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CONTENTS

INTRODUCT ION 1

An overview of García Márquez’s works, major and minor, with a suc-cinct account of the author’s sudden fame, which brought attention to his earlier works, his novels in succession after One Hundred Years of Solitude, key biographical details relating to his fiction and his level of importance in the literary world.

CHAPTER ONE 7

Ea r l y F i c t i on and Sho r t F i c t i on

Details the first short pieces of fiction printed in Colombian news-papers from 1947 and traces the development of the author’s craft while examining critical differences of opinion regarding their qual-ity and purported literary influences. Donald McGrady and Mario Vargas Llosa disagree on the quality of these works while suggest-ing that there are themes, motifs and techniques that resemble those used by William Faulkner. Later critics such as Suzanne Jill Levine and Harley Oberhelman explore those questions. Leaf Storm, In Evil Hour and No One Writes to the Colonel are the subject of a critical overview of book-length fiction, and the stories from Big Mama’s Funeral are examined, particularly those that form part of the Macondo cycle. The stories from Innocent Eréndira are seen as representative of García Márquez’s maturity as a writer.

CHAPTER TWO 27

One Hundred Yea r s o f So l i t ude I

Considers Reinaldo Arenas’ essay review, which highlights most of the points of later critical investigation: biblical allusions, the influences of Borges and Alejo Carpentier among Latin American authors, Colombian history and magical realism. Rodríguez Monegal, Palencia-Roth, Levine and Oberhelman investigate the question of the Macondo cycle and comparisons with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the banana plantation workers massacre, the etymology of

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Macondo, Biblical paradigms, Melquíades’ parchments, the Biblical hurricane, incest and Sophocles, magical realism and The Boom.

CHAPTER THREE 50

One Hundred Yea r s o f So l i t ude I I

Explores Anglo-American and Latin American comparative strategies and literary genealogies proposed by different critics, and looks at the novelist’s discussions about Sophocles, Faulkner, Borges, Virginia Woolf and Tolstoy and their appeal to him. Considers how González Echevarría characterizes the novel within a theory of Latin American archival fiction and Regina Janes disputes the validity of theoretical conventions, citing regional grounding. Examines the critical contentions regarding the insomnia plague; Wayuu folklore; Chibcha mythology versus Biblical intertextuality; the meaning of ‘solitude’; and whether the novel is serious or not, including an analysis of the chemical and botanical poisons scattered through-out its pages. Reflects also on the novel’s influence on post-Boom novels in Latin America (especially Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits) and on world literature, and on the rejection of the yoke of magical realism in the anthology McOndo.

CHAPTER FOUR 71

The Au tumn o f the Pa t r i a r ch and The Genera l i n H i s Laby r i n th

Discusses The Autumn of the Patriarch as an example of the sub-genre of ‘the novel of the dictator’ and compares it with Miguel Ángel Asturias’ The President and highlights the author’s desire to write the paradigm of the sub-genre. Focuses on Gene Bell-Villada’s examination of the aesthetic qualities of the novel and his proposed sources in Virginia Woolf and Béla Bartók. Considers Raymond L. Williams’ analysis of the poetics of the novel. Explores Julio Ortega’s comments on the burden of dictatorships borne by Latin Americans and relates the novel to popular culture. Investigates how Lois Par-kinson Zamora and Regina Janes contrast and compare the novel with One Hundred Years of Solitude, both considering the end of time. Goes on to explore the treatment of history, the mythification of Simón Bolívar and García Márquez’s depiction of a demythified historical figure in The General in His Labyrinth.

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CHAPTER F IVE 86

Chron i c l e o f a Dea th Fo re to ld

Considers various critical treatments of the question of scapegoat-ing, the best of which is by Gustavo Pellón. Raymond L. Williams examines the question of journalism in the novel. Carlos Alonso takes on the same topic but subordinates it to critical theory. Ángel Rama suggests that the novel’s genuine inspiration is Sophocles’ Oedipus, proves the point and argues that the narrator, like Oedipus, is investigating a crime he himself has unwittingly committed. Ali Shehzad Zaidi takes the point much further, demonstrating convinc-ingly that the narrator is responsible for having deflowered Ángela Vicario, his distant cousin, and is therefore also responsible for the tragedy that unfolds. Biblical imagery and orientalism are both examined.

CHAPTER S IX 107

Love i n the T ime o f Cho le ra and Of Love and O the r Demons

Discusses different critical treatments of parody and satire in the novel. Álvarez Borland examines the novel’s internal texts and the oil painting for deeper meaning. Claudette Kemper Columbus presses a Marxist interpretation. John Benson explores the mean-ing of the layers of nostalgia in the novel. Steven Hunsaker looks at the role of black women in it and compares García Márquez’s treat-ment with Jorge Amado’s in his novel Tent of Miracles. Of Love and Other Demons is examined in relation to Baroque era conceptismo, the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic faith and the Yoruba tradition. Aníbal González links it with the post-Boom sentimental novel and a Platonic view of the novel; Arnold Penuel considers the role of the Church in oppression; and William O. Deaver contrasts it with the Yoruba ancestor of Santería.

CONCLUSION 126

NOTES 132

SELECT B IBL IOGRAPHY 146

INDEX 152

CONTENTS vii



Chapter ONe

early Fiction and Short Fiction

the First Stories and their place in Latin american Fiction

Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction began appearing in the late 1940s in Colombian newspapers, and his first dozen stories were published between 1947 and 1953. His first short story, ‘The Third Resignation’ (‘La tercera resignación’), was printed in 1947 in El Espectador. Several weeks later his second story, ‘Eva Is Inside Her Cat’ (‘Eva está dentro de su gato’), featured in the same newspaper.1 To be certain, a story printed in a Colombian newspaper at the time was very unlikely to receive much attention. The author’s earliest stories did not come out as a collection until much later, after the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967). According to Gerald Martin, two days after the publication of ‘Eva Is Inside Her Cat’, an influential journalist, Eduardo Zalamea Borda, recognized García Márquez’s talent: ‘In Gabriel García Márquez we are witnessing the birth of a remarkable writer.’2 There was certainly not as yet a definitive place in Latin American literature for the novice writer. García Márquez’s first masterpiece came in the form of ‘Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait’ (‘Nabo, el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles’, 1951), which was published in a Bogotá newspaper. Martin addresses it as follows: ‘This is the first story called something that sounds like a García Márquez title and has some-thing of the manner of his later works.’3 Relegated to the notes is his personal comment on the story: ‘It is also manifestly “Faulknerian.”’4 This is a commonly held view within the Anglo-American cabal of crit-ics who view the shadow of William Faulkner lurking in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, a point that will be addressed presently.

Gene Bell-Villada summarizes ‘The Third Resignation’ as ‘a some-what morbid account of a young boy presumed dead in his coffin for 18 years, yet whose mind remains alive with sensations, memory and

7



imagination’.5 Gerald Martin notes that the day after reading Jorge Luis Borges’ translation of Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, García Márquez sat down to write his first story.6 Curiously, though well versed in criti-cism and obviously well-read, neither Martin nor Bell-Villada associates the story’s theme of live burial or consciousness within the coffin with Edgar Allan Poe.

