Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

247 Pages·2006·2.11 MB·English

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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
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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
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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