Gabriel Garc’a Márquez
was born in Aracataca, Colombia March 6, 1928. As a novelist, Garc’a Márquez has known worldwide success because of his literary inventions. An inventor of cities, of entire families and, of time, he maintains that whatever he writes is about things that he knows and people he has seen.
Educated by Jesuits, he first thought of becoming a lawyer. Upon entering the university he realized that the streets were what attracted him. He stopped his studies. The mysteries of a large city, the enigma of the outsider who becomes the object of suspicion and hatred, the problems of possessions ingrained in socio-political dynamics were of far more interest to him than school rooms and term papers. He decided instead for a job with the newspaper
El Espectador
in Bogotá. During this time he read novels and stories by Franz Kafka, James Joyce and William Faulkner. In 1954 the newspaper assigned him to Europe, and he went to live in Rome. While there, he preferred to write articles concerning the cinema rather than daily events. He developed an interest in film direction and moved to Paris. Meanwhile in Bogotá, the newspaper closed down due to the ruthless governing of a Colombian dictator, Rojas Pinilla. Garc’a Márquez saw himself unemployed, awaiting the arrival of checks that never arrived, like in the case of a character from one of his novels,
El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba
. Thanks to a kind landlord, he was able to stay in France for a year without having to pay rent. Anecdotes say that the man took pity on him because he always saw Garc’a Márquez typing. He returned to Colombia and married Mercedes, who had been waiting four years for him. Together, they tried their luck in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. From there they went to New York and then to Mexico, where Márquez could dedicate himself to the writing of films. During these years these were important activities, but not at all decisive. He was able to support his family by doing odd jobs. During this time he was preparing himself for the book that would propel him to fame and fortune. It was not until 1967 that his masterpiece,
Cien a–os de soledad
appeared. However, this is not to say that Garc’a Márquez had not published before then. In 1955 he published
La Hojarasca
, followed by
El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba
in 1961. In 1962 he published the novel
La mala hora
. By 1965 he was already working on
Cien a–os de soledad
, a story he had conceived of as a child, listening to the stories his grandmother told him, as well as the countless things his grandfather showed him. Of his grandparents, Garc’a Márquez says that they were responsible for the circumstances in which his novelistic world was formed. He says that when his grandmother died, things “got flat”. In his imagination the fantastic world of his grandparents, together with the routine of the town in which he lived, melted to form a life where there were no frontiers between the fantastic and the real. His grandma told him of the bloody civil wars of Colombia, with names of generals, regional leaders (caudillos) and presidents. Names and dates got convoluted. The child did not distinguish what was historical and what was fiction. From this world of remembrances, fantasies and unrealities,
Cien a–os de soledad
emerged, for which he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.
Márquez is interesting because from his first novels, elements appeared which were to recur in later works, such as a “lonely town, cut off from the rest of civilization, and bitter political feuds that deaths and marriages cannot heal.”
1
Again and again in Garc’a Márquez’s stories, “a lonely proud individual asserts a sense of dignity despite a society in which brutality and corruption triumph.”
2
Distortion of reality and precise detail around the impossible are permanent qualities in Márquez’s work, His novels “remind us that in a continent conquered by men who had absorbed the novels of chivalry and were haunted by tales of
El Dorado
, a continent in which nature has a most invariably triumphed over man, the marvelous must have a place in literature.”
3
Jorge Luis Borges
was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina August 24,1899 and died in Switzerland in 1986. He is known as a writer of strong imagination. An avid reader, this portent of Latin American letters has talked about the faith he had in life, the love he felt for his country and ancestors, the wisdom which lies in our own personal God, his determination to defend his ideas and principles without compromise, and about what is commonly considered or talked of as “reality”. For his countrymen, he was not always an Argentine to the bone. For his admirers, a universal Argentine. Borges was always fascinated with mirrors and labyrynths. His stories are reflections of ideas and facts which are multiplied in the reader’s imagination until they acquire the fragility of the dreamlike, becoming confused with reality.
Borges was born in a comfortable household. His father was a lawyer, a linguist, and even wrote a novel. The family moved to Europe in order for Borges and his sister to receive their education. Borges has said many times that he learned to read in English before he did in Spanish, due to the availability of English magazines around his home. It was in English that he read his first novels, including the Quijote. He developed his style studying English as well as American literature. As a young man he formed part of a group known as Ultraists, i.e. beyond “isms”.
