Telling the Tale
By
PAUL BERMAN
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
A Life
By
Gerald Martin
Illustrated. 642 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50
The single most thrilling event in Gabriel García Márquez’s life, judging from the biography by Gerald Martin, took place in
February 1950, when the novelist, who was 22 and not yet a novelist, though he
was already trying to be, accompanied his mother to the backwoods town where he
had spent his early childhood. This was a place called Aracataca, in the
“banana zone” of northern Colombia. His grandfather’s house was there, and his
mother had decided to sell it.
García Márquez himself has described this
trip in his autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But Martin supplies, as it were, the fact-checked version — a product
of the 17 years of research that went into “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life,”
together with the benedictions of the novelist himself, who has loftily
observed, “Oh well, I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an
English biographer.” In “Living to Tell the Tale,” García Márquez says that, upon
arriving at Aracataca, he entered the house and inspected the rooms. The
English biographer, by contrast, observes that García Márquez has also said he
never entered. Either way, he saw the house. Childhood vistas presented
themselves, and vistas prompted thoughts.
García
Márquez was engrossed just then in a study of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Proust, in Spanish
translation. He was learning to appreciate what Martin calls “the multiple
dimensions of time itself.” And with a pensive gaze at the old house, he
realized — here was the epiphany — he could invent himself anew. There was a
way to become a member of the sleek novel-writing avant-garde, and this was to
be the boy from Aracataca. And so he had his grand theme; and he had his
writer’s persona, who was himself, as adult and child both; and he had his
method of inquiry, which was to gaze back on his own most powerful childhood
experiences.
The
opening sections of Martin’s biography are clogged with genealogical chronicles
of the Garcías (the father’s family) and the Márquezes (the mother’s), snaking
into the 19th century — a preposterously tangled story of cousins and
noncousins united in wedlock, nonwedlock, near-incest, vendetta-mania and
frontier trailblazing in the Colombian wilds, such that, after a few pages, you
can hardly remember who is who, and where the murder took place, and what the civil
war was about, or the next civil war, or the next. You could even suspect that
Martin, having set out to describe García Márquez, has ended up competing with
him: where the novelist ornamented some versions of “One Hundred Years of
Solitude” with a one-page genealogical table, the biographer has ornamented
“Gabriel García Márquez” with seven pages of them.
But
what else was a biographer to do? A kind of sea breeze of atmospheric moods
blows across García Márquez’s work — a saline mood of unexplained and
understated pathos, moods of delicate solidarity and even complicity with
everything frail and cracked, a slightly morbid mood. And all of those moody
currents seem to converge, in the end, on a single lush and regal emotion,
which is nostalgia — García Márquez’s never-exhausted and always tender search
for what he is not going to find: his own past, and his family’s, and the
universe at his grandfather’s knee.
His
childhood touched on one other experience, though, and this had nothing to do
with family lore. Martin tells us that, as a child, García Márquez read
Alexandre Dumas and “A Thousand and One Nights.” He was a normal boy. Mostly he
was a normal Latin American. He read the poets of Spanish literature’s “Golden
Age,” the 16th and 17th centuries. And, in this fashion, he appears to have
spent whole portions of his childhood dwelling not just in northern Colombia
but also in the hyper-elegant universe of Luis de Góngora and the syllable-counting
poets of imperial Spain, long ago — whose own memories reached spectrally back
into the shadows of Roman myth and esoteric philosophy.
The
lucky break in García Márquez’s life was to win a scholarship to an excellent
college outside Bogotá, where his studies concentrated on still another of the
early modernist writers, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. The English-speaking
world has never paid much attention to Darío, but that is because his deepest
theme was strictly a Spanish-speaking one — namely, the same vexed problem that
García Márquez would have to solve: how to reconcile a childhood immersion in
the poetry of the Golden Age with an adult immersion in the realities of the
modern age. Darío entertained a precise idea of how to do this. It was through
a kind of madness. He embraced every last extravagant curlicue of the Golden
Age — the Roman myths and esoteric doctrines, the fanatical dedication to the
verse structures of Spanish tradition — only he embraced them in a pop-eyed
spirit of paradox. He wanted to show how large and heartbreaking is the gap between
life as it ought to be and as it actually is. And this idea, too, Darío’s mad
embrace of the Golden Age, entered into García Márquez’s imagination — or so it
seems to me, though Martin says not too much about this.
