Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Art of Fiction (Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Gabriel García Márquez
I'm back from vacation, and I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.
I went to Las Vegas for a family visit. Few other places in the world have such an absurd relationship with reality. It's fantasy run amuck, and I'm glad to have seen it once. I rode the fake Eiffel Tower and the New York, New York roller coaster, then went into that pyramid that shoots a light up into the sky. I saw more fake art than I could count at Ceasar's. What's a person to do? Snap pictures, grab a drink, and people watch.
To reground after such an experience, there seems no one more fitting to turn to than Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is perhaps best known for the magical realism lacing together the prose of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Colera. Less known are the years he spent as a journalist, working on his novels in the late night hours after his shift, the sounds of the presses keeping him company.
Given that magic realism as a fictional style seems so far removed from the work of a journalist, I found Márquez's comments on the links between fiction and journalism, or between fantasy and reality, most surprising and illuminating. I feel as if the differences between fiction and nonfiction are over emphasized today. Too often we define writers, editors, and other people involved in publishing as either "fiction" or "nonfiction." Hopefully Márquez's remarks demonstrate that writing techniques -- and attentive, active writing -- cross the abyss.
Márquez: I don't think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.
Interviewer: Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?
Márquez: In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
While he does not see them as fundamentally different, Márquez emphasizes what each brings to the other once an author opens him or herself to both:
Fiction has helped my journalism because it has given it literary value. Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality.
Still, there is a specific technique that journalism has given Márquez that has been powerful in the creation of his magical realism -- that of rendering minute detail:
That's a journalistic trick that you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That's exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn't say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it. When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible. One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind. She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away. I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend. That's how I did it, make it credible. The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it's believed.
Even when Márquez discusses other sources of inspiration when writing stories, he turns to a commonplace art form with a strong relationship to reality and the everyday -- photography:
Share on FacebookI've got a photography book that I'm going to show you. I've said on various occasions that in the genesis of all my books there's always an image. The first image I had of The Autumn of the Patriarch was a very old man in a very luxurious palace into which cows come and eat the curtains. But that image didn't concretize until I saw the photograph. In Rome I went into a bookshop where I started looking at photography books, which I like to collect. I saw this photograph, and it was just perfect. I just saw that was how it was going to be. Since I'm not a big intellectual, I can find my antecedents in everyday things, in life, and not in the great masterpieces.
