Larger than life: the hyperbolic realities of Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the paintings of his Colombian compatriot Fernando Botero have achieved immense popularity at home and abroad. Although they are comparable in many ways, they have never been studied at length together. Very briefly, both García Márquez's novel and Botero's paintings extend reality slightly toward the fantastic: García Márquez includes magical events in his otherwise realistic narrative; Botero paints people whose plumpness goes beyond the actual shapes of actual people. To compare them is to document the existence of a magically real, contemporary American baroque, and to understand more fully its complexities and its appeal. Such a comparison also helps to explain the collective vitality of Latin American culture today and to suggest why, as Fredric Jameson claims, ‘Latin American literature, since the boom, has become perhaps the principal player on the scene of world culture.’1 In his well-known discussion of a postmodern ‘literature of replenishment,’ John Barth cites One Hundred Years of Solitude as a prime example, one that is ‘humanly wise, lovable, literally marvelous.’ Vague generalities perhaps, but they express a sense of inclusiveness, of wonder, of rejuvenation, important cultural needs that also characterize our experience of Botero's paintings. Furthermore, of, as Brian McHale has suggested, postmodernism has an ontological cast to it, both García Márquez and Botero belong within it, for their art implicitly poses ontological questions: we can see figures, for example, relatively clearly, even in relative detachment from their grounds, but what, we ask, is their ontological status?