Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations

7. A Biographer in Macondo

A Biographer in Macondo n. s. I want to return to an earlier topic in our conversations: the boundaries between fact and fiction in Hispanic civilization. My interest in this conversation is to discuss your views on biography as a genre, and in particular, to talk about your quest to produce a biography of Gabriel García Márquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. But let me do so by asking: Is biography a form of fiction and vice versa? i. s. By all means. Biography and fiction are impossible to divorce. n. s. Yet in the United States people acknowledge that divide. i. s. North of the Rio Grande, people go out of their way to mark a straight, uncompromising difference between the two. Enter any bookstore and you find a section of fiction, one of nonfiction, and a third of biography. Wouldn’t it be better to dump them all into a single category, literature? Is it really possible to distinguish between fact and fantasy? n. s. It is the lesson learned from Don Quixote. i. s. Miguel de Cervantes understood that between sanity and lunacy there is but a thin line, and likewise between fact and fiction. n. s. In Imagining Columbus [1993], you state that, “as a nonfiction genre, biographies are dangerous in that they enlarge or shrink the natural size, talents, and defects of their object of study.” 142 7 A Biographer in Macondo i. s. Biographies should be shelved in the fiction section. For one to be successful, the biographer must be at once present and absent in every page: too much ego is terrible, too little is absurd. In that sense, every biography is also a veiled autobiography. You mentioned Heinrich Heine the other day. Once, on a crowded subway ride in New York City during rush hour, a homeless man jumped into the train I was in and began singing in an atrocious fashion. People were squeezed like sardines: elbows and hands and mouths and chins sprung from everywhere. The collective disgust could not be contained . “Be quiet, please,” someone shouted. “Not here, not now,” another person said. The homeless man wouldn’t stop, though. He knew he was generating discomfort, but that, precisely, was his objective . He also knew that no one would hand him a penny. Then, after a few minutes, he screamed: “If you pay me, I’ll stop.” Often we come across characters in fiction who are used there as revenge by the author for an injury suffered. In some cases, the fiction comes across as wonderful; in spite of the revenge, it is firstrate and in others it’s just pure revenge, venom, acid. What a sibling remembers of life is so different from what his other siblings remember. So in the end, what is memory? How should we define it? To me, memory is an incredibly evasive function. For years I’ve searched for a satisfying definition, but I only come across stilted versions hammered out by one lexicon after another. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell argues that there is no way to prove that the world was not created five minutes ago with a memory of two thousand years. Memory is a treacherous data bank: every time we make either a deposit or withdrawal, the currency in our hands looks different. n. s. You’ve written that “to be outstanding, a biographer ought to have the heart of a novelist and the punctiliousness of a historian.” i. s. It is important to see the biographee in perspective. You have to understand the motivations that make each of these characters tick. And, at the same time, you have to have the idea that you are learning history, getting the facts, grasping the past. And if those ingredients are not there, you don’t read the second chapter. n. s. I remember once reading an interview with Jacobo Timerman. It was conducted right around the time he was composing his memoirs in Uruguay just prior to his death. He complained that he was 143 A Biographer in Macondo flooded with requests by would-be biographers. He was upset that biographers acted as if his life started when he went to prison. i. s. Media-driven publishers often have something concrete in mind: they are...