Born in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez was 87 when he died
last week. According to his younger brother, Jaime, he had been suffering
from complications caused by chemotherapy, which saved his life but
accelerated his dementia, a disease that apparently ran in his family. He’d
call his brother and ask to be reminded about simple things. “He has problems
with his memory,” Jaime reported a few years back.
Remembering and forgetting are García Márquez’s great
themes, so it would be easy to read meaning into his senility. The writer was
fading into his own solitude, suffering the same fate he assigned to the
inhabitants of his fictional town of Macondo, in his most famous novel, One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Struck by an insomnia plague, “sinking
irrevocably into the quicksand of forgetfulness,” they had to make signs
telling themselves what to remember. “This is a cow. She must be milked.”
“God exists.”
The narrative of that book is straightforward. Macondo is
founded, it grows, catastrophe strikes. Its people, though, experience time
not as progressive motion but as circular repetition, engaging in ever more
desperate efforts to ward off the forces of oblivion. Life and history are
lineal, García Márquez seemed to want to say, but memory, which makes us
human, is reiterative. Or, as he wrote at the beginning of his memoir, Living
to Tell the Tale, published in English in 2003, “Life is not what one lived,
but what one remembers and how one remembers in order to recount it.”
The climax of One Hundred Years of Solitude is
famously based on a true historical event that took place shortly after
García Márquez’s birth: in 1928, in the Magdalena banana zone on Colombia’s
Caribbean coast, not far from where the author was born, the Colombian
military opened fire on striking United Fruit Company plantation workers,
killing an unknown number. In the novel, García Márquez uses this event to
capture the profane fury of modern capital, so powerful it not only can
dispossess land and command soldiers but control the weather. After the
killing, the company’s US administrator, “Mr. Brown,” summons up an interminable
whirlwind that washes away not only Macondo but any recollection of the
massacre. The storm propels the reader forward toward the novel’s famous last
line, where the last descendant of the Buendía family finds himself in a room
reading a gypsy prophesy: everything he knew and loved would be “wiped out by
the wind and exiled from the memory of men...because races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
It’s a powerful parable of imperialism. But the real wonder
of the book is not the way it represented the past, including Colombia’s long
history of violent civil war, but how it predicted the future.
One Hundred Years of Solitude first appeared in Spanish in
Buenos Aires in May 1967, a moment when it was not at all clear that the
forces of oblivion had the upper hand. That year, the Brazilian Paulo Freire,
in exile in Chile and working with that country’s agrarian reform, published
his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, which kicked off
a revolution in pedagogy that shook Latin America’s top-down,
learn-by-rote-memorization school system to its core. The armed and unarmed
New Left, in Latin America and elsewhere, seemed to be in ascendance. In
Chile, the Popular Unity coalition would soon elect Salvador Allende
president. In Argentina, radical Peronists were on the march. Even in
military-controlled Brazil, there was a thaw. Che in Bolivia still had a few
months left.
In other words, the doom forecast in One Hundred Years
was not at all foregone. But within just a few years of the novel’s
publication, the tide, with Washington’s encouragement and Henry Kissinger’s
blessing, turned. By the end of the 1970s, military regimes ruled the
continent and Operation Condor was running a transnational assassination
campaign. Then, in the 1980s in Central America, Washington would support
genocide in Guatemala, death squads in El Salvador and homicidal “freedom
fighters” in Nicaragua.
Political violence was not new to Latin America, but these
counterinsurgent states executed a different kind of repression. The terror
was aimed at eliminating not just opponents but also alternatives, targeting
the kind of social-democratic solidarity and humanism that powered the
postwar Latin American left. Hundreds of thousands of people were disappeared
and an equal number tortured. Hundreds of communities were, like Macondo,
wiped off the face of the earth.
It is this feverish, ideological repression, meant to
instill collective amnesia, that García Márquez so uncannily anticipates in One
Hundred Years. “There must have been three thousand of them,” says the
novel’s lone survivor of the banana massacre, referring to the murdered
strikers. “There haven’t been any dead here,” he’s told.
A year and a half after García Márquez published
that dialogue, a witness to the October 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre in
Mexico City cried, “Look at the blood... there was a massacre here!” To which
a soldier replied, “Oh lady, it is obvious that you don’t know what blood
is.” Hundreds of student protesters were killed or wounded that day by the Mexican military,
though for years the government denied the extent of the slaughter. Even the
torrential downpour in One Hundred Years is replicated at Tlatelolco:
as Mexican tanks rolled in to seal off the exit streets, one witness recalls
that “the drizzle turned into a storm...and I thought that now we are not
going to hear the shooting.”
There’ll never be another like Gabriel García Márquez, and
when his friend Fidel Castro soon dies, they’ll say the same thing about him.
The two have been linked together for years, and not just because every
article about García Márquez published in English, including now his
obituaries, are obligated to mention that he never gave in to demands to
denounce Castro’s authoritarianism. García Márquez recognized such demands
for what they were: credentialing rituals (the United States, he said in
1990, has an “almost pornographic obsession with Castro. The U.S. Press has
made him into a devil”).
