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WHAT THE YOUNG GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ LEARNED FROM THE MASTER GRAHAM GREENE: THE CASE OF "UN DÍA DE ÉSTOS" Gene H. Bell-Villada In an interview pubUshed in 1980 in 77ie Harvard Advocate, García Márquez described Graham Greene as "the only living, great English novelist that comes to mind" (Ashton 27). In a conversation I was privileged to have with the Colombian fabulator a couple ofyears later, he acknowledged a writerly debt to the elder British author, saying that Greene had taught him, among other things, "to evoke the warm climate of the tropics" (Bell-Vülada "Journey").1 There is in these statements the suggestion of an artistic debt that, to my knowledge, has not yet been explored. And so, in the course of this essay I should Uke to examine a specific lesson that a thirtyish Garcia Márquez learned from a mature Graham Greene's fiction sometime in the 1950s, at a time when the EngUshman was a world-renowned author and the Colombian was stül struggUng as ajourneyman and journalist.2 On first sight, it may seem puzzUng to juxtapose two such different Uterary figures. García Márquez, after all, consciously carries on the Modernist project of transcending the Umits of nineteenth-century realism through ceaseless formal experimentation, an ethos that he inherited from Kafka, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other such models acknowledged by him in his youth. In one of his early journaUstic pieces, for instance, García Márquez himself enthusiasticaUy cites as his Uterary mentors such figures as Joyce, Faulkner, and "la gran Virginia," among others (Textos 269). Greene, by contrast, stands soUdly within the venerable, and stillvital , EngUsh realist tradition of chronologically structured novels that are shaped by the requirements of Unear plot and individual character. Fittingly, in a 1945 essay on François Mauriac, Greene complains that, in our time, "the noveUst [. . .] took refuge in the spiritual [. . .]." Moreover , he specificaUy singles out Virginia Woolf as a prime culprit in this regard, and further notes, "how tired we have become of the dogmatically 'pure' novel, the tradition founded by Flaubert and reaching its tortuous cUmax in England in the works of Henry James" (552; 553). Mere mention of García Márquez is to conjure up a feeUng of amazement at a world filled with wondrous events, and further driven by the magical causation and miraculous processes that Borges first advocated in a now-famous essay in the 1930s, "El arte narrativo y la magia," or by a pan-deterministic "causalité imaginaire," to use Todorov's analogous term in his classic study of the fantastic (116). The very term "magical reaUsm," so habituaUy associated with the Colombian's work, serves to Vol·. 24 (2000): 146 ??? COHPAnATIST sum up—if oftentimes in too pat and facile a fashion—one of his key characteristics. Greene's fictional universe, on the other hand, is almost synonymous with a hardened, midcentury weariness and a worldly, melancholy skepticism . Amazement and wonder are alien to the Englishman's vision, in which what matters is reality and realism, sans "magical" or any other adjectives. Finally, García Márquez's faux-naïf method of"pure" storytelling, as well as his South American leftism, would surely put him at odds with the complex moral and doctrinal dilemmas lying at the heart of the suspense-filled fables of Graham Greene, the English Catholic. In matters of narrative tone, fundamental preoccupations, and type of artistry, then, the two authors differ enormously from each other. Nevertheless, if one looks at those humbler and more self-evident aspects of setting, subject matter, and theme, some obvious similarities emerge. Many of Greene's books, the later ones especially, are characterized by their exotic locales—revolutionary Mexico (77ie Power and the Glory), the Belgian Congo (A Burnt-out Case), Indochina during the French war (77ie Quiet American), Paraguay during Stroessner (77ie Honorary Consul), or Haiti under DuvaUer (The Comedians). The physical and human geography of these places is always superbly sketched by Greene, and though the point ofview is generally that of a European cosmopoUte, there is no hint of condescension, be it along the lines of colonial...

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