A Summary of how MR differs from Surrealism and
Fantasy

• MR does not use dream motifs neither does it
  distort reality or create imagined worlds, as
  fantasy or science fiction, it does not emphasize
  psychological analysis of characters.
• MR is not an aesthetic movement either, neither
  is it interested in the creation of complex
  structures.

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How does MR differ from Magic Literature?

• Its aim, unlike that of magic, is to express
  emotions, not to evoke them.
• MR is , more than anything else, an attitude
  toward reality that can be expressed in popular
  or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles,
  in closed or open structures. In MR the writer
  confronts reality and tries to untangle it.

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Problems with MR

• Dangers when younger, inexperienced writers
  attempt to attach realism to their narratives
  without purpose. Writers MUST have a thematic
  purpose.
• No justification for enlisting MR unless there is
  a larger truth which cannot be reached but for
  distortion of ordinary social realism.
• MR at its best relies not upon flights of
  fantasy, but on the particular fusion of fact and
  fantasy in the service of a quest for meaning.

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Focused Study- Chronicle of a Death Foretold

• Based on actual events
• Marks the end of Marquezs period of silence
  (1976 -1981)
• Promised not to publish anything as long as
  Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet remained in
  power
• It restarts his career

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Structure

• Non-Linear Structure
• Interrelationships, juxtapositions, and
  connections are more important than a linear plot
  and clear character development
• Counter-Cantus a story told many times, but
  distorted each time.
• Function of Non- linear structure
• Patterns Deceive

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Literary Technique

• Pieced together
• Fragmentation and Disintegration
• How through technique does he reveal what is the
  focus of the story?
• Foreshadowing
• References to dreams and visions
• Concerns real events, highly surrealistic tone
  mixed with MR
• Irony

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Themes/Motifs

• What it means to be human
• The nature of reality
• Community/individual identities
• Economic and social inequalities
• Womens use and role
• Male honor
• Medieval Sense of honor
• Moral Responsibility

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P of V and Narrator

• Power lies in the unique way in which Marquez
  relates the plot of the murder.
• Typically, first person narrator gives his own
  point of view but does not know what other
  characters are thinking an ability usually
  reserved for the 3rd person omniscient, or
  all-knowing, point of view.
• He bends the rules the narrator tells the story
  in First-person, he is all knowing- adds to the
  mystery of the murder.