García Márquez and Gaitán: Vivir para contarla and the Personalization of History

Abstract

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND GAITÁN: VIVIR PARA CONTARLA AND THE PERSONALIZATION OF HISTORY David Bost Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s long-awaited autobiography–Vivir para contarla , the first of three planned volumes–was published in 2002 and represents the culmination of a literary and journalistic career spanning six decades. Vivir para contarla tells the fascinating story of Garcı́a Márquez’s early years as a high school and university student in the 1940s struggling to find pathways to his authentic vocation as a writer. Readers familiar with his prose will find, as Edith Grossman observes in a commentary of her own translation (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003), a recognizable style and many memorable landmarks from his novels and short stories: Garcı́a Márquez makes it clear that he sees little distinction between the practice of journalism and the writing of fiction. This is certainly not a question of his confusing truth and imagination or reality and fantasy, and it is much more than a clever turn of phrase or thought. Over and over again in the memoir, he refers to incidents and situations that are familiar to the reader because they have appeared, transmuted and transposed, in the works of fiction. Even more important than events mined from the mother lode of his experience, however, is the reportorial narrative technique common to both genres in Garcı́a Márquez’s writing. (37) In this sense, Vivir para contarla is a hybrid narrative in that Garcı́a Márquez weaves into his life story commentaries not only resembling his own imaginative narratives, but also Colombia’s literary history, national and international political analysis, personal genealogy, economic geography, biography and national history. Autobiography is such a flexible and loosely defined genre, suggests literary theorist James Olney, that “there are no rules or formal requirements binding the prospective autobiographer—no restraints, no necessary models, no obligatory observances gradually shaped out of a long developing tradition and imposed by that tradition on the individual talent who would translate a life into writing” (3). Robert Folkenflik puts it rather succinctly: “Autobiography, as I understand it, has norms but not rules” (13). With such autonomy readily available within the autobiographical genre, Garcı́a Márquez thus freely creates space in his own story also to comment extensively on Colombia’s often violent and tragic historical reality. His life story intersects with Colombian history over and C 2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 87 The Latin Americanist, March 2010 over again throughout Vivir para contarla to such an extent that it is sometimes difficult to separate his life, at least as he remembers and reports it, from larger events that have shaped his homeland. To a certain degree, Colombia’s history intrudes into his life, and, in a more limited sense, his life forms part of Colombia’s story. Vivir para contarla therefore tells multiple stories simultaneously and seems particularly focused on narrating seminal historical events from a personal perspective. Throughout much of his literary career, Garcı́a Márquez has interlaced many different facets of Colombian and Latin American history into his narratives, fiction and non-fiction alike. His vast experience as a journalist—his first calling—has honed his considerable skill as an astute observer and commentator on the inordinately complex Colombian political and social world that formed him. Apart from the countless historical allusions sprinkled throughout many of his novels and short stories, Garcı́a Márquez has also published several non-fiction texts that explore particular aspects of Colombian and Latin American history and culture: Relato de un naúfrago (1970), a first-person account of a shipwrecked Colombian sailor; La aventura de Miguel Littı́n clandestino en Chile (1986), the tale of the movie director who sneaks back into Pinochet’s Chile in order to film a testimony of the dictatorship’s failures and abuses; and Noticia de un secuestro (1996), an account of Pablo Escobar and the problems of extradition resulting from the contemporary drug trade and resulting civil conflicts. In these non-fiction works he communicates a historical and political sensibility with such novelistic devices as first-person narrators...