Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “The Myth of Gabriel García Márquez: How the Colombian Writer Really Changed Literature” by Michael Wood (©2009 by Washington Post. Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC).

Many years later, and many times over, the writer Gabriel García Márquez was to remember the day he discovered how to set about writing his great novel. He was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco when the illumination hit him. He turned the car around, went home, and locked himself away for 18 months. When he reappeared, he had the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude in his hands.

When Gerald Martin, around the middle of his rich and resourceful biography of García Márquez, starts to tell this story, the reader may be a little surprised, even disappointed. “He had not been driving long that day when . . . García Márquez, as if in a trance, turned the Opel around, and drove back in the direction of Mexico City. And then . . .” Up to this point, Martin has not been challenging what he calls his subject’s “mythomania”—how could he, since it’s the basis of the writer’s art and fame—but he has not been retelling the myths, either. He has been grounding them, laying out the pieces of what became the puzzles. And that’s what he’s doing here, too.

After “and then,” Martin writes in mock apology, “It seems a pity to intervene in the story at this point but the biographer feels constrained to point out that there have been many versions of this story . . . and that the one just related cannot be true.” The truth was no doubt less “miraculous, ” to use Martin’s word. The writer probably continued to Acapulco. He didn’t live in total seclusion for 18 months. And García Márquez wasn’t starting a new book; he was reviving an old one.

What García Márquez found was a way of telling it. He would combine, as he frequently said, the narrative tone of his grandmother with that of the author Franz Kafka. She told fantastic stories as if they were true, because for her, they were true. Kafka told them that way because he was Kafka. After his moment of illumination García Márquez came more and more to look for (and often to find) the truth in the fantastic, to pursue whatever truth was lurking in the nonliteral reading of literally presented events.

Just because the miracle didn’t happen as the story says it did doesn’t mean there wasn’t a miracle. One Hundred Years of Solitude changed García Márquez’s life entirely, and it changed literature. When he got into the car to set out for Acapulco, he was a gifted and hardworking writer, certainly. When he got out of the car, he was on his way to the Nobel Prize, which he won in 1982.

García Márquez made many jokes about his fame over the years. These jokes are witty and complicated acts of gratitude for a destiny the writer was sure could have been quite different. One of his finest sentences, written in an article in 1983, concerns a dream of the life he might have led if he had stayed in his isolated birthplace of Aracataca, Colombia. “I would not perhaps be the same person I am now but maybe I would have been something better: just a character in one of the novels I would never have written.”

The term “mythomania” certainly covers Garcia Marquez’s stories about his life and plenty of his journalism. But his fiction is different. It takes pieces of already thoroughly mythified reality—there is scarcely an extravagant incident in his novels and stories that doesn’t have some sort of basis in specific, local fact or legend—and finds the perfect, unforgettable literary home for them. But García Márquez neither copies nor further mythifies these facts and legends. He honors them, to borrow a well-placed word from Martin:

[O]ver the dark story of conquest and violence, tragedy and failure, he laid the other side of the continent, the carnival spirit, the music and the art of the Latin American people, the ability to honor life even in its darkest corners.

To honor life, I take Martin as saying, is to celebrate dignity, courage, and style wherever they are found and in whatever forms they take. It is not to deny darkness or even to believe it has its compensations.

Martin’s biography is itself rather a dark affair— appropriately, since he is telling the life of a man whose autobiography is an elaborate historical myth. In García Márquez’s own accounts, his life is both hard and magical. But it’s never sad, and Martin evokes the sorrow that must lurk in such a life. There is perhaps a slight imbalance in Martin’s insistence on the writer’s sadness, an excess of melancholy; but it’s a good corrective to García Márquez’s own joking cheerfulness and elaborate ironies, and we can return to the master if we get too depressed.