Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez) was a Colombian short story writer, novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Throughout Latin America, he is known affectionately as Gabito or Gabo. He is regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.
In 1972, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He also received Nobel Prizes in Literature in 1982. He followed a self-directed education that causes him to leave law school and start his career in journalism.
Even though Garcia Marquez started his literary career as a journalist and wrote many short stories and non-fiction works, he is best known for his novel, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The works of Garcia Marquez achieved commercial success and significant critical acclaim.
He is mostly known for popularizing a literary genre/style known as magic realism. The style of magic realism uses magical events and elements in realistic and ordinary situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional town/village Macondo, which is inspired by his birthplace Arcataca. Most of his works explore the theme of solitude.
The president of Colombia called Garcia Marques, “the greatest Colombian ever lived” in his death in April 1014.
A Short Biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on 6th March 1927. He was the eldest of 12 children. His father was a telegraph operator, a postal clerk, and an itinerant pharmacist. His parents moved to another place when Garcia Marquez was eight years old.
His maternal grandparents left him to be raised in a large tumble-down house. His grandfather, Nicholas Marquez Mejia, was a liberal activist. He also served as a colonel during the Thousand Days War in Columbia. Garcia’s grandmother believed in superstition and magic. She filled the head of her grandson with the folk tales and superstitions, spirits and dancing ghosts.
Writing Career
Garcia Marquez was admitted to a Jesuit College. He started studying law at the National University of Bogota in 1946. Garcia sent a collection of his short stories to the editor of the liberal magazine “El Espectador” when the editor claims that Colombia has no more talented young writers. The editor published the collection of short stories as “Eyes of a Blue Dog.”
This proved to be a brief burst of success. This was interrupted by the assassination of the president Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. In such a chaotic condition following the assignation of Colombian president, Garcia Marquez refuses to become an investigative reporter and journalist in the Caribbean region. It was a role that he would never part with.
Exile from Colombia
Garcia Marques aired a news story about a sailor who survived a shipwreck of a Columbian Navy destroyer. Previously, the shipwreck had been credited to a storm. The sailor then reported, which badly put illegal imports from the US, came loose and hit eight crew members.
As a result of the breaking news story, a scandal started. The scandal caused Garcia Marques to exile to Europe. In Europe, Garcia continued to write magazine reports, short stories, and news.
He published his first novel Leafstorm in 1955. He had written the novel seven years earlier, but he was unable to find a publisher for it.
Marriage and Family
In 1958, Garcia Marquez married Mercedes Barcha Pardo. Both of them had two children Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
In 1967, Garcia Marquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel is his most famous work. He got the idea for the novel when he was driving to Acapulco from Mexico City. While on the script, he went into debt for $12,000, the novel sold more than 25 million copies in the next 30 years. It has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Political Activism
Garcia Marquez, for most of his adult life, lived as an exile from Colombia. The exile was most self-imposed because of his frustration and anger over the violence in his country. Garcia Marquez remained a lifelong socialist.
He was a friend of Fidel Castro. He always sustained his personal ties with the Colombian communist party, despite the fact that he never joined the party as a member. He received the Iron Curtain to the Balkan States from a Venezuelan newspaper. After reading this, he learned that remote from the ideal Communist life, the people in Eastern Europe are living in terror.
Due to his leftist inclinations, he was repeatedly denied tourist visas to the US. He was also criticized by the activist at home that he is not totally committed to communism. He first visited the US when President Bill Clinton sent an invitation to Martha’s Vineyard.
Later Novels
Augustin Pinochet, a dictator, came in power in Chile in 1975. Garcia Marques wore that until Pinochet is gone, he will never write a novel. For the next 17 years, Pinochet remained in power. In 1981, Garcia Marquez acknowledged that he was letting a dictator censor him.
In 1981, he published Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The story is an account of the horrific murder of one of his childhood friends. The merry, peaceful, and open-hearted protagonist of the novel is hacked to death. The whole town knows that the murder will occur, but they cannot prevent it, despite the fact that the town does not consider him guilty of the crime. He has been accused of a plague of inability to act.
Garcia Marques published Love in the Time of Cholera in 1986. It is a romantic narrative of the two lovers who meet in warfare but cannot reconnect for almost 50 years. The world Cholera in the novel refers to both the disease prevailing at the time and extreme warfare.
Death and Legacy
Garcia Marques was diagnosed with Lymphoma in 1999. However, he continued to write until he published Memories of My Melancholy Whores in 2004. The book received mixed reviews and was banned in Iran. He sank into dementia and died in Mexico City on 17th April 2014.