Borges’ character could perhaps be summed up with the following adjectives: daring, yet timid; a tireless chatter, nostalgic, ironic, a political reactionary; a sociable, yet private man. Between 1920 and 1930, Borges worked with great intensity. He read and studied the relations of China and India. He also read many philosophers, specially those of idealistic thought and absorbed the ideas of Nietzche. In his stories, Borges experiments with a subjective conception of time and with the idea that history can be considered as an eternal repetition of facts and begins within which limited and scarce possibilities can co-exist. In 1938, Borges suffered a septicemia or injury to his head, and spent several days in the hospital. While resting, he wrote various fantastic stories. He suggested that this incident (the injury to the head) changed the literary orientation of his work. He then published a series of strange stories and essays, which are not quite adventures or mysteries, but in them intrigue, facts, death, and duels of clues abound. From this point on, Borges became the master of intellectual games, strange plots, and unexpected endings. He resembles a narrator of police stories with a tint of philosophy and theology. In a sentence, “poetic meditation on illusion and reality, on dream and consciousness, were to become obsessive preoccupations.”
4
When he published
Historia Universal de la Infamia
, from which our selection is taken, he referred to it as “the irresponsible game of a timid man who did not have the drive to write stories and distracted himself by falsifying and apostasising the tales of others.”
5
In this collection the main characters are evil men and women of somewhat obscure historical importance revived in Borges’ imagination.
One of Borges’ constant themes is that of a man caught in a trap he has created himself. The fiction can take the form of historical investigation, literary criticism, description of an imaginary planet, a detective story or of an imaginary controversy. The core of these stories is “fortified” by footnotes and quotations which give the reader a probability of the fantastic mixed with descriptions of facts, which seem possible but weird at the same time. “Borges’s metaphysics reflect the madness that is there in reality.”
6
His tales are intertwined and quasi-revealed in a series of bibliographical references which hint at meanings that keep the reader guessing. The insinuations and many mysteries linked to contradictions of time and to characters caught in the trap of time and inner processes, perplexes and entertains the reader. It is required that the reader be an active one, looking for clues, willing to embark in a tunnel of his own, to either come out of it in triumph, or “defeated”, but stimulated by the exotic universe Borges presents.
For many years however, Borges searched for the chief genre that was to make him a renowned author. At first, he wrote essays which dealt with philosophical matters such as cyclical time theories, religions, the Cabbala, Gnostics, etc. In 1936 he published
Historia de la eternidad
, a group of essays dedicated to time and time philosophies, It wasn’t until
Ficciones
(1944) and
El Aleph
(1949) that Borges really found the best vehicle for his ideas: the short story. “I know that the least perishable part of my literary production is the narrative, yet for many years I did not dare to write stories. I thought that the paradise of the tale was forbidden to me.”
7
Borges’ work speaks to the modern man. His themes are varied and touch on such diverse areas as the philosophical, the socio-political, the psychological, and the religious. He is an Argentine who breaks away from the frontiers of his country and transcends his, as well as our own, panorama. His universalism attacks the present condition of the modern day homo sapiens who is much too happy or sad contemplating himself/herself, indifferent to others, Borges asserts the philosopher and sociologist in himself but through the expression of possibilities and transformation fiction can bring forth the lack of humanity in human societies. The main orbit of concentration relies on death. Death penetrates the Rulfian world: ambiance, things, people. Death is present in all of the stories, The Italian translation aptly carries the title of
La morte al Messico.
Rulfo’s narratives are told either in first or third person. Critics agree that he is at his best utilizing the first person. He is a master of the monologue, though he also receives high marks for his dialogues. But whatever the technique, Rulfo invariably describes the misfortunes of a large segment of humanity. The author himself has said that what he does is a transposition of the facts of his experience. Rulfo’s people grow not outwardly but rather inwardly. His monologues are carried by a strong hermeticism, as one could very well imagine people under such conditions would develop. One has the sense that the characters are chewing their words avoiding their coming forth. But come out they do, reveling to us a series of atrocious procedures. In “Nos han dado la tierra”, for instance, Rulfo deals with the theme of a group of men to whom the government has given a vast chunk of arid land. “Del pueblo pare acá es de ustedes”,
8
explains the government representative to the men. The campesinos proceed to cross the “llano” a metaphor for the government’s “generosity” towards its citizens. As they cross the vast arid valley, a single drop of water is witnessed by the men. The drop of water provides a brief moment of hope, but this promise quickly disappears, “dejando una plasta como la de un salivazo”.
9
Hope turns into anguish. It is from the title that one can find the deceit and the irony.