Fiction as History Essay

He was known as â€Å"Gabo† to the people living in Colombia and to those who knew him by his reputation. He was not only a short-story writer, a novelist and a screenwriter by profession for he was also a journalist—these were only among the many things which gave him the honor as among the famous writers of Latin America and one of the most significant 20th century authors. At the age of 65, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982: the product of the combination of an early life largely influenced by his grandfather and a life lived through the ways and means of journalism after quitting law school (Williams, p. 135). Gabo is considered to be a pioneering author in the Latin American â€Å"Boom† during the 1960s, stemming from the fame he achieved through his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude and his indispensable presence and role in Latin American literature (Maurya, p. 54). One Hundred Years of Solitude has been significantly understood by critics and literary scholars as a history of Gabo’s rendition of the circumstances during the strike that happened back in 1928 in Colombia (Posada-Carbo, p. 401). That magnus opus of Gabo is said to scrutinize the Colombian regime’s repressive nature as well as the strike itself which claimed the lives of many workers. Throughout the course of his career, the literary style known as â€Å"magical realism† has been largely attributed to Gabo as he was the one who popularized the literary technique of using magical events and elements so as to give real experiences the fitting explanations (Hinds and Raymond, p. 897). Gabo is also said to have been an influential writer not only for his fellow Latin Americans but also for fresh authors and budding writers from other nations. For Gabo, reality is a very significant theme and ingredient in his writings, especially evident in his works â€Å"In Evil Hour,† â€Å"Big Mama’s Funeral† and â€Å"Nobody Writes to the Colonel† (Aizenberg, p. 1239). These three works of Gabo reflect the kind of Columbian society where he lived inasmuch as they also reflect the reality of life in the nation. The theme of reality is the foundation for the rational structure of the books of Gabo, although European readers may tend to be less aware of the reality that Gabo wants to send across and tend to be more inclined to interpret his works as testimonies to his magical realist craft. The first few years in the career of Gabo Marquez saw a struggling journalist in him. He was literally a travelling journalist simply because he was always on the move, transferring from town to town across Latin America and Europe. At one point, he worked for El Espectador back in 1955 as a correspondent reporting from Rome and Paris. Although the newspaper was shut down by the dictator Rojas Pinilla which took away his position as a journalist, Gabo nevertheless was able to pick up on where he was left and continued his writing career in Mexico City. In the City, he did not only work as a journalist; he also worked as a screen writer and as a publicist before moving back to Barcelona during the 1970s. Although Gabo was a well-travelled writer, it can be said that he never fails to at least think about his hometown and reflect it on what he has written. Evidence to this is his constant use of the town â€Å"Macondo† in his many stories which reminds the readers of the town of Aracataca where Gabo was born and lived his childhood days (Molen, p. 4). This was true right from the time when Gabo began writing to the time when he was able to considerably attain success in the literary limelight. Nonetheless, the time when Gabo began writing was a significant event for the literary scene in Hispanic American societies because the literature in those regions was characterized either by realist-modernist or super-regionalism during the middle part of the twentieth century. Those were the times when Latin American writers were busy either writing as a modernist or as a realist—both having the tendencies to categorize themselves as ‘regional’ writers or writers who either depict or mask reality in their respective places. Maurya Vibha further suggests that there is an apparent â€Å"absent history in the Third World conditions of Latin