The End of Erendira's Prostitution

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Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent. (Frank Kermode 175) HE criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works usually accomplishes the difficult task of considering both his formal innovations and his criticisms of Latin American society and politics, but in the secondary literature on La increible y triste de candida y de su abuela desalmada (1972), the magical, fairy-tale elements have been analyzed much more thoroughly than its main theme of oppressive child prostitution. For example, Joel Hancock discusses Erendira and the Brothers Grimm (1978); Barbara B. Aponte examines el rito de initiation (1983); Marta Morello-- Frosch analyzes the funci6n de lo fantAstico (1984-85); Efren Ortiz gives the story una lectura mitica (1980); Antonio Benitez Rojo calls la Bella Durn-dente de Garcia (1987); Roberto Reis writes that the estructura de Poder is questioned through the use of the fantastic (1980); Jasbir Jain calls it Reversal of a Fairy Tale (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa places his comments on within a chapter titled the Hegemonia de lo imaginario in his 1971 biography of Garcia Marquez, Historic de un deicidio. The social problem that La increible historic addresses deserves a more frontal treatment. (I will use this short form of the story title to distinguish it from the film, for which I will use the character's name within quotation marks: Erendira). Overlooked in comparison to genre and myth, the story's social themes and realist strategies reveal Garcia Marquez' early interest in criticizing aspects of women's oppression. In this article I first remind readers of the Colombian author's insistence on the autobiographical origins of the Erendira-Abuela pair, and then discuss prostitution in several other texts by him. Finally I seek to explain the controversial ending of La increible historia by highlighting its faithfulness to its genesis and analyzing where the fiction diverges both from those origins and from literary norms. My contention is that Erendira!s prostitution is comparable to the massacre of the banana workers in Cien anos de soledad in that they are narrathemes based on real events which are treated by the fictions as unreal. In Cien anos, the historical massacre is represented, but then the sole survivor cannot find anyone to believe his testimony. All deny his tale and declare him mad. Hyperbole and improbability weight the evidence in the fiction in favor of the massive coverup, the Big Lie in which a massacre on such a scale never could have happened. Yet history has witnessed such an event. Similarly, the nature of Erendira's slavery is couched in the language of fable and fairy tale, giving the appearance of fictionality, of its impossibility or untruth in any literal sense. Hyperbole and improbability have led to reader incredulity. Yet Erendira!s barbaric treatment by her grandmother and the huge number of men who have paid-sex with her in fact could happen and does happen in reality. According to published interviews with the author, La increible historic is based on an experience when, as a sixteen-year-old, Garcia Marquez saw an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute. She was accompanied by a woman whom he presumed to be a relative. At a decisive moment in the fictional story, the text similarly anchors itself in the reporters look, in personal testimony, rather than the omniscient authority of a storyteller. The episode with the bordello prostitutes is witnessed by a first-person, participant narrator who enters the text on the page before (126), interrupting the third-person omniscient narration. Like Garcia Marquez' newspaper account of seeing the young prostitute abused by a relative, this unnamed participant narrator is a young man. In this segment, a group of sex workers from the local brothel are angry because has attracted all their customers to wait in lines at her tent. …