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175 part v Literary and Political Imagination in the Latin American New Novel Chapter 10 Scenes of Instruction in Gabriel García Márquez G abriel García Márquez is widely regarded as part of a generation of Spanish American writers who are less didactic and less documentary than their predecessors. Two of García Márquez’s fellow Boom authors helped propagate this view of the Colombian author as one of the foremost representatives of the “new” Latin American novel. In La nueva novela hispano­ americana, Carlos Fuentes described what he saw as a shift that had begun to take place in Spanish American narrative of the 1940s “de la antigua literatura naturalista y documental a la nueva novela diversificada, crítica y ambigua” [from the old naturalist and documentary style of writing to the pluralistic, critical , and ambiguous aesthetic of the new novel], and he hailed García Márquez as one of the most distinguished practitioners of this new type of novel. In throwing off the shackles of a naive realism, the Colombian author had reclaimed for the art of narrative what Fuentes called “un derecho a la imaginación” [the rights of the imagination].1 In the same year, Mario Vargas Llosa published a polemical essay, “Novela primitiva y novela de creación en América Latina” [The primitive novel and the creative novel in Latin America], in which he put forward a similar reading of the Latin American novel. He argued that there had been an evolution from the documentary, folkloric, Manichaean, and stereotypical type of writing that had predominated during the first half of the twentieth century to the more authentic, personal, universal, and autonomous novel that had first emerged with the publication of Juan Carlos Onetti’s El pozo [The pit] in 1939.2 Vargas Llosa labeled the former type of novel as “primitive” and the latter as “creative.” He described García Márquez as a leading exemplar of the “novela de creación” [creative novel].3 176 Gunshots at the Fiesta García Márquez himself has offered an account of his development as a writer that stresses the importance of his decision to free himself from the demands of political engagement and the constraints of traditional realist methods of representation. In El olor de la guayaba [The scent of the guava] (1982), a series of conversations with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he claims that he was able to write Cien años de soledad [One hundred years of solitude] (1967) once he realized that “mi compromiso no era con la realidad política y social de mi país, sino con toda la realidad de este mundo, sin preferir ni menospreciar ninguno de sus aspectos” [my commitment was not to the social and political reality of my country, but to the totality of the reality of this world, without preferring or disdaining any aspect of it].4 In a 1971 interview with Ernesto González Bermejo, he develops a similar interpretation of the early stages of his career. He explains that for a long time he struggled with the question of how to capture the social and political realities of Colombia. At one point, he had come to believe that the “mythical method” toward which he was inclined was “escapist,” but he eventually realized his mistake. Once he grasped the deficiencies of the social realism practiced by most of his contemporaries, and understood that the “mythic treatment ” of the history of his country was not an evasion of reality, he was ready to take “the plunge” and write his masterpiece.5 In later years, García Márquez has continued to dismiss the view that literature could be used as a political tool. “I don’t think literature should he used as a firearm,” he stated in a 1988 interview with Marlise Simons.6 Yet García Márquez has also insisted repeatedly on the depth of his political convictions, and the way he has acted on the public stage has clearly conformed to the traditional Latin American conception of the writer as someone who uses his literary gifts—and the prestige he derives from these gifts—to help shape political debates and influence people in power. In a 1982 Playboy interview, he explained that the “enormous political, economic and social problems” of Latin America made it impossible for him to “ignore politics.” As a result, the Colombian author has had to turn himself into what he calls “an emergency...

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