García
Márquez’s readers sometimes imagine that supernatural events and folk beliefs
in his novels express an all-purpose spirit of primitivist rebellion, suitable
for adaptation by progressive-minded writers in every region of the formerly
colonized world. Martin endorses that interpretation in the opening sentence of
his biography, where he flatly defines García Márquez, encyclopedia style, as
“the best-known writer to have emerged from the ‘third world’ and the best
known exponent of a literary style, ‘magical realism,’ which has proved astonishingly
productive in other developing countries.” But I think that, on the contrary,
magical events and folk beliefs in the writings of García Márquez show how
powerfully the Golden Age has lingered in memory. Instead of a postcolonial
literary rebellion against Western imperialism, here is a late-blooming flower
of the Spanish high baroque. Gongorism disguised as primitivism. And, being a
proper son of Darío, García Márquez has gone on to embrace in his mad spirit
the glories of Spanish rhetoric at its most extreme.
Martin
tells us that in García Márquez’s own estimation, his greatest book is “The
Autumn of the Patriarch,” from 1975 — a book that is an extended homage to
Darío, who is invoked at the beginning and again at the very end, and who,
somewhere in the middle, shows up as a character, sailing into port on a banana
boat to deliver a poetry recitation. Every last sentence in “The Autumn of the
Patriarch” offers a heroic demonstration of man’s triumph over language —
unless it is language’s triumph over man. The sentences begin in one person’s
voice and conclude in someone else’s, or change their subject halfway through,
or wander across the centuries, and, even so, conform sufficiently to the rules
of rhetoric to carry you along. To read is to gasp. You want to break into
applause at the shape and grandeur of those sentences, not to mention their
length. And yet to do so you would need to set down the book, which cannot be
done, owing to the fact that, just when the impulse to clap your hands has become
irresistible, the sentence you are reading has begun to round a corner, and you
have no alternative but to clutch onto the book as if steering a car that has
veered out of control.
Those
are gorgeous sentences, but they are also tyrannical — and tyranny, in the
conventional political sense, is entirely the novel’s theme. “The Autumn of the
Patriarch” tells the story of a despot ruling over an unnamed and benighted
Caribbean land. It is a dictator novel. The marriage of plot and prosody makes
it a masterpiece — a greater triumph even than Mario Vargas Llosa’s marvelously
brilliant “Feast of the Goat,” which is likewise a Caribbean dictator novel,
and likewise invokes Rubén Darío. “The Autumn of the Patriarch” does have a
puzzling quality, though. The dictator whose portrait emerges from those tropical-flower
sentences is monstrous and despicable — yet even his creepiest tyrannical
traits are presented as signs of the human condition, deserving of pity and
compassion, maybe even a kind of sorrowful love. I have always wondered what
sort of political attitude García Márquez meant to convey with those peculiar
ambiguities.
But
now that I have read Martin’s biography, I know. The book is 642 pages long,
and the first half of it, after completing the genealogical survey of northern
Colombia, records the dreadful poverty that García Márquez and his wife and two
sons endured before 1967, when “One Hundred Years of Solitude” finally lifted
him into the comforts of multiple-home ownership and, in 1982, the Nobel Prize.
But the second half mostly recounts the novelist’s subsequent career as
hobnobber among the powerful — a man who, according to his biographer, has
labored hard and long to get himself invited to the dinner tables of
presidents, dictators and tycoons around the world. And among those many table
companions, no one has mattered more to him than the maximum leader of the
Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro,
with whom García Márquez has conceived a genuine friendship, based on shared
vacations, a part-time career promoting Havana as a movie-industry capital and
a history of defending the Castro dictatorship against its detractors in the
Hispanic literary world. Here is the real-life Caribbean tyrant. García Márquez
does lead you to think about Castro in some of those spectacular sentences in
“The Autumn of the Patriarch.” And the novelist plainly loves his dictator.
Martin
gushes over nearly everything that García Márquez has ever done, yet, even so,
he concedes that friendship with Castro has sometimes aroused criticism. The
biographer mentions twice that Vargas Llosa (who at one point punched García
Márquez in the face, for reasons possibly bearing on marital honor) has
described García Márquez as Castro’s “lackey.” Martin emphasizes the insult
mostly to show the indignities that García Márquez has undergone out of
fidelity to Fidel. And yet, the biography’s account of the friendship will make
readers pause thoughtfully over that word, “lackey.” Martin tells us that, on
an occasion when Castro visited Colombia, García Márquez volunteered to be one
of his bodyguards. The world’s most popular serious novelist does seem to be a
flunky of the world’s longest-lasting monomaniacal dictator. Why García Márquez
has chosen to strike up such a friendship is something I cannot explain —
except to point out that, as Martin shows, the great novelist has never veered
from the epiphany that came to him at his grandfather’s house in 1950, and he
has always been fascinated by the grotesque, the pathetic and the improbable.
Paul
Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the author of the
forthcoming “Flight of the Intellectuals.”
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