García Márquez’s earliest stories have produced very little criticism, largely because they came to the attention of readers beyond Colombia long after they were written. Moreover, most of the stories are unlike the author’s more mature writing and, according to a few critics such as Vargas Llosa and Gene Bell-Villada, of lesser literary value. One of the best articles on those first stories was written by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated and then published in Books Abroad. Like other critics, Vargas Llosa divides the stories into two groups; the first several he attributes to the influence of Kafka, and the second group he insists are tinged with elements of Faulkner.7 Although he suggests that the literary interest of these pieces is minimal, Vargas Llosa remarks that their dominant theme is death.8 This begins with ‘The Third Resignation’, narrated by a man who believes he has died as a seven-year-old child and has been kept alive artificially, lying in a coffin, for 18 years. He stops growing, which brings him closer to death, and finally his body begins to emit an unmistakable odour; rats start to climb up into his casket to gnaw on his legs, until there is nothing left but bone; the ensuing resignation is that of consciousness without a physical form attached to it. Vargas Llosa maintains that particular witticisms mixed with the seriousness of the story are strongly reminiscent of Kafka.9 He further remarks that the themes in this story reoccur in later fiction, noting Leaf Storm, Big Mama’s Funeral, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Vargas Llosa continues in a similar vein through subsequent stories, namely ‘Eva Is Inside Her Cat’, ‘Tubal-Cain Forges a Star’ (‘Tubal-Caín forja una estrella’), ‘The Other Side of Death’ (‘La otra costilla de la muerte’) and its continuation, ‘Dialogue in a Mirror’ (‘Diálogo del espejo’). Vargas Llosa refers to these stories as ‘inconse-quential’ and repetitive of the theme of a living death.10

Afterwards, according to Vargas Llosa, ‘García Márquez has begun to read Faulkner and the experience [would] leave a bright imprint on these last tales.’11 The first of that group is ‘Bitter Sorrow for Three Sleepwalkers’ (‘Amargura para tres sonámbulos’), which Vargas Llosa qualifies as a ‘poetic tableau’.12 It is a story told by one of three brothers, describing an otherwise strangely hermetic sister whom they find after her fall from a second-floor window. ‘Eyes of a Blue Dog’ is the most weakly executed tale of this group, though, according to Vargas Llosa, it resembles a short story by the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Erostrate’

8 Gabriel García Márquez



(‘Erostratus’ in Sartre’s Le Mur [The Wall], 1939).13 Afterwards, Vargas Llosa offers a sketch of ‘Nabo’, although he falls into a formulaic assess-ment, imagining that the location of Nabo is reminiscent of Faulkner because it seems to be set in the Deep South with ‘peasants who live in semi-slavery, estates with horses, aristocratic young ladies with their Black servants, and saxophone players in the public squares’.14 At this point one must disagree with Vargas Llosa, given that neither horses nor saxophones delimit the South. There are no aristocrats in García Márquez’s story, and town squares are common to cities all over the Americas. Vargas Llosa further states, ‘The faithful reader is becoming a writer: trading the abstract for the concrete, the psychic for the vital, he is showing an increasing ability to tell a story in a truly convincing man-ner.’15 If anything, Vargas Llosa’s treatment of García Márquez’s early stories belongs to the history of the Boom. His three-paragraph analysis of ‘Nabo’ is superficial and disappointing. Although there may be some-thing of Faulkner in that story, there is much more of García Márquez in it. Its technical fireworks are unlike Faulkner’s: they were already evi-dently at play in ‘The Third Resignation’, written before García Márquez had discovered the Southern novelist.

A better, deeper analysis was written by Donald McGrady, who begins with ‘The Other Side of Death’ by stating that it is the best of the collection in certain ways, as it weaves in typical literary themes, such as the theme of the double, the surreal world of dreams, the rec-reation of biblical myths and time.16 Unlike other critics, McGrady stresses that while there are commonalities in the story with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double (1846), García Márquez’s story is origi-nal.17 Furthermore, it has a few more commonalities with The Other (El otro, 1926), a play by the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno.18 How-ever, McGrady stresses that the thematic resemblance is superficial, and García Márquez’s development of the plot is original. This is in part due to García Márquez’s inclusion of the world of dreams in his story.19 Each work, including ‘The Other Side of Death’, is an illustration of the bibli-cal theme of Jacob and Esau. McGrady points out that the protagonist of the story has a keen sense of smell,20 while also underscoring that the story alludes to circular time, a hallmark of the Colombian novelist’s writing.21 McGrady, a monumental critic of his day, determines that the story is brilliantly executed and that it is one of the author’s best pieces of writing.22 There is a critical chasm between Vargas Llosa’s assessment of this story and McGrady’s, for example in the footnotes of McGrady’s work, pointing out the story’s use of interior monologue, which James Irby had much earlier attributed to the influence of William Faulkner. One may disagree with McGrady’s critiques of these stories on a num-ber of points, but not on the now well-known point at which García

early Fiction and Short Fiction 9



Márquez had first read Faulkner, which was after he had written and published ‘The Other Side of Death’. This point will be addressed pres-ently. McGrady’s careful treatment of ‘Nabo’ includes indicating sev-eral major points on which the story coincides with William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), namely, Nabo’s role in taking care of a handicapped child, who in García Márquez’s story stares at a wall while Faulkner’s character stares at a fire. McGrady further suggests that there are technical debts to Faulkner’s novel in ‘Nabo’.23 One of these is, according to McGrady, interior monologue. McGrady’s conclu-sion is the polar opposite of Vargas Llosa’s, although to be fair, McGrady was a critic rather than a competitor. In his view, the initial works of García Márquez show clear signs of the genius that would emerge in full force in One Hundred Years of Solitude.24 In the case of either critic, there are points that lend themselves to contention or further investiga-tion, although clearly McGrady’s favourable vision is based on a deeper reading. Where there is a particular weakness in McGrady’s work is its conclusion, at which point, while underscoring that Faulkner was one of García Márquez’s favourite novelists, there are particular techniques in the stories that are indications of his influence. There he exceeds reasonable critical bounds by suggesting that beyond those indications there is a certain je ne sais quoi of Faulkner in these stories,25 but not mindful of the later established point that some of that precedes the author’s discovery of Faulkner. This is, however, a matter that can easily be drawn back to James Irby, who appears footnoted at each mention of Faulkner. What is much more interesting is McGrady’s essay includes pieces of nonfiction which, as he very clearly and deftly argues, pre-figure the magical realism that will appear in full force in One Hundred Years of Solitude.26

The stories analysed by McGrady are now all better known and gathered in collections; however, little published scholarship about them exists. The reason may be, as Vargas Llosa stated, that they are of little literary value, or, conversely, because the author’s short fic-tion has been studied much less than his novels. They have a particu-lar place in the history of Latin American fiction because, although they are not all representative of García Márquez’s mature fiction, they contain the basic technical elements for which he was later known. It should be pointed out that the author’s experimentation with time frames, interior monologue and rewriting of myths is all present in the earliest works and therefore may not be attributed to the influ-ence of William Faulkner as they have been erroneously and often in criticism. A few pieces of García Márquez’s early fiction, such as ‘Nabo’ and ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’, have been analysed more than others, and may be of considerably more literary value than others.




playing with time, Style and attribution

As noted above, ‘Nabo’ represented different things for Vargas Llosa and McGrady. The plot of the story is unlike that of García Márquez’s other stories. Vargas Llosa and McGrady were both quick to suggest the influ-ence of William Faulkner, without having thought for a moment that the story was written during García Márquez’s time in Barranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, the Afro-Caribbean centre of Colombia. The cen-tral character in ‘Nabo’ is the eponymous young man who comes to the home of a family looking for work. He can sing, but the family does not need a singer, but rather someone to groom the horses. Meanwhile, he winds the family’s Victrola and sings to keep their handicapped daughter entertained. The story is divided fairly evenly between two time frames. The objective time frame of the story recounts the time in which Nabo is hired, and his presence at the house, the stables, and the plaza where he goes to see the saxophonist once a week, and ultimately his tragedy. He is kicked by a horse in the forehead and then kept in a room in the house, and he is not seen until he emerges 15 years later. It is narrated omnisciently by a member of the household who remains unidentified. The subjective time frame is time frozen, during which a man comes to visit Nabo at his bedside, asking him to join the choir. It becomes appar-ent that this man is the saxophonist who has gone missing and probably died. Nabo will not join the choir because he dropped the comb he used to groom the horses when he was kicked in the head and needs to find it. Fifteen years elapse but for Nabo no time has passed at all. By the end of the story we learn that the daughter has been winding the Victrola on her own, and as he emerges from his room in a rage after 15 years, the daughter utters the first word anyone has heard her say: Nabo.

