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Singing in the Rain

John Bayley

February 17, 1994 issue

Reviewed:

Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories

by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 188 pp., $21.00

Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity

by Michael Bell
St. Martin's, 160 pp., $29.95

Gabriel García Márquez; drawing by David Levine

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Films can more easily be truly international than modern novels. A film’s
appeal is less parochial, more immediate, more comprehensive. Publishers
are shy of translating and trying to sell the latest fictional masterpiece from
Portugal or Turkey or Bulgaria: they know all too well how limited its appeal
will be, and how limited a grasp of its real virtues will be achieved by the
most sympathetically disposed reader. Even Mark Kharitenov, the first
winner of the Russian Booker Prize, and an accomplished novelist in the
classic Russian tradition, has still to see an English version of his work.

But Latin America has been somehow di!erent. The local characteristics,
which so often inhibit the success of a novel when it is translated into a
quite di!erent culture, have somehow served miraculously to popularize
One Hundred Years of Solitude. Critics and literary theorists, in Europe and
in North America, hailed the advent of a new vision and a new technique in
novel writing, and dubbed it “magic realism.” The author, Gabriel García
Márquez, who was already well known as a journalist and story writer in his
native Colombia and in the Spanish-speaking world, became as famous and
respected a name in literary circles as the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges.

It may be of significance that Márquez had been working in the Mexican

film industry in the late Sixties when he produced on paper, in an eighteen-
month burst of creative energy, a project for a novel on the history of a
family in South America which had been maturing in his head for years
under the general title of La Casa, “the house.” He was then approaching
forty. The great critical and commercial success of One Hundred Years of
Solitude transformed his life, and enabled him to produce his subsequent
work in economic security. The Autumn of the Patriarch came out in 1975;
and there followed Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of
Cholera (1985), and The General in his Labyrinth (1989). While none of these
has achieved the spectacular success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, all
have broken fresh ground in their outlook and technique, and all have been
received with praise and attention. Márquez has never repeated his own
formula, no matter how much it may have been taken up and exploited by
later novelists.

Always an enthusiast for the movies and an admirer especially of the Italian
masterpieces of the genre, such as de Sica’s and Zavattini’s Umberto D,
Márquez himself would probably be the first to suggest that the apparently
freewheeling world of magic realism owed a great deal to this always
experimental medium. For the rest, there is the opinion of the Cuban
novelist Alejo Carpentier, who absorbed the precepts of surrealism during
the interwar period in Paris, and who maintained in a famous essay that it
was the only appropriate artistic form in which to express the actuality of
the Latin American landscape and historical experience. Latin American
reality, he observed, is itself magical. But while what might be termed
classic, or pure, surrealism is carefully devoid of any expressions of emotion,
in its new form, as heightened actuality, it could have all the love, style, and
feeling in the world: above all love as style, as the celebration of the beauty,
cruelty, and extraordinariness of the true world. Thus it might be said that
Márquez popularized surrealism by making it such a pleasure to experience
surrealist moments in his own lovingly exotic paragraphs. Here is an author
who really enjoys what he writes about, and can be felt and seen to be
enjoying it.

His other sources were more simply literary ones, English and American.
Faulkner he took to early, but even earlier he took to Virginia Woolf. He once
remarked that he would have been a di!erent writer altogether if he had not
read, at the age of twenty, one of the single long sentences in Mrs. Dalloway.
It struck him like a thunderclap, and it is worth quoting in full for that
reason. The sentence describes the progress of an o#cial car, with some
Great Man inside it, down one of the fashionable streets of London.

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness
was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-
breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first time and last,
be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring
symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting
the ruins of time, when London is a grassgrown path and all those
hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones
with a few golden wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold
stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.

The way Woolf invoked, in her deceptively helpless and wayward prose, the
vision of a vista of time and a culture’s gradual destruction, became the
germ of One Hundred Years of Solitude. What may seem to many English or
American readers today a rather banal piece of Woolfian indulgence was for
the young Márquez a revelation. It must have been a fascinating moment. As
Michael Bell points out in his brilliant study of Márquez in the St. Martin’s
Press Modern Novelists series, Woolf’s characteristically throwaway phrase
—“will be known”—becomes in Márquez the more fateful Spanish ” ‘había
de’/ ‘was to,’” whose formulaic use keeps recurring in One Hundred Years of
Solitude.

