Gabriel Garcia Marquez, His Fables and Techniques (Part I)

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Trying to find a congruent bridge between the life of his personages with his own imagination, Garcia Marquez fabricated, without doubt, a reality of his own. He is one of the most documented storytellers of his time, and many of his readers still believe that what has happened in the pages of his books, is part of the history of Latin America. Many people now travel to the places Garcia Marquez writes in his stories, to finally find out that it is what it is: a magical world, created by a Master magician.

If we read his stories, we’ll see Garcia Marquez have used every single subterfuge to beguile the reader. If we were to be entrapped by his “craftiness”, we’d willingly come to believe in the world he painstakingly has created. With a few techniques and magical passes, so well studied, almost to perfection, few really have noticed his arguments are simple, and his stories a wonderfully told folk tale. And he even withdraws his stories from banal, mostly trivial and nonsensical folk tales from Latin America, tales whose value reside not precisely in his originality, but in his dreamlike, believable, wordy qualities.

However, let’s not go too fast. With these simple, elemental materials, he has created the most outstanding literary edifice, to become the most read storyteller of his time.

One of these elemental techniques, is the carefully crafted and specific wording with which he approaches a story. He has revealed that if you, for example, say: “There was a dozen people who died in the airplane crash…”, you are still far from obtaining the necessary verisimilitude to make it an impact on the reader. Nevertheless, if you would have said: “Thirty seven people died, and forty one injured, in a plane crash, in Colombia, 452 miles from the Ecuadorian line… “, that single sentence will carry the impact of truth more effectively due simply to his pinpointed specificity.

On the other hand, if you were to continue writing about the same theme, for more than 230 pages, going over and over on the same pre-fabricated facts and figures, you would have not only told a story, you would have constructed a world!

Myths, legend, folk tales, beliefs, dreams and the like, are all valid materials to fabricate a new reality. The use of this recycled reality made with every single thread of humanity, is not only desirable for a fictional writer but is, according to Garcia Marquez, absolutely necessary for a reader to believe it. If we, as readers, could not be absorbed in a construct of factual imagination, we would be writing in vain. What we desire in a story is not just adventure or a strong argument, but the fabrication of a new way to see our own reality. We have the imperative need to reshape our daily life, in order that we may find a congruent conjuring up of our own demons. Only then, we would be able to confront them, to re-do our interiority, our belief system, in order to find in the end a cathartic release that will heal our lives, or at least to find a new perspective in a world which was before so definitive and stagnant.

What words achieve is making our interior lives a fluid cycle of thoughts and dreams. They can reshape our positivism, or our willingly accepted negativism, on those areas we need to accept or to reject.

It is only then that we may learn to set the needful separators in our conscience so as to distance or to approach our experiences. This is done not in the usual, accustomed way, but our thoughts and its machinations transformed in malleable stuff. This is the meditative principle through which a concentrated reading can effect changes in how we view reality.

Nowadays, Philologists, Psychologists and Neuro-Pathologists, know well the powerful wisdom a good, metaphorical story may bring, and how it can influence the attitude and the vision of our own tribal beliefs and interactive ways to relate to each other and the world at large.

We can say, without much hesitation, that Garcia Marquez, among other effective storytellers have effectively contributed in augmenting our cultural atmosphere, influencing the way we see ourselves, and –what’s also important– the way the world sees us as Latin Americans.

To be Continued…