Besides his unforgettable prose works, Marques Garcia set up an International Film School near Havana, and on the Caribbean coast, he set up a school of journalism. He also brought the attention of the world to the literary sense of Latin Americans.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Writing Style
Most of the stories of Garcia Marques revolve around the eccentricity of the Colombian Caribbean region. Even though the writing of Garcia Marques has certain features like humor, he does not have any clear and predetermined style.
In an interview, Garcia says that he tries to make a different path in every book. He asserts that one does not choose a style or discover the best style for the theme. The subject and mood of the times determine the style. If someone tries to choose or use a particular style that is not suitable, it does not work.
It seems that Garcia Marques leaves or does not mention apparently important things or events. He forces the readers into a participatory role in the development of the story. For instance, the main characters are not given names in No One Writes to the Colonel.
This sort of practice was used in Greek Tragedies in the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone in which important events occur offstage, and the audience is left to imagine.
Realism and Magical Realism
Magic realism is a type of narrative in which the fantastic elements blend with the realistic picture of ordinary life. Garcia Marques wrote about the fantastical element in his works with an ironic sense of humor, unmistakable, and honest prose style.
One of the important themes in the works of Garcia Marquez is reality. For his early works, he said that: “Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama’s Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don’t regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality.”
For the rest of his works, he appears to be experimenting with traditional approaches to reality. He tells the most unusual and the most frightful things with a deadpan expression. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character both spiritually and physically ascends into heaven while she is hanging laundry clothes. The style of his works fit into the marvelous realm and was labeled as magical realism.
The style of Garcia Marquez has been understood in an alternative way by literary critic Michael Bell. He criticized the category of magical realism for being exoticizing and dichotomizing and says that “what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimental the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed.”
Garcia Marques talks about magic realism in his works by saying that the way one treats reality in their book is called magic realism. He also says that European people are able to see the magic realism in his book, but unable to see the reality behind it. This happens because their rationalism prevents them from seeing the reality is not something restricted to eggs and tomatoes.
Literary Themes in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Writings
Solitude
In most of the works of Garcia Marques, solitude is a major theme. For instance, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera explores the theme of the solitude of the individual and solitude of mankind. It is portrayed by the solitude of love and being in love.
When Garcia was asked for the roots of this overriding emotion, as it is the theme of all of his books, he says that it is everybody’s problem. Everyone expresses in his own way. The feeling of solitude is pervaded by so many writers, and some of the writers express it unconsciously.
Macondo
Another important theme in Garcia’s works is the recurrent setting of the fictional village Macondo. The cultural, historical, and geographical reference to this place is Garcia Marquez’s home town Aracataca, Colombia. However, the representation of the fictional village is not restricted to a specific area.
Garcia Marques asserts that Macondo is not simply a physical location or place. It is a state of mind that allows one to see what he or she wants to see and how he or she wants to see.
Some of his stories are not set in Macondo. Still, there is a constant lack of specificity to the location of the stories. Even if the stories are set in an Andean hinterland or on a Caribbean coastline, the settings are unspecified. They are in accordance with Garcia’s attempt to apprehend a wide-ranging regional myth instead of any particular political event.
In the literary world, the fictional town of Macondo has become well-known. The inhabitants and the geography of Macondo are constantly evoked by politicians, tourists, and teachers. It makes it difficult to believe that the place is just an absolute creation.
In the novel Leaf Storm, Garcia Marques shows the realities of Banana Boom in the village Macondo. This includes a period of great wealth when US companies were present and a period of depression when US companies leave. Similarly, One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in Macondo and narrates the complete one hundred years of the town from its foundation to its doom.
La Violencia
La Violencia is the violence and “a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians”. In some of the works such as No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, and In Evil Hour, Garcia Marquez refers to this period.
In other works, there are subtle references to the violence as well. For example, his characters appear to be living in a different unjust situation like press censorship, curfew, and underground newspapers.
Even though In Evil Hour is not among the notable novels of Garcia Marques, it is famous for the portrayal of la Violencia. It is also known for its split portrayal of social collapse resulting from b la Violencia.
Despite the fact that Garcia Marques portrays the injustices and corrupt nature of time in la Violencia, he does not use his fictional work as a platform for political marketing. He asserts that a revolutionary writer is obliged to write well. The ideal novel, for Garcia Marques, is the one that moves the reader by its social and political context, and it must have the power to penetrate reality and expose the other side of reality.