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Bell goes on to point out that Woolf’s seriousness, as so often with

Bloomsbury authors—Aldous Huxley would be another case—has to take a
frivolous form, a conscious rhetorical extravagance which skirts the edge of
self-parody. This too became important to Márquez. It is abundantly evident
in the twelve tales which make up his latest collection, some of which have
appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, and the Paris Review. All might be
called slight, but the verdict which might seem unfavorable—indeed
slighting—if applied to most famous novelists is to Márquez a kind of
accolade, the most delicate of all compliments, as the most sincere. Much of
his genius resides in a seeming unawareness of that plodding Anglo-Saxon
distinction between a “serious” writer (and how that adjective still gets
overworked in a book’s publicity) and a popular, lightweight one. Of the
Márquez oeuvre it would be no paradox to say: the slighter the better; or
perhaps, rather, the more joyous the more meaningful.

Thus in “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” the narrator sees a beautiful girl
at the Paris airport, with “an aura of antiquity that could just as well have
been Indonesian as Andean.” The plane is delayed in taking o! for hours by
a snowstorm, and when they at last get aboard he finds himself beside her in
the First Class section. No word passes between them, and she asks the
attendant only for a glass of water.

She placed a cosmetics case with copper corners, like a grandmother’s

trunk, on her lap, and took two golden pills from a box that contained
others of various colors. She did everything in a methodical, solemn
way, as if nothing unforeseen had happened to her since her birth. At
last she pulled down the shade on the window, lowered the back of her
seat as far as it would go, covered herself to the waist with a blanket
without taking o! her shoes, put on a sleeping mask, turned her back to
me, and then slept without a single pause, without a sigh, without the
slightest change in position, for the eight eternal hours and twelve extra
minutes of the flight to New York.

Meanwhile the narrator drinks a lot of champagne, saying to himself, “To

your health, Beauty” as he downs each glass. “The lights were dimmed, and
a movie was shown to no one, and the two of us were alone in the darkness
of the world.” The narrator murmurs to himself a sonnet by Gerardo Diego,
and remembers, as they lie “closer than if we had been in a marriage bed,” a
novel by Kawabata “about the ancient bourgeois of Kyoto who paid
enormous sums to spend the night watching the most beautiful girls in the
city, naked and drugged, while they agonized with love in the same bed.”

Beauty’s sleep was invincible…. She awoke by herself at the moment the
landing lights went on, and she was as beautiful and refreshed as if she
had slept in a rose garden. That was when I realized that like old
married couples, people who sit next to each other on airplanes do not
say good morning to each other when they wake up. Nor did she. She
took o! her mask, opened her radiant eyes, straightened the back of the
seat, moved the blanket aside, shook her hair that fell into place of its
own weight, put the cosmetics case back on her knees, and applied
rapid, unnecessary makeup, which took just enough time so that she did
not look at me until the plane door opened,… she left without even
saying good-bye or at least thanking me for all I had done to make our
night together a happy one, and disappeared into the sun of today in the
Amazon jungle of New York.

Amazon jungle…. We are seeing here Márquez’s Latin American magic

becoming cosmopolitan, and the marvelous richness of his sense of
objective and solitary movement transposed from towns and histories lost
in the jungle into what has become the equally strange world of modern
traveling. The e!ect is not unlike Nabokov’s transposition of the rich
Russian domesticity of Turgenev’s novels into the world of Lolita, where
gym socks and a half-chewed apple core lie on the floor. The magic is not so
di!erent. The di!erence, and distinctively Márquez’s, is in the wholly
unartificial and unemphatic dignity of the composition, its natural poise of
understanding what lies beneath the surface of things. Sexual experience is
always solitary to some degree, and in its solitude can lie one of its greatest
rewards and consolations.