The dialogue between Nabo and the angel is reminiscent of the call-and-response formula of Afro-Caribbean music, a point missed by critics who were perhaps too eager to assign too much of the author’s technical prowess to the influence of others. The particular use of time in this story is ingenious, as there is linear time, circularity, time stop-page, and retrograde time all at once, without the slightest hint of self- consciousness or ostentatiousness. Nabo’s 15-year dialogue with the angel marks the freezing of time and so does the stillness of the daugh-ter; circularity comes in Nabo’s return to the stables and to the plaza over and again, which is mirrored in the winding of the Victrola. Linear time is expressed in the omniscient narration, and retrograde time is hinted at in the break between omniscience and subjective memory. Stylistically the story revolves around music, as Nabo sings to the horses he grooms and to the family’s daughter, and music is the point of the Victrola and of the saxophone player in the plaza, as well as the invitation to join the choir. Time stops when Nabo stops singing, which is foreshadowed




in the death of the saxophonist. Nabo and the saxophonist are the only two characters who can speak and their common link is music. As noted, their scant dialogue can be reduced to variants of two phrases: ‘we’re waiting for you’, and Nabo’s response, ‘I cannot find comb.’

The story’s temporal distortions can be traced directly to ‘The Third Resignation’ and other stories written before García Márquez had read Faulkner. The story may coincide with The Sound and the Fury on the level of two or three motifs, but the amount of influence is probably far less than has been asserted by various critics. Signalling McGrady’s work on the early stories, Harley Oberhelman reiterates what the ear-lier critic had written regarding the influence of Faulkner on ‘Nabo’, underscoring parallels with The Sound and the Fury. He also states that ‘The Other Side of Death’ shows ‘further evidence of Faulkner’s early presence in his fiction’.27 Robin Fiddian, on the other hand, states that García Márquez first read Faulkner in 1949.28 This point is reaffirmed by Gerald Martin, who states that ‘The Other Side of Death’ was pub-lished before García Márquez became part of the ‘Barranquilla Group’ by whom he was introduced to Faulkner’s novels.29 Oberhelman makes no further references to ‘Nabo’ or to ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’ (1955). Later biographical information, unavailable during Oberhelman’s era, clarifies when García Márquez began read-ing Faulkner. That information, if it is accurate, should determine that earlier claims of attribution were premature. It may be better in light of these points to suggest commonalities rather than direct influences in the early fiction.

The second story considered only in brief by Oberhelman but rel-evant to the point of time contortions, is ‘Monologue of Isabel Watch-ing It Rain in Macondo’. The story revolves around Isabel, a character in Leaf Storm, several years previous to the time of the novel. The rain begins as Isabel and other women are leaving mass, barely giving them time to undo their umbrellas. Time in the story is both linear and circu-lar, and at points it seems to have stopped. On Monday, Isabel sits with her father and stepmother, and when she is alone she hears the voice of her husband who abandoned her five months before. She is expect-ing a baby, a point alluded to in the first paragraph as she feels a stir-ring in her womb. As the rain continues, colours retreat and the earth turns to mud. On Tuesday morning they awaken to find a cow in the garden with her hooves lodged in the mud. Guajiro (Wayúu) men try to shoo her with sticks and bricks but she remains. By Wednesday the rain is described as a shroud on the heart, and the humidity as warm and sticky. The cow dies when it can no longer hold its head up. And time seems to stop. By the end of the story Isabel also believes that she has died. We are never quite sure if Martín is there or not. All sense of time is impeded by the rain, which floods the house, the church and the




cemetery. The smell of death permeates as garbage, animal and human remains are found floating in the flooded streets. As in ‘Nabo’ and ‘The Third Resignation’, the theme of death is pervasive and linked inexora-bly with the author’s technical feat of playing with time, and stopping it.

Gene Bell-Villada remarks on the early stories that ‘[r]eaders min-imally acquainted with a mature García Márquez, with his generous sense of humour and his loving eye for everyday life, will feel startled and disappointed’ by them.30 About ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’, he suggests that it is an outline of Leaf Storm and ‘was probably originally destined to be inserted into chapter 8 of that novel’.31 He subsequently dismisses ‘Nabo’ as an imitation of Faulkner, remarking that it is centred on a decaying wealthy rural family, a men-tally handicapped daughter and ‘a dedicated Negro manservant’.32 Bell-Villada remarks that these stories belong to García Márquez’s pre-history and are not canonical. Some of Bell-Villada’s claims, though in agreement with Vargas Llosa, are easily countered. For example, there is little basis in ‘Nabo’ for the assumption that the family in the story is wealthy or decaying, only that it has horses and a Victrola, which are more indicative of the story’s time frame than anything else. There is a handicapped daughter, and Nabo is black, but the story centres on Nabo, not on the family he works for, and there is no dialogue except between Nabo and the angel. It is probably more correct to state that there are motifs in Nabo that may be traced to The Sound and the Fury, but they should not be mistaken for themes, and that the story’s sym-bolism has not been examined enough in part because of critical insist-ence that it is not original.

If there is a flaw at all in Bell-Villada’s summary, it is that he is unable to see the progression of time manipulation evident in the sto-ries and equally unable to see García Márquez’s works independently of Faulkner. That is clearer in his assertion that ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’ is a sketch of Leaf Storm, which he views as imitative of As I Lay Dying (1930). There is no apparent contortion of time in As I Lay Dying, no pregnant female central character, no flood, no bodies floating in the street, no ghost of a missing husband. ‘Mono-logue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’ has no shift in narrative voice. As the title suggests, the story is narrated by Isabel. And although the characters are the same as those in Leaf Storm, it is a separate work with different aesthetic values, and it cannot reasonably be compared with As I Lay Dying, with which it has very little common ground.

The ever-present Wayúu servants signal to the cautious reader that there is another layer of meaning in the story that relates to the distor-tion of time. Rain in Wayúu mythology is associated with Juya, its sole male god, from whom young women are protected by seclusion.33 In the story Isabel remains in her house from the moment the rains begin




until they end five days later. If anything it is a prelude to the much later episode of the seduction of Rebeca in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 3.

Although the connections between García Márquez’s early fiction and William Faulkner’s novels should not be dismissed or minimized, neither should they be exaggerated. At the time these comparisons were drawn, it may be said that they were not unique because of the popu-larity of Faulkner. Nobel laureate in fiction Czesław Miłosz wrote about influences as follows: ‘I did get . . . my share of foreign reviews, like those in Germany comparing me to Faulkner (?) or those in the United States acknowledging my influence on American poets of the younger generation, but seldom were they written with intelligence and even more seldom were they willing to grant me any originality.’34 Miłosz’s frustration is also evident in the words of García Márquez, who men-tioned in an interview that critics had insisted so much on Faulkner’s influence in his prose that for a time he believed them.35

It is evident from McGrady’s early ruminations on García Márquez’s first fiction that the stories contain indications of the author’s genius, but it is in the stories of the final stage of that period of his writing that the novelist begins to approach the themes of Afro-Caribbean and Amerind influences. These themes are relatively little commented on in criticism; nevertheless, they will come to fruition in later novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Of Love and Other Demons (1994), and are examined by a few critics such as William Deaver and Jay Corwin. For the moment it may be suggested, taking into account the author’s own observations as well as those of Czesław Miłosz, that criticism that relies too heavily on comparison may not serve the same purposes as analytic texts that are less inclined towards writing the history of litera-ture and more closely focused on a writer’s uniqueness. It should also be reiterated that comparison of literary works, a natural and expected part of criticism, should sometimes be taken with a measure of scepticism.

early Novels

García Márquez published his first novel, Leaf Storm (La hojarasca), in 1955, six or seven years after it was written. The novel’s three charac-ters, a colonel, his daughter and his grandson, narrate the events that begin with the suicide and burial of a doctor who is hated by the people of Macondo. Each of the short novel’s 11 unnamed chapters is narrated by one of these three characters, mainly through interior monologue. The doctor is a Frenchman, about whom no one really knows any-thing. He is a recluse who lives with Meme, a Wayúu servant. At first




his medical practice is successful, but it fails later after the arrival of the banana company’s doctors destroys his practice. He refuses to treat banana plantation workers injured in the government’s attack on the strikers. The colonel is indebted to the doctor who performs surgery on his leg, and thereafter supports him, paying for his burial in the end.

