Cities, Territories and Conflict: Narrative and the Colombian City in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In 1959, amid one of the most violent and sad times in Colombia’s history, Gabriel Garcia Marquez published an essay entitled: Dos o tres cosas sobre la novela de la Violencia (Garcia 1983). He emphatically states that the novels dealing with the history of la Violencia (the civil war between 1948 and 1958) were aesthetically poor and unworthy of examination: ‘Quienes han leido todas las novelas de violencia que se escribieron en Colombia parecen de acuerdo que todas son malas’ (Garcia 1983: 286). Although it may be true that the vast majority of texts of this genre are highly concerned with the political conflict of the time and, as such, are deliberately partisan, Garcia Marquez’s essay demonstrates a compromising disregard for Colombia’s literary development. Firstly, this is because he is too involved with the problems of his contemporary Colombian society, as can be seen in Lamala hora (Garcia 1996) and El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Garcia 2003). Secondly, la Violencia and the literature about it were the first phenomena to draw attention to the Colombian city and its inhabitants. Thus, it can be seen as the precursor of the country’s urban literature.