Triumph of the Artist

...Triumph of the Artist Chronicle of a Death Foretold By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Gregory Rabassa Knopf 120 pp $10 95 Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" My obsession with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his milieu began long before I met him, or even read his masterpiece, 100 Years of Solitude I was traveling through South America m 1968 with Bill Negron, whose art frequently graces these pages We were working together on a book to be called South America of the Poets Our notion was to focus on Colombia through the eyes of the author, since both of us admired his short stories in No One Writes to the Colonel, just published in New York When we discovered that he was living in Spain, we decided to go ahead with our plan anyway, visiting his birthplace, Aracataca (fictionalized as Macondo), and talking with his mother and father, who then resided in nearby Cartagena It was in Aracataca that the young Garcia Marquez began drawing cartoons of his grandmother's occult fables, mining the vein of fantasy that gives 100 Years its poetic depth Here, too, he listened to yarns of war, injustice and political infighting from the hps of the grandfather who became the garrulous hero of both early books Or rather, antihero For Garcia Marquez' genius lies in treating all this material with the kind of black humor that allows characters to utter absurd, sometimes insane ideas without diminishing their essential humanity "What I like about you," a young prostitute says to her lover in one of the stories, "is the serious way you make up nonsense," and the novelist agrees that this formula defines his work and personality In much of his work the 1982 Nobel Laureate for literature has turned his hometown into a dream kingdom of shattered expectations built on nostalgia, Macondo is bereft of idealism, visions of a better world, calls to arms These attitudes are seen as part of an old order that must be stripped away to get at the long-concealed truth What the Colonel was fighting for, if anything, in the various revolutions when he commanded Liberal Party forces, is purposely unclear—and irrelevant "If you feel like singing, sing," he tells his wife "It's good for your spleen " And when she reminds him that he cannot eat hope, he replies, "You can't eat it but it sustains you,' adding good-naturedly, "I'm taking care of myself so I can sell myself I've already been hired by a clarinet factory " Before the present book came The Autumn of the Patriarch, a monologue of a dying tyrant based on the life of Juan Vicente Gomez of Venezuela, whose crimes had been magnified into myth in the mouths of refugees to Aracataca during the novelist's childhood The book's highly praised style was baroque and convoluted Garcia Marquez implausibly defends his method by citing the supposed unreadability of Ulysses when it first came out, and claiming that "today children read it ' Although an intellectual tour de force, Autumn lacks the endearing magic of the author at his best Chronicle of a Death Foretold, fortunately, brings Garcia Marquez back on track The setting is Macondo again, with many of the old faces reappearing in minor roles, including the author himself, his family and his wife The mood is somber and tragic, for this is an account of a horrifyingly brutal and senseless crime A beautiful girl, Angela Vicano, is betrothed to a handsome youngman, BayardoSanRoman, whom she does not love After a lavish wedding reception involving the entire village, he takes her to bed, disco vers she is not a virgin and promptly returns her to her parents They beat her, and her two brothers demand to know who seduced her She names a young Arabic blade, Santiago Nasar The brothers sharpen their pig-sticking knives, track down their sister's presumed seducer—who can't believe he is being hunted, though many try desperately to warn him?and disembowel him at the door to his home His mother, thinking him in the house, had locked it to protect him Years later, thinking things over in the seclusion of a desert village, Angela does fall in love with her vanished husband and starts writing him affectionate letters One day when they are both quite old he shows up "He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him They were arranged by date in bundles tied with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened " Part morahty tale, part fairy tale, Chronicle of a Death Foretold unfolds like a Greek tragedy We know everything essential to the plot from the opening page, and yet Garcia Marquez fills in the details with such masterful skill that we hang on breathlessly to the final paragraph, where the murder is described As in all this writer's strongest work, the writing is lucid, factual, almost hterary except for an occasional word or phrase in the vernacular ("rot-gut,' "eighty-proof hangover") to remind us that this is our world What is Garcia Marquez trying to say in his books 91 can hear him answer, amiably or scornfully depending on his mood, that he isn't trying to say anything, that he writes because he must, that the words come out this way, virtually trancelike, dictated by his memory and edited by the sum of his parts Which would be the truth Still, one searches for some connection between the public man and the artist A typical Latin American liberal, the public man supports all Leftist causes, while shying away from justifying the Soviet Union's domestic atrocities and its more barefaced sandbagging of its weak neighbors He hates Augusto Pinochet and reveres the memory of Salvador Allende, regardless of what Allende did in Chile during his reign Garcia Marquez excuses Latin America's political infantilism on the grounds that democratic institutions did not have centuries to mature as in Europe—ignoring the Umted States, which broke away from colonialism at the same time His naivete is unbelievable He indignantly insists to a Playboy interviewer that "I am not and never have been" a member of the Communist Party, as if unaware that fellow travelers conduct most of the Soviet Union's propaganda abroad He "proves" the freedom-loving spirit of his good friend Omar Tor-njos, Panama's late military dictator, by pointing to the popular grief that followed the General's death (Imagine the popular grief in Germany had Hitler died in 1939 in a similar plane crash1) He explains his deep rapport with the Soviet Union's henchman Fidel Castro as a reflection of their mutual enthusiasm for literature and gastronomy, brushing aside Havana's total military and economic dependence on Moscow as a mere consequence of Yankee hostility The ingenuousness verges on outright dishonesty when he boasts that his admittedly wild exaggeration of "thousands" of deaths in the 1928 Aracataca strike against the United Fruit Company has been repeated so oltcn by the anti-gnngo Latin American press thai it now passes tor lact As loi the must, Oclavio Pay once died to persuade me that Garcia Marquez has not changed the language the way Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Jorge Luis Borges have "They started a new tradition, he comes at the end of an old one—the rural, epic and magic tradition of Ricardo Guiraldes, Horacio Quiroga, Jose Eustacio Rivera " I disagreed, comparing the Colombian Rivera's horrendous penetration of Amazonia with his successor's recreations of the past One emerges from Rivera's desperate journey in The Vortex with a sense of suffocating depression, from Garcia Marquez' strolls through Macondo with a reassuring conviction that a world so full of lusty adventurers, irrepressible louts and unconscious poets cannot be as bad as he says it is The artist triumphs over the public man, over the sociologist In other words, whereas Rivera, the conscious artist, succeeded at what he set out to do—horrifying his readers?Garcia Marquez, the unconscious artist and the better one, creates a realm that gives delight His characters have lives of their own and they refuse to be manipulated They may fulfill their tragic destiny, but they behave with so much spontaneity and good humor that we remember them as the better parts of ourselves and accept their world of irrational "happenings" as the real one...