Gene Bell-Villada notes that whereas García Márquez later denied any genuine similarity, Leaf Storm was written ‘under the youthful spell of the Faulkner of As I Lay Dying’.36 To be accurate, García Márquez did point out how the novels are dissimilar; for example, whereas Faulkner labels each chapter of his novel with a name, the three narrators in Leaf Storm are identifiable without being named.37 Robert L. Sims summa-rizes the difficulty of the sort of approach that Bell-Villada and others have employed:

J another critical pitfall we must avoid is to regard La hojarasca as a con-scious imitation of William Faulkner whom García Márquez admired at the time he wrote the novel. We could again draw up a list of the similarities between La hojarasca and Faulkner’s works, for example, Garcia Marquez’ use of multiple narrators, a technique which resembles that of Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. It could also be said that Macondo is for Garcia Marquez what Yoknapatawpha County is for Faulkner. these and other affinities do exist, but they ultimately yield only superficial comparisons.38

Sims underscores the necessity of viewing Leaf Storm independently as a means of understanding the author and the development of his writing. Rather than taking a comparative approach, Sims examines the author’s use of time, pointing out how temporal distortions func-tion to produce an impression of timelessness in which myth is able to function.39

Sims deftly divides time frames in Leaf Storm into four categories, remarking first that the actual time span of events is half an hour, whereas its historical past stretches over a period of 25 years, with more muddled details going back to the founding of Macondo, and finally the subjective time of each of the novel’s three narrators. Sims consid-ers that each of these periods is also part of the prolonged present of the novel that occurs simultaneously.40 As Sims observes, illustrating the point with examples from the novel, both Isabel and the colonel are conscious of the prolonged, continuous present. Memory as well is divided into voluntary and involuntary actions, such as habit and events, a technique that is also present in the works of Proust and oth-ers.41 These and other time frames discussed by Sims allow the author to create the mythology of Macondo which will return in One Hundred Years of Solitude.42 Sims’ analysis of García Márquez’s use of time in Leaf Storm may be the most complete to date. As Sims suggests and then




argues convincingly with supporting material from the novel, examina-tion of García Márquez’s technical time frames is paramount to under-standing the creation of mythology in his works.43

Part of the novel’s mythology is evident in its epigraph from Sopho-cles’ Antigone. Robin Fiddian recounts that for one critic, Pedro Lastra, García Márquez’s intention was to rewrite the myth, but that Dasso Saldí-var points out that at the time it was written in 1949, García Márquez had not yet read Antigone. This is corroborated by García Márquez,44 who later remarked that a friend, on reading a draft of the novel, told him that it was the myth of Antigone, and he added the epigraph after-wards. Gerald Martin, on the other hand, states unhesitatingly that Leaf Storm is the most autobiographical of García Márquez’s novels and that the characters are based on himself as a child, his mother and his grand-father.45 Although Fiddian and Martin agree that there is some connec-tion to As I Lay Dying, their perspectives nonetheless complement those of Sims as they demonstrate that the novel is multifaceted and perhaps more evolved a work than is contended by other critics.

Much more criticism has been devoted to No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961). Often described as a novella, it is set in the middle 1950s in a small, unnamed Colombian town where a colonel has been waiting for his war pension for years. In the nov-el’s scant seven chapters relatively little happens, but the reader learns that the colonel and his asthmatic wife are penniless; their only son, Agustín, was killed nine months before in a government crackdown on protesters and the only option the colonel has to make any money will come through selling his fighting cock to Don Sabas.

According to Bell-Villada it is an outtake of In Evil Hour,46 although Fiddian views its origins in Leaf Storm.47 The colonel’s pension stems from the War of a Thousand Days that ended in 1902, 50 years previous to the novel’s present. Fiddian observes keenly that the meagre half hour of Leaf Storm is starkly contrasted in No One Writes to the Colonel, ‘more capacious, accommodating changes in events and subtle modifications of the couple’s relationship and situation’.48 Its seven unmarked chap-ters have little action which is perhaps a deliberate technical emptiness that mirrors the colonel’s dearth of financial reserves and the loss of his only son. Mario Vargas Llosa’s view coincides with Fiddian’s: ‘In reality, No One Writes to the Colonel, though not the total picture of this imaginary world which obsessed García Márquez, is a revelation which enlarges and enriches what we already knew about it through La hojarasca.’49

As Fiddian wisely notes, characters in both novels are woken from a collective stupor through an event.50 In the case of No One Writes to the Colonel it is the first visit of a circus in ten years. As if to sum up the novel, the last word is the colonel’s expletive answer to his wife’s ques-tion, ‘What will we eat?’: shit.51




Bell-Villada clarifies in his chronicle that the novel or novella, which he qualifies as a little masterpiece, was written during the author’s stay in Paris.52 Themes that dominate include hunger, loneliness, asthma, constipation, diabetes and death, along with miserable poverty. There is a grimness to the work, which Bell-Villada rightly notes in the colo-nel’s observation that the death of the town trumpeter is the first one by natural causes in years.53 In the background there are hints at the rule of a military dictatorship, which, as Bell-Villada remarks, come in bits and pieces of information such as the nightly curfew, press cen-sorship, banned films and clandestine leaflets.54 As for the style of the novel, Vargas Llosa notes that García Márquez’s prose has simplified from that of Leaf Storm, and with it all traces of Faulknerian influence have disappeared.55

In Evil Hour (La mala hora, 1962) is a much longer novel but clearly related to No One Writes to the Colonel, set in the same nameless place with some of the same characters. The action takes place over three weeks in the month of October of an unknown year. Stephen Minta suggests it is probably 1954, having gleaned that from the civil strife of the period known as La Violencia.56 Robin Fiddian notes, ‘Common narrative details abound and include the character of the diabetic Don Sabas, the circulation of underground news-sheets and the visit of a circus to the town’.57 There are characters who return in later stories and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but, as noted previously, the aesthet-ics may change from work to work. There are ten sections or chapters in the novel, unnumbered and unnamed as in the author’s other nov-els. The novel’s story line is unusual in that the characters and their actions are less important than the backdrop of military dictatorship and the appearance of anonymous lampoons on walls exposing lurid gossip about prominent people in town, but which people have already been saying covertly. The names of several of the characters are rife with reli-gious significance, such as Asís, Pastor, Father Ángel and Trinidad (Trin-ity). Raymond L. Williams provides a clear, detailed analysis of In Evil Hour. Quoting the judge in the novel, who mentions that examining the lampoons is like reading detective novels, Williams draws parallels with the subversive nature of literature.58 Williams remarks that ‘this novel’s most successful technical innovation, considered in the total trajectory of García Márquez’s work, is the use of montage’.59

In Evil Hour marks a departure from some of the experimental uses of time in García Márquez’s earlier works, and along with No One Writes to the Colonel, the first signs of the author’s sarcastic humour come to the surface. In it one can see anticipations of the author’s trademark style in later works, such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and Of Love and Other Demons (1994), in the strange use of religious names and feast days of Roman Catholic saints to indicate a date.




Fiddian suggests that In Evil Hour is modelled stylistically on mod-ernist novels such as John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925).60 Although Fiddian does not elab-orate on these points, they are both interesting and valid, given that the first is characterized by the use of pastiche and the second by interior monologue. Michael Bell concurs on the comparison with Woolf and suggests that there is a tipping of hats in the name of one of the char-acters of In Evil House, Mr Carmichael, also the name of a character in To The Lighthouse (1927).61 Bell further states that García Márquez ‘has adapted the technique of Woolf to an opposite significance. Where she typically absorbs the world into a heightened consciousness, he expresses the absorption of the personal consciousness into the physi-cal and social worlds’.62 Whether one accepts that or not is entirely dependent on the reader’s perspective, but García Márquez certainly credited his readings of Virginia Woolf for some of his ability to write.