Rather, the bond between the two men was deep and organic;
one explains the other. They were born a year apart, both in Caribbean
provinces dominated by US plantations. Coming of age steeped in the heady
social-democratic populism of mid-century Latin America, both were rebels
against form. Castro revolted against Latin America’s highly stylized
tradition of political declamation, made even more rigid when performed by
urban Cuban Stalinists, developing an oratorical style that García Márquez
once described as capable of inducing “an irresistible, blinding state of
grace.”
That of course would be a good description of García
Márquez’s writing. Art was not only inseparable from his leftist politics;
those politics were the source of his artistry. His memoir’s most fascinating
passages describe the influence that Colombian populism, as represented by
the fiery and enormously popular Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (think Hugo Chávez in a
fedora), had on his narrative style. As a university student living in Bogotá
in the 1940s, García Márquez at first tried to resist Gaitán. But the
aspiring writer accidentally came upon the politician giving a speech. His
voice, García Márquez thought, was like the “lashes of a whip over the astonished
city”:
Not so much because of what his words said as
for the passion and shrewdness in his voice... . The subject of that night’s
speech was an unadorned recounting of the devastation caused by official
violence.... After a terrifying enumeration of murders and assaults, Gaitán
began to raise his voice, to take delight word by word, sentence by sentence,
in a marvel of sensationalist, well-aimed rhetoric. The tension in the
audience increased to the rhythm of his voice, until a final outburst
exploded within the confines of the city and reverberated on the radio into
the most remote corners of the country.
As a young writer, García Márquez felt constrained by the
two genre options available to him: either florid, overly symbolic modernism
or quaint folklorism. But Gaitán offered an alternative. Upon hearing that
speech, García Márquez “understood all at once that he had gone beyond the
Spanish country and was inventing a lingua franca for everyone.” García
Márquez describes the style as a distinctly Latin American vernacular that,
by focusing on his country’s worsening repression and rural poverty, opened a
“breach” in the arid discourse of liberalism, conservatism and even Marxism.
García Márquez flung himself through that breach,
developing a voice that, when fully realized in One Hundred Years,
took dependency theory (a social-science argument associated with the Latin
American left that held that the prosperity of the First World depended on
the impoverishment of the Third) and turned it into an art form.
The melancholy that saturates some of García Márquez’s
later novels also has its roots in politics. Having practically prophesied
the defeat of the New Left with One Hundred Years, he mourned its
loss, metaphorically at least, in a series of elegiac books, including The
General in his Labyrinth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and The
Autumn of the Patriarch.
So many deaths, so many political hopes shattered,
betrayed, exhausted. One can trace the pivot from prediction to lament to one
essay in particular, a remarkable meditation on the significance of Salvador
Allende, “Crónica de una
tragedia organizada”
(“Chronicle of an Organized Tragedy”), written six years after the
publication of One Hundred Years and almost immediately after the
Chilean president’s overthrow and death on September 11, 1973. (It was
published in English in the New Statesman as “Why Allende Had to
Die.”)
If Castro is autumn’s patriarch, Allende is the democratic
lost in history’s labyrinth. Drawing on his by then finely tuned sense of
historical existentialism, García Márquez presents Allende as a fully realized
Sartrean anti-hero, alone in the presidential palace, “aged, tense and full
of gloomy premonitions.” The Chilean embodied and confronted an “irreversible
dialectic”: Allende’s life proved that democracy and socialism were not only
compatible but that the fulfillment of the former depended on the achievement
of the latter. Over the course of his political career, he was able to work
though democratic institutions to lessen the misery of a majority of
Chileans, bringing them into the political system, which in turn made the
system more inclusive and participatory. But his life, or, rather, his death,
also proved the opposite: democracy and socialism were incompatible, because
those who are threatened by socialism used democratic freedoms - subverting the
press, corrupting opposition parties and unions, and inflaming the military -
to destroy democracy.
Here was Macondo writ large across the world: “All the
force of internal and external reaction came together in a single, compact
bloc” and were brought to bear on the isolated Allende, leading to a “social
cataclysm without precedent in the history of Latin America.... The drama
took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass
into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age,
and it will remain in our lives forever.”
García Márquez, though, taught us by example how to live
with the loss. Unlike so many of the other famous “boom” writers of his
generation, both from Latin America and elsewhere, he never grew bitter,
self-important or smugly disapproving. He remained joyous, generous with his
laughter, faithful to his friends and ideals, clear in his perspective. “We
are all alone,” he said, a truth meant not to depress but to accept and thus
transcend.
He told us, over and over again, that other utopias were
possible. Today, Salvador Allende’s daughter, Isabel Allende Bussi, is the
head of the Chilean Senate; his granddaughter, Maya Fernández Allende, is in
the House of Deputies; and Michelle Bachelet, tortured by Pinochet’s security
forces, is president of the country (all three women are members of Allende’s
Socialist Party). Maybe, as García Márquez said upon receiving the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1982, rethinking that famous last line, “races condemned to
one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second
opportunity on earth.”
[Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University and
is the author of Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in
history. His new book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and
Deception in the New World, will be published in January.]
Copyright c 2014 The Nation. Reprinted with
permission. May not be reprinted without permission. Distributed by Agence Global.
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