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Wells Thomas Pynchon Jonathan Swift Eudora Welty Philip Roth Amy Tan Edith Wharton Salman Rushdie Alfred, Lord Tennyson Walt Whitman J. D. Salinger Henry David Thoreau Oscar Wilde José Saramago J.R.R. Tolkien Tennessee Williams Jean-Paul Sartre Leo Tolstoy Tom Wolfe William Shakespeare Ivan Turgenev Virginia Woolf William Shakespeare’s Mark Twain William Wordsworth Romances John Updike Jay Wright George Bernard Shaw Kurt Vonnegut Richard Wright Mary Wollstonecraft Derek Walcott William Butler Yeats Shelley Alice Walker Émile Zola Alexander Solzhenitsyn Robert Penn Warren Bloom’s Modern Critical Views GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez—Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabriel García Márquez / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern criticial views) Includes bibliographical refereences and index. IBN 0-7910-9312-3 (hardcover) 1. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom Harold. PQ8180.17.A73Z673 2006 863’.64—dc22 2006020462 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing Editor: Amy Sickels Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © Piero Pomponi/Liaison/Getty Images Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Interview with Gabriel García Márquez 7 Rita Guibert The Writer’s Life 33 Gene H. Bell-Villada Hemingway’s Presence in the Early Short Fiction (1950–55) 55 Harley D. Oberhelman The Logic of Wings: Gabriel García Márquez and Afro-American Literature 67 Vera M. Kutzinski Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicised Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of Spirits, and Beloved 83 Stephen M. Hart One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 95 Steven Boldy vi Contents The End of Eréndira’s Prostitution 107 Diane E. Marting The Autumn of the Patriarch(1975) 123 Raymond L. Williams Language and Power inThe Autumn of the Patriarch 145 Jo Labanyi From Mystery to Parody: (Re)readings of García Márquez’s Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada 159 Isabel Alvarez-Borland A Prospective Post-Script: Apropos of Love in the Times of Cholera 169 Robin Fiddian Apocalypse and Human Time in the Fiction of Gabriel García Márquez 183 Lois Parkinson Zamora Chronology 217 Contributors 221 Bibliography 225 Acknowledgments 229 Index 231 Editor’s Note My introduction suffers some doubt as to the permanence of One Hundred Years of Solitude(where all is hyperbole), while giving the preference to Love in the Time of Cholera, where erotic vitalism seems to me more appropriate in its extravagance. An interview with the novelist opens the selection of essays, after which Gene H. Bell-Villada describes the principal events, so far, of the life of García Márquez. The influence of Hemingway is traced by Harley Oberhelman, while Vera Kutzinski learnedly relates García Márquez to the poetry of Robert Hayden. One wonders if Stephen Hart enhances One Hundred Years of Solitude by juxtaposing it with Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, both of which essentially are ideological rather than literary texts, in my own judgment, but then I am an aesthete, always. Steven Boldy seconds García Márquez’s compassion for the characters of One Hundred Years. The escape from sexual slavery by Eréndira in his famous tale of child prostitution is seen as an instance of García Márquez’s transcendental irony by Diane E. Marting, while Raymond L. Williams commends The Autumn of the Patriarchas a worthy companion to the Hundred Years. Jo Labanyi agrees with that judgment, though she sees The Autumn of the Patriarch as more modest in its style, after which Isabel Alvarez-Borland stresses parodistic elements in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Love in the Time of Cholera, perhaps García Márquez’s masterwork, is seen as open-ended to interpretation by Robin Fiddian, while Lois Parkinson Zamora concludes this volume by highnoting the optimistic Nobel speech of the novelist, with its utopian hope. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction I Macondo, according to Carlos Fuentes, “begins to proliferate with the richness of a Columbian Yoknapatawpha.” Faulkner, crossed by Kafka, is the literary origins of Gabriel García Márquez. So pervasive is the Faulknerian influence that at times one hears Joyce and Conrad, Faulkner’s masters, echoed in García Márquez, yet almost always as mediated by Faulkner. The Autumn of the Patriarch may be too pervaded by Faulkner, but One Hundred Years of Solitude absorbs Faulkner, as it does all other influences, into a phantasmagoria so powerful and self-consistent that the reader never questions the authority of García Márquez. Perhaps, as Reinard Argas suggested, Faulkner is replaced by Carpentier and Kafka by Borges in One Hundred Years of Solitude, so that the imagination of García Márquez domesticates itself within its own language. Macondo, visionary realm, is an Indian and Hispanic act of consciousness, very remote from Oxford, Mississippi, and from the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In his subsequent work, García Márquez went back to Faulkner and Kafka, but then One Hundred Years of Solitudeis a miracle and could only happen once, if only because it is less a novel than it is a Scripture, the Bible of Macondo; Melquíades the Magus, who writes in Sanskrit, may be more a mask for Borges than for the 1