Big Mama’s Funeral and Stylistics

Although the characters exist independently within separate works, it is very difficult to separate In Evil Hour from either No One Writes to the Colonel or the collection of stories known as Big Mama’s Funeral (Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, 1962). Each story is self-contained, with the exception of ‘Montiel’s Widow’ (‘La viuda de Montiel’), which is a con-tinuation of ‘Balthazar’s Marvellous Afternoon’ (‘La prodigiosa tarde de Baltazar’). As is the case with Eyes of a Blue Dog, little criticism has been devoted to Big Mama’s Funeral, although a few of the stories have pro-duced some interesting critical comments.

‘Tuesday Siesta’ (‘La siesta del martes’), the first story in the col-lection, recounts the journey by train of a woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Very little happens in the story, but it becomes apparent that they have come to visit the grave of the woman’s only son, a thief who had been shot dead a week before. As it happens he has been killed by Rebeca, a recurring character in García Márquez’s fiction. Although the town is not named in the story, the reader may glean that it is Macondo because of Rebeca. Not knowing who could be trying to force the door of her house at three in the morning, she fires a gun for the first time in her life, although it had not been fired since the days of Aureliano Buendía. All dialogue is between the mother of the thief, the parish priest who has the key to the cemetery, and his sister who opens the door to the woman and her daughter. As it happens, no one in the town knew his name because he had never been there before. Children begin pressing their noses against the window. The priest’s




sister advises that people have discovered who they are, and she and the priest try to get the woman and her daughter to wait until sunset to avoid the heat and curious onlookers. The woman takes her daughter by the hand and leaves. More than anything else the story is a charac-ter sketch of Rebeca, opening a theme that will return in One Hundred Years of Solitude and later in the collection. ‘Tuesday Siesta’ is purport-edly García Márquez’s favourite of his short stories.

‘One of These Days’ (‘Un día de estos’) is a comical exchange between an unlicensed dentist and the mayor of the town who has an abscessed tooth. The mayor’s arrival is announced by the dentist’s son, whom the dentist tells to report to the mayor that he is not there. The boy replies that the mayor knows he is because he heard him and that if the dentist does not pull his tooth, the mayor will shoot him. The dentist secures his revolver, the mayor enters the surgery and after a short examina-tion, the dentist tell him that the tooth has to be removed without anaesthesia because it is abscessed. According to the dentist, the mayor, a government thug, will pay for 20 deaths. The dentist removes the tooth and then hands the mayor a cloth, telling him to dry his tears. Ignoring a demand to gargle with salt water, the mayor stands and tells the dentist to send him the bill. The dentist asks whether to send it to him personally or to the city. The mayor replies that it is the same thing. Stephen Hart calls the story ‘one of the clearest examples of the emer-gence of a political allegory in García Márquez’s work’.63

‘There Are No Thieves in This Town’ (‘En este pueblo no hay ladro-nes’), like the previous story, seems to be an outtake from In Evil Hour. Dámaso, a 20-year-old inexperienced thief, breaks into the town billiard hall in the middle of the night and steals three billiard balls. He returns home to show them to his pregnant wife, Ana. The townspeople sus-pect a stranger of the theft because, as one woman says, ‘There are no thieves in this town.’ Don Roque, who owns the billiard hall, exagger-ates the theft to include 200 pesos. By the end, Dámaso breaks in again to return the billiard balls, but is caught in the act by Don Roque, who asks him about the 200 pesos. Dámaso insists that there was no money in the till. Don Roque tells him that they will tell that to the mayor and it will be taken out on his hide, not because he is a thief, but because he is stupid. Although the story has not generated much in the way of criticism, it was adapted for a film made in Mexico in 1965, and features cameos by Juan Rulfo, Arturo Ripstein, Luis Buñuel and Gabriel García Márquez. Bell-Villada suggests that the plot is too thin for the length of the story.64

‘One Day After Saturday’ (‘Un día después del sábado’) contains an array of plot lines revolving around two characters: the widow Rebeca and Father Antonio Isabel, in his nineties and showing signs of senil-ity. Rebeca finds piles of dead birds in her house and is convinced that




someone has broken in, only to be told that birds have been dying in the town for several days. Father Antonio Isabel takes little notice, at first blaming cats, until he sees a third dead bird at the train station. He recalls reading Sophocles and an earlier era when he asked to be replaced by a younger priest after claiming to have seen the devil on three occasions, and later the Wandering Jew. There are likely classi-cal allusions in the story, given that the priest invokes Pythagoras and Sophocles, a possible indication that Macondo is something like Aris-tophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo land. Of this piece, Raymond L. Williams sug-gests that it is a commentary on authority.65 Williams remarks that this story, along with a few others in the collection, falls into a political mode, written in the shadow of the period of violent unrest in Colombia known as La Violencia.

The final and title story of the collection is ‘Big Mama’s Funeral’, which is narrated in an exaggerated tone reminiscent of a carnival announcement. Big Mama has reigned in the kingdom of Macondo and died one Sunday in September at the age of 92. The story recounts, in the same tone, the weeks leading to the character’s death, full of pomp and ridicule. And her funeral is presided over by the Pope. Stephen Hart submits that in ‘Big Mama’s Funeral’, García Márquez inaugurates the short story as an allegory of contemporary Latin American history.66 He stresses that the story, given that it was written in May and June of 1959, is a direct response ‘to the ideology underlying the Cuban Revo-lution’.67 Listing Big Mama’s claims of ownership, taken directly from the story, of such things as the colours of the flag and the rights of man, Hart demonstrates the validity of his point without room for ques-tion. The character also seems to be a paradigm for Eréndira’s heartless grandmother in the 1972 story. Hart may go just beyond the bounds of good taste when he proclaims that the story may have served as García Márquez’s letter of introduction to Fidel Castro and what he stood for in the 1960s. Furthermore, he says of the story:

J It certainly contains within it the seeds of a radical, anti-colonial reading of the history of Latin america, but this is nowhere an over-obvious para-digm, and indeed may be dismissed as an overdetermined interpretation by the historicist critic; but, notwithstanding this, it is a potential reading and as such hovers around the text.68

Raymond L. Williams draws similar conclusions about the story’s obvious references to politics, but much less daringly states, ‘This story can be read as a burlesque depiction and implied condemnation of the privileged oligarchy.’69

Williams summarizes the stories in Big Mama’s Funeral respect-fully, with an objective detachment. He remarks that the stories in the




collection represent a successful expression of social and political reali-ties while expanding the humour that first emerged in Leaf Storm.70 He further addresses technique by highlighting this result:

J the correspondence between narrative point of view and ideology can be appreciated in these stories by observing the human filters García Márquez uses to relate these stories: humble persons who maintain their dignity despite the power of the hierarchy above them. they are often reduced to silence, an appropriation of the word that cannot steal from them their profound humanity.71

Innocent Eréndira, ‘a Very Old Man with enormous Wings’ and Magical realism

These final pieces to be commented on are short fiction of the author’s middle period and are best placed at the end of this chapter, with García Márquez’s earlier short fiction, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, they are best viewed independently of One Hundred Years of Solitude so that their aesthetic values may be examined within their class and category, and without reduction. Secondly they are, like the novel, on the threshold of two periods, or perhaps represent a period of their own, depending on how one would see these works, and serve to lead from one period to the next. Finally, they are, like the majority of works discussed in this chapter, short fictions, but not quite vast enough to merit a separate chapter.

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ (‘Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes’, 1968) is set in coastal Colombia. A three-day rain-storm brings Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, the task of removing crabs from their house. Their newborn son’s fever is blamed on the smell. At the back of their patio, Pelayo spots something moving and discovers it is a very old man who cannot move because his wings are trapped in the mud. He is dressed in rags and has few teeth and little hair. They try to speak to him but cannot understand his language and suspect he is a shipwrecked sailor. They consult with a wise neighbour lady who informs them that he is an angel who must have come for the baby, but who is so old that the rain knocked him down. The next day a crowd turns up at their house to see the angel, who, according to their neigh-bour, was part of some celestial conspiracy, but they do not have the heart to do as she advises and club him to death. The crowd is character-ized by the actions of the people who show no devotion but react as if they were in the presence of a carnival freak.