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As with other kinds of post-modernism, the danger of the approach may be

that “anything goes”; anything may happen and mean as much, or as little,
as anything else. Some of his readers and critics have found Márquez too
facile, in spite of the elegance with which each of his literary projects is
shaped, considered, and carried out. In contrast and response to magical
realism, whose danger, as Michael Bell puts it, is that of lending itself when
in the wrong hands to “a sentimental blankness,” there has grown up a
more rigorous school of postmodernism, of what might be called the
Flaubertian rather than the Woolfian kind. Flaubert’s celebrated severity,
the reductive and repressive gaze which seeks to analyze human and
worldly phenomena, is certainly very di!erent from the tropical profusions
of new Latin American writing. In his concisely clever and enigmatic novel,
Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes has supplied an obliquely telling parody of
the kinds of weakness to which magical realism can give rise.

Ah, the propinquity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion

and banditry, of surprising honor and random cruelty. Ah, the daiquiri
bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah, the fredonna tree whose
roots grow at the tips of its branches, and whose fibres assist the
hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda
owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle. Permit me to rap
on the table and murmur “Pass!”

But if the danger of magical realism is overluxuriance, that of Flaubertian

rigor is sterility, the atmosphere of “La vie est bête”; and Márquez’s whole
approach to life is not that of an ideological but of a purely sensuous
optimist.

This optimism is demonstrated in a story like ”‘I Only Came to Use the
Phone,’” in which an ordinary girl from Barcelona has her car break down
on a country road in a rainstorm, and manages eventually to hitch a ride in a
truck full of sleeping women. They come to a large building where she asks
to use the phone to call her husband, but is put o! with excuses, and finds
herself under sedation in a female lunatic asylum. Her attempts to escape
are frustrated, and when she finally manages to get through to her husband
he calls her a whore and puts the phone down. She is so angry that she
becomes reconciled to life in the hospital, and to the lesbian devotion of a
herculean female warden. Things drift along; finally her husband, who turns
out to be a professional magician, comes to see her, but the visit is not a
success, except that he brings her much-needed cigarettes.

The atmosphere of the story is absurdly cheerful, not nightmarish as it

would be in Ka$a. One notes again the situation’s resemblance to a film
comedy-thriller, and the e!ectiveness of a cinematic reality when a story of
this sort is transposed into language. It is worth noting, too, that Ka$a’s
nightmares are much more cast-iron, as it were, than those out of which
Márquez constructs his supple and disconcerting entertainments. The man
who wakes up turned into a large beetle can never, ever, do anything about
it; whereas we expect the misunderstandings of ”‘I Only Came to Use the
Phone’” to be cleared up, as in comedy. But the twist to Márquez’s technique
is that the misunderstandings in the story are not cleared up, just as when
things start to go wrong in life they are not cleared up. The comedy or magic
trick we expect to take place (and the professional magician in the story is
of course exceedingly helpless) does not come o!: it cannot avoid the
ordinary breakdown and the wear and tear of things. (We never know just
what happened to Maria since the last person who tried to visit her found
“only the hospital in ruins.”) Márquez’s sense of detail is in every case as
telling and as funny as it is in Ka$a’s tales. And in neither case is the humor
self-consciously black, in the modern manner.

One of the best details in ”‘I Only Came to Use the Phone’” is the wonderful
comfort given to Maria by the director of the asylum, after her first wild
seizure of panic and despair has caused her to be attached to the metal
bedstead by her wrists and ankles. When she is released and led into his
presence he lights a cigarette for her, gives her the rest of the pack, and talks
to her for an hour in a manner so comforting that she knows she can never
be unhappy again. In her mind she contrasts the solace he gives her with
that o!ered by her lovers and husband to reward her for letting them make
love to her. This man expected nothing. At the door, however, “he asked her
to trust him, and disappeared forever.” Such a moment is characteristic not
only of Márquez but of a writer like Milan Kundera in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, which suggests not only that magic realism has spread
throughout Europe, but that something very like it was, or has become, a
part of the literary spirit of our age, in Europe and America.

“Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness” begins with a characteristic Márquez

sentence—“When we came back to the house in the afternoon, we found an
enormous sea serpent nailed by the neck to the door frame.” The story is of
two little boys, whose father no doubt is fabulously rich (several of these
stories concern the very rich), having a Mediterranean holiday, skin diving
and all, in the care of their horribly upright German governess, who in the
magical world of Márquez naturally has an English name. The sea serpent, a
moray eel, sacred in the ancient world, is soon forgotten about; but Miss
Forbes is found with multiple stab wounds, inflicted by one of the many
lovers to whom her fanatical virtue dementedly yields by night. Her charges
have themselves tried to poison her with some old wine they have found in
a sea-encrusted amphora, but that is by the way—or is it? With Márquez, as
with Borges, one can never be sure. Indeed, the longer story that ends the
collection, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” su!ers from being less
enigmatic in this respect.

The quality of all the tales is greatly enhanced by Edith Grossman’s

admirable translation. Márquez himself contributes a prologue, “Why
Twelve, Why Stories, Why Pilgrims,” which explains in a not entirely
unpretentious manner how and when they came to be written over the last
eighteen years. His remarks on his own compositions, however, are very
revealing.

The e!ort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a

novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph:
structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the
personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the
most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one’s
life is not spent correcting the novel, it is because the same iron rigor
needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no
beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn’t.

Márquez’s most notable success lies in persuading the reader to share that
pleasure. And for both it does indeed become a solitary, even a solipsistic,
activity. The texture of his work is invariably more pleasing than any
“philosophy” that can be got out of it, for as Michael Bell rightly suggests,
his work is “specifically designed both to invite and to resist interpretation.”
That is to say, unlike Conrad for example, or Hardy, or Thomas Mann, he
would much rather we didn’t bother ourselves trying to formulate his ideas
or philosophy. These are not, in fact, to be formulated, to be clenched into
the project like a liana into a tropical tree Still, Bell aptly notes the
resemblances of Chronicle of a Death Foretold to Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, where fate is engaged in the same trick of compelling the
victim and her persecutors alike to play their roles in the manner prescribed
by usage and custom.

The liberator Simón Bolívar, in The General in His Labyrinth, represents

Márquez’s most ambitious character and concept; and significantly this is
his most recent novel. The theme again is solitude—Bolívar actually died in
a little town called Soledad, which shows that history and geography can
behave as magically as fiction, and the vision of what he tried and failed to
achieve is powerfully and movingly presented. And yet one doubts that
Márquez is really in the end a political animal, for all that he has been
supportive of Fidel Castro and was reluctant to condemn the Russian
invasion of Hungary. Admiration for authoritarian policies and figures is
very often the sign of a political outsider, unwilling to take much interest in
the boring ambiguities of liberal or administrative problems.

One of Michael Bell’s subtitles is “Fiction versus Politics?” and Márquez’s

fellow novelist the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa has himself written an
excellent critique of Márquez’s work, in which he suggests that like all
writers of fiction, only much more so, Márquez has created a substitute
world of “subjective reality,” which in practice drives out God, history, and
politics from the a!ective world of the novel. Though he is less well known
as a writer, Vargas Llosa’s own monumental histories, like The War of the
End of the World, emphatically do not do this, but, where history and society
are concerned, use more modestly the methods of Tolstoy and the
nineteenth-century realists. This is no reflection on Márquez, who has to his
credit a di!erent kind of invention altogether; but it shows the way his
books resemble Lolita or The Castle, or even Jane Austen’s Mans!eld Park,
rather than a novel by Balzac or Galdos or War and Peace. And why not?
The fact remains that most of his works are undoubted masterpieces; and
that may be true particularly of his novellas and stories, like most of the
ones in the present collection.

More by John Bayley

What Henry Knew

July 15, 2004 issue

Sex & the City

March 25, 2004 issue

Chameleon Genius
December 18, 2003 issue

John Bayley
John Bayley is a critic and novelist. His books include Elegy for Iris and The Power
of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

This Issue
February 17, 1994

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