The parish priest arrives and determines that the angel is an impostor because he cannot speak or understand Latin, ‘God’s language’; he warns




the people about the devil and writes to the archbishop so that the news can ultimately reach the Pope. As such a large crowd is drawn, Elisenda has the idea to charge admission to capitalize on the intruder, and within a short time pilgrims begin to arrive from all over the Caribbean. The angel does not speak to people, and those who come with diseases they hope to have cured are disappointed by the useless miracles visited upon them, such as a leper whose sores do not heal, but sprout sunflowers.

The spectacle of the captive ill-tempered angel is eclipsed by the arrival of a carnival that features a woman who was turned into a spi-der for disobeying her parents. Nonetheless, Pelayo and Elisenda have earned enough money from the crowds to build a mansion for them-selves with a second storey so that they will never again need to worry about flooding, and also fancy dresses and shoes for Elisenda. The angel remains for seven years, until the chicken coop he has inhabited rots and his wings begin to sprout new feathers. At the end he flies away while Elisenda chops an onion and watches from her kitchen window.

The brilliant technical achievement of ‘A Very Old Man with Enor-mous Wings’ is widely regarded in criticism as exemplary of magical realism. Pelayo and Elisenda are seemingly ignorant of the supernatural quality of the event and character that changes their lives. This is offset by the wise neighbour woman and Father Gonzaga, the parish priest, two equally ridiculous characters who represent two different strains of incomplete knowledge: the neighbour that of folklore and superstition, the priest that of theology and hierarchy. They are parallels to Pelayo and Elisenda and antithetical to each other. The angel’s parallel is in the spider woman, creating further antithesis with the priest and the neigh-bour woman, respectively, as the spider woman represents folklore, and the angel, religion.

The supernatural elements of the story are softened by the reactions of the people, through whom the author’s Caribbean humour emerges. The image of Elisenda screaming at the angel and chasing him with a broom provides a humorous portrait of a Caribbean housewife who val-ues cleanliness and order in her house above all else. Her financial wit is what changes the fortune of her family.

The qualities of the mundane and the supernatural provide a level of tension, but each is tempered with humour, mitigating any sense of wonder while maintaining suspension of disbelief. It must be noted that the humour, while typically Caribbean, is universally understood and serves as the tightrope on which all events pass before the reader.

A fine analysis of the story was undertaken by Raymond L. Williams, who isolated six different interpretations of the supernatural creature in the story.72 Williams also divides the story’s perspective into two separate parts: that of the omniscient narrator and of the townspeople either individually or collectively.73 Williams’ conclusion, that the story




contains hints at the futility of interpreting its symbolism, is probably less convincing an interpretation than his detailed analysis.

Taking up a point proposed by Chilean poet and critic Oscar Hahn, Eduardo Chirinos examines ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ with the idea that its prototype is an 1899 children’s story, ‘The Fallen Angel’ (‘El ángel caído’) written by the Mexican poet Amado Nervo. Hahn suggests that Nervo’s story very closely approaches magical real-ism in its technique. Chirinos, after a lengthy but probably unnecessary disquisition about angels and their imagery in earlier literature, begins with the premise that Hahn ‘says it all’.74 Hahn proposes that the sto-ries’ plots are nearly identical, that each is symbolic of Latin America and that, although Nervo’s story is idealistic and youthful, as his angel is a child, García Márquez’s angel is old and decrepit, denoting the amount of war and bloodshed in the region. Chirinos’ comparative analysis yields many more differences than similarities, although the idea he propounds that the stories are symbolic of Latin America is interesting, noteworthy and contributes to the scholarship on a story that few critics have examined in as much detail.

If there is a paradigm for ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’, a much likelier candidate for that is Lev Tolstoy’s ‘What Men Live By’ (1885), which shares a subtitle with García Márquez’s work (‘A Chil-dren’s Story’). The common points are the length of the angel’s stay of seven years, a couple with a child who take him in, their initial poverty and relative wealth at the end, the rural settings, miracles, the angel’s fall and his failure to take the ill child for whom he has come. Among the authors whose works García Márquez mentions is Tolstoy, a point made by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in The Fragrance of Guava (El olor de la guayaba, 1982).75 Both Tolstoy and García Márquez offer a view of their respective countries’ national character, although ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ makes no moral statement. It is not imitative of Tolstoy or of Amado Nervo for that matter.

‘The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother’ is either a very long short story or a novella. Technically speaking, it is, like ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’, a master-piece and one of the author’s three most representative works at the threshold between his first and second periods of writing. Stylistically it bears the hallmark of the two other works, which induce the reader into an oneiric world of unified extremes, of hyperbole tempered by drab, mundane or outrageously funny reactions to it. It is, of course, the style referred to as magical realism. Although that label is now mainly applied by book reviewers or in editorials, its history and meanings will be addressed further in Chapter 2.

‘Eréndira’ begins with the eponymous character, aged 14, bathing her wealthy, obese grandmother when the ‘wind of her misfortune’




begins to blow. Her house is in the middle of the desert, a palace with weird furniture and an artificial garden where only a peacock lives. In the language of the Indians, the legend is that the grandmother had been a beautiful prostitute in the Caribbean, rescued by a smuggler named Amadís after she had stabbed a man to death, who set her up in the desert mansion. Their only son was also named Amadís; both father and son are dead and buried in the garden. The grandmother lives with Eréndira, the grandchild she raised from infancy. Eréndira works as a slave for her grandmother from morning till night, her tasks taking hours; she continues working in her sleep with her eyes open, and her grandmother falls asleep as well but continues issuing orders to Eréndira. Too tired to think, Eréndira sets a candelabrum on the night table and falls into bed while the wind of her misfortune enters the house, setting the curtains alight. The first section of the story, full of hyperbole and baroque descriptions of knick-knacks and finery in the house, is limited to two living female characters, two dead male charac-ters and a sickly peacock.

The following morning, in the smouldering ruins of the mansion, the nameless grandmother tells Eréndira that her life will not be long enough to repay her. That day she sells Eréndira into prostitution, advis-ing the young widower who pays 220 pesos that, at that rate, it will take Eréndira 200 years to repay the debt. After selling Eréndira to every man in town who is able to pay, the grandmother packs her few remaining possessions and the bones of the Amadises in a trunk and sets out to sell her granddaughter in town after town. Eréndira pays for the trip with her body. Landing in the first small town, the grandmother sells Eréndira to a mail carrier at a reduced price on condition that he spread the word, and shortly thereafter men begin arriving. After calculating her earnings, the grandmother happily states that, at that rate, the debt will be paid in eight years, not counting the expenses.

The novella continues in the same vein, with the arrival of a Dutch farmer and his son Ulises, who is unearthly and whom Eréndira initi-ates sexually. After a series of adventures, including involuntary intern-ment in a convent, a forced marriage in order to be able to leave and a return to prostitution to repay her greedy grandmother, Eréndira is finally liberated by Ulises, who kills her grandmother, stabbing her in the heart. Eréndira runs into the wind, never to be heard from again.

Gene Bell-Villada isolates the numbers three and seven as central to the novella: Eréndira is sold as a virgin three times; she is abducted three times; Ulises steals three oranges from his family’s business and attempts three times to kill the grandmother.76 Conversely, José Ramón García Menéndez takes a Marxist approach and views ‘Eréndira’ as a parable of Latin American debt, pointing out four parallels: (i) how the debt is generated and how it is paid; (ii) how the grandmother gets




fatter on Eréndira’s enslavement; (iii) how the debt is paid with resigna-tion; and (iv) the grandmother’s gluttony and how the debt increases.77 Despite the grim political subject matter and short treatment of the story, García Menéndez’s analysis is by and large convincing.

Diane Marting provides another angle within the critical body. Mar-ting notes that the magical elements of the story have been examined more often than the subject of child prostitution. She considers inter-views given by García Márquez who stated that ‘Eréndira’ was based at least partially on an 11-year-old girl he had once witnessed, who was led around by an older relative and who worked as a prostitute.78 Mar-ting asserts that although the numbers of clients that Eréndira is forced to service per day are presented in criticism as hyperbole, it is much less so in the face of data on sexual slavery.79 In places Marting’s essay drifts into conjecture, but it is nonetheless a valuable and unique approach to separating the nature of hyperbole from the abuses also remarked on by García Menéndez.

César G. López analyses ‘Eréndira’ as a parable of the Conquest. Unlike nearly every other critic to touch García Márquez’s works, López recognizes the importance of Ulises’ multilingualism, and especially of the Wayunaiki language he speaks with his Guajiro mother: ‘He rep-resents a bridge between diverse worlds and cultures, with a Dutch father and a Guajiro Indian mother.’80 López’s analysis, though at times stretched a bit too thin, traces a credible parallel between the grand-mother and Spain, and Eréndira and America – in short, a history of exploitation.

Conclusion

The first stories written by 20-year-old Gabriel García Márquez show traces of the author’s ability to manipulate time in his fiction. Critics differ in their assessments of the youthful writer’s abilities. Donald McGrady and Eduardo Zalamea Borda contend that a remarkable tal-ent can be discerned in the first stories, whereas Mario Vargas Llosa sees them as unimportant sketches that form the prehistory in the writ-ing life of a writer whose abilities had not yet matured to a notable level. Vargas Llosa, Gerald Martin and Gene Bell-Villada rely largely on comparisons to Kafka and Faulkner, which other critics reject on the basis that those comparative assessments may be interesting but are ultimately superficial. The second group of stories, published in Eyes of a Blue Dog, are technically more evolved, especially ‘Nabo’ and ‘Mono-logue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo’, which contains characters from the novel Leaf Storm.




The early novels are another matter. There are some critical differ-ences about the quality and originality of these works, but these stem from a point initially made by McGrady and a few other critics, such as Ernesto Volkening. Some critics of these works are unable to view them independently of other novelists, especially Faulkner, because of a pro-pensity for comparison, which Robert L. Sims markedly addresses. No One Writes to the Colonel, though independently interesting, is best viewed with its twin novel, In Evil Hour. Leaf Storm, the author’s first novel, is viewed by most critics as only an amateurish imitation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, even though structurally it is distinct enough for cer-tain critics to examine without taking a comparative stance. Some of the most important points made about La Violencia in No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour are taken up by Stephen Minta and Robin Fiddian, whose analyses are based on thorough examination of Colom-bia’s political situation of the mid-1950s. Fiddian also demonstrates her remarkable breadth of reading, although understating it by quite a bit, through her suggestion that John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer is a prototype of In Evil Hour.

Big Mama’s Funeral is a collection of stories that has not generated much criticism, but some of it is exceptional, such as Raymond L. Williams’ analyses of the stories. These stories are mainly related the-matically and through characters shared in the early novels, and a few, as noted by Williams and Stephen Hart, are deeply political.

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ and ‘Eréndira’ belong to the category of short fiction but fall obviously into a separate period of García Márquez’s writing. Each is a masterpiece, and both are tinged with hyperbole and the wry humour that marks the novelist’s genuine period of maturity into a writer of world-class fiction, which, in fact, is in a class of its own. Varying approaches have been taken in the analy-ses of these works, from the social to the Marxist and Post-Colonial, to the purely aesthetic. The question of magical realism, which unites both works, will be addressed much more fully in the next chapter.




Allende, Isabel 63–66The House of the Spirits vi, 64–67

Alonso, Carlos vii, 79, 82, 93, 104, 142 (notes)

Álvarez Borland, Isabel vii, 110–12, 124, 144 (notes), 150

Amado, Jorge vii, 23, 87, 100, 115–16, 125, 129–30, 145 (note), 151,

Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon 87, 100, 129–30

Amerindians 14, 24, 25, 29, 36, 46, 52–55, 58–59, 68

anajawat jipü 58apocalypse 32, 33, 34, 37, 50, 77apülainwa jipü 58Aracataca 1, 30, 31, 60, 69Arenas, Reinaldo v, 2, 32–33, 38, 40,

46, 49, 130Arnau, Carmen 49Asturias, Miguel Ángel vi, 3, 5, 41, 51,

53, 69, 72–73, 76, 77Men of Maize 5, 53The President vi, 3, 72–73, 76, 77

Bacatá 56Bachué 56, 57Balzac, Honoré de 51, 73banana massacre v, 29, 31–32, 37 Barnes, Julian 45Barranquilla 1, 11, 12, 60, 61, 70, 80Barthes, Roland 51, 52, 69, Bartók, Béla vi, 75, 84Bataille, Georges 39Beauvoir, Simone de 109, 124

The Coming of Age 109, 124, Bell, Michael 18, 45, 52, 53, 66, 67Bell-Villada, Gene vi, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17,

19, 24, 25, 34, 35, 48, 59, 73–75, 77, 84, 100, 105, 109, 110, 124, 127, 128, 147,

Benson, John vii, 114, 124Biblical hurricane vi, 30, 34, 38, 59, 97Bloom, Harold 50

Bochica 57Bolaño, Roberto 69, 70 Bolívar, Simón vi, 3,4, 78–85, 126, Boom, the vi, vii, 2, 9, 28, 30, 31, 40,

42–45, 49, 62–64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 120, 121, 125, 126, 128

Borges, Jorge Luis v, vi, 8, 33, 36–38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48–50, 52, 60, 63, 65, 130

The Aleph 36, 37, 65The Universal History of Iniquity 41, 65

Brotherston, Gordon 129Bulgakov, Mikhail 66

The Master and Margarita 66

Cabrera, Lydia 6, 30, 31, 51, 126Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 31, 42, 43

Three Trapped Tigers 31, 42Camayd-Freixas, Erik 53–55, 65, 128Carpentier, Alejo v, 31, 33, 41, 42, 46,

49, 51, 53, 59, 69, 127, 130The Kingdom of this World 41, 53The Lost Steps 51, 59, 63, 69, 127,

Cartagena 1, 4, 11, 82, 108, 117Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 37

Don Quixote 50, 81, 112Changó 120Chateaubriand, François-René de 58, 59Chibcha vi, 55–57, 69Coetzee, J. M. 67Conrad, Joseph 2, 50, 109Cortázar, Julio 42, 43, 44, 62

Hopscotch 43, 62Corwin, Jay 14, 56, 57, 59, 67Costa Milton, Heloisa 81, 82, 85Couto, Mia 67, 70, 127, 131

Sleepwalking Land 67Cuban Revolution 20, 43, 67

Darío, Rubén 41, 71, 74, 84, 115Davis, Mary 39, 47Deaver, William vii, 14, 61–62,

119–120, 122, 124, 125

Index

152



Derrida, Jacques 52, 91, 92, 94, 105, 125Donoso, José 42Dos Passos, John 18, 26Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 9, 72

Editorial Sudamericana 44Edwards, Jorge 42Ekphrasis 81, 112El Dorado 55, 56El país 57Eleggúa 120Eliade, Mircea 37Martínez, Tomás Eloy 42, 43, 44Esquivel, Laura 67, 68, 131

Like Water for Chocolate 67, 68, 131Eyzaguirre, Luis 89–91, 104

Faulkner, William v, vi, 2, 7–15, 17, 25, 26, 39, 46–48, 50–51, 64, 74, 127, 130

As I Lay Dying 13, 15, 26, 48, The Sound and the Fury 10, 12, 13

Fiddian, Robin 12, 16–18, 26Flaubert, Gustave 109, 121, 124

Madame Bovary 109, 124Sentimental Education 109

Flores, Angel 41, 42, 44 Freud, Sigmund 39Fuentes, Carlos 42–44

The Death of Artemio Cruz 43

García Márquez, Gabriel, worksThe Autumn of the Patriarch vi, 3, 4,

48, 70, 71–79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 103, 110, 126, 128, 130

Big Mama’s Funeral 8, 18–20, 26, 47, 77

‘Bitter Sorrow for Three Sleepwalkers’ 8

Chronicle of a Death Foretold vii, 4, 17, 85, 86–106, 107, 110, 121, 126, 128, 130

‘Eyes of a Blue Dog’ 1, 8, 18, 25The General in his Labyrinth vi, 3, 4,

70, 71, 78, 79–85In Evil Hour v, 1, 4, 16–18, 19, 26,

47, 88, 104, 107 The Fragrance of Guava 23, 60 The General in His Labyrinth vi, 3, 4,

70, 71, 78–85, 126

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother v, 1, 2, 4, 5, 20, 21, 23–25, 26, 57, 72, 90, 126, 129, 131

Leaf Storm v, 1, 8, 12, 13, 14–17, 21, 25, 26, 47, 48, 88, 96, 104, 107, 110, 126

Living to Tell the Tale 5, 58Love in the Time of Cholera vii, 4, 106,

107–116, 121, 123, 124–125, 126, 128

Memories of My Melancholy Whores 5‘Monologue of Isabel Watching It

Rain in Macondo’ 2, 5, 10, 12–13, 25, 128

‘Nabo’ 1, 7, 9–12, 13, 25, 63, 128, 129No One Writes to the Colonel v, 1,

16–18, 26, 48, 81, 83Of Love and Other Demons vii, 4, 5, 17,

31, 106, 107, 108, 116–23, 123–26, 129

One Hundred Years of Solitude v, vi, 1–5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27–70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 97, 103, 107, 110, 124, 126–130.

The Story of a Ship-Wrecked Sailor 6Strange Pilgrims 5‘The Third Resignation’ 7–9, 12, 13,

128‘Tubal-Cain Forges a Star’ 8‘A Very Old Man With Enormous

Wings’ 4, 21–23, 26, 99Girard, René 88, 90, 91, 104Gómez, Sergio 68González, Aníbal vii, 120–23, 125González Echevarría, Roberto vi, 35,

38, 51–53, 55, 57, 69, 79, 127, 128, 129, 131

Grass, Günter 54, 67 The Tin Drum 54, 67

Grossman, Edith 83Guajiro 5, 12, 25, 29, 36, 57Guerra, Ruy 126Guimarães Rosa, João 67Gypsies 29, 48, 54

Haberly, David T. 58, 59Hart, Stephen 19, 20, 26, 44, 45, 54,

64, 65–66, 101

Index 153



Heraclitus 37Hood, Edward Waters 130Humboldt, Alexander von 60, 127

Incest vi, 4, 27, 28, 33, 37, 38–40, 48, 56, 57

Indians see Amerindians

Inquisition vii, 102, 122, 123, 125, Insomnia plague vi, 29, 34–37, 48, 52,

53, 55, 57–59, 62, 92Isaacs, Jorge 58

Janes, Regina vi, 34, 35, 40, 45, 46, 50–53, 56, 57, 69, 77, 78, 84, 127, 128, 129, 130

Joyce, James 2, 47, 50, 64,

King, John 43Kristeva, Julia 52, 113Kafka, Franz 8, 25

La Guajira 28, 54, 92Lacan, Jacques 113Leal, Luis 42,44Levine, Suzanne Jill v, 37, 39, 48, 77, Ludmer, Josefina 37, 39, 40, 128Harss, Luis 44

Macondo v, vi, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12–15, 18, 20, 25, 27–31, 33, 34–38, 40, 47, 48, 51, 53, 54, 56–60, 67, 68, 70, 86, 128, 129

Magical Realism v, vi, 2, 10, 21–23, 26, 27, 28, 33, 39, 40–47, 49, 50, 53–55, 63, 65–70, 72, 73, 83, 127, 130, 131

Malinowski, Bronisław 89Mann, Thomas 64Martin, Gerald 5, 7, 8, 12, 16, 25, 44,

73, 80, 84, 127McGrady, Donald v, 1, 9–11, 12, 14,

25, 26 McNerny, Kathleen 108–109McOndo vi, 62, 68, 70Melquíades’ manuscripts 36–38, 110,

130Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo 23, 46, 47,

60, 70

Moreno Blanco, Juan 57, 69Unamuno, Miguel de 9, 81Miłosz, Czesław 14Kundera, Milan 55, 70, 75, 131Minta, Stephen 17, 26, 30–32, 35–36,

53, 92, 93, 107, 108, 124Mo Yan 69Mundo Nuevo 43Murakami, Haruki 67, 69, 70, 131

Nabokov, Vladimir 118, 123, 124Lolita 118, 123

Naturalism 41Nobel Prize 3, 4, 14, 47, 51, 67, 72, 73,

78, 103, 107Novel of the dictator vi, 3, 4, 72–74,

78, 84,

Oberhelman, Harley v, 12, 47, 48, 127Ochún 118–119Oddúa 120Orientalism vii, 100–102, 105, 130Orixas 31, 117, 119, 120, 129Ortega, Julio vi, 37, 42, 75–76, 79,

80–81, 84, 85, 128

Palma, Ricardo 81Palencia-Roth, Michael v, 36–38, 39,

82–83, 85, 128, Parkinson Zamora, Lois vi, 35, 38, 77,

84, 128Pedro Simón, Fray 56Pelayo, Rubén 98–100Pellón, Gustavo vii, 88–89, 90, 91,

104, 130Pentateuch 34, 36Penuel, Arnold vii, 122–123, 125, Perrin, Michel 57–59Plato 109, 121–122, 125,

Symposium 121, 122Poe, Edgar Allan 8, 118Poem of the Cid 102Poniatowska, Elena 63Pope, Randolph 121Popol Vuh 59, 69Postmodernism 63, 68, 82, 91, 112Primera Plana 43–44Proust, Marcel 15, 109Puig, Manuel 42

154 Index



Quiroga, Horacio 87, 130

Rama, Ángel vii, 42, 43, 63, 89, 90, 95–97, 98, 105, 121, 126, 130

Remarque, Erich Maria 108Ricoeur, Paul 113Roa Bastos, Augusto 42Rodríguez Freyle, Juan 56Rodríguez-Monegal, Emir v, 36, 37,

42, 43Roh, Franz 41 Rulfo, Juan 19, 39, 48, 64

Pedro Páramo 39, 48, 53, 63, Rushdie, Salman 66, 67, 69, 70, 131

Midnight’s Children 67The Satanic Verses 67

Said, Edward 100Saldívar, Dasso 16Sánchez, Luis Rafael 42Santería vii, 5, 117, 120, 129Sartre, Jean-Paul 8Semana 44, 79Shaw, Donald L. 44, 63–64Sims, Robert L. 2, 15–16, 26, 31–32,

45Skármeta, Antonio 63Skłodowska, Elzbieta 63Soledad 60Sophocles vi, vii, 2, 16, 20, 37, 38–40,

49, 50, 56, 88, 96, 104, 105, 130Oedipus Rex vii, 2, 38–40, 88, 96,

104, 105, 130Stendhal, Marie-Henri 121Summa Theologica 118

Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich vi, 6, 23, 50, 64–65, 111

Anna Karenina 65, 111War and Peace 111

Uslar Pietri, Arturo 41

Valle Inclán, Ramón del 3Vargas Llosa, Mario v, 2, 8–11, 13, 16,

17, 25, 37, 42–45, 49Volkening, Ernesto 2, 26, 47, 48, 127Volpi, Jorge 68–70

Wayúu vi, 12, 13, 14, 36, 52–55, 57, 58, 59, 69

Wayuunaiki 36, 54, 57, 58, 69Williams, Raymond L. vi, vii, 17,

20, 22, 26, 39, 40, 71, 74, 75, 84, 91–93, 97, 104, 124, 128,

Williamson, Edwin 39Woolf, Virginia vi, 2, 18, 47–50, 64,

74–75, 84Mrs Dalloway 18Orlando 48The Waves 74, 84To The Lighthouse 18

Yemanjá 129Yemayá 118, 120Yoruba vii, 5, 31, 117, 120, 123, 125,

126, 129

Zaidi, Ali Shehzad vii, 97–98, 105, 130

Zalamea Borda, Eduardo 1, 7, 25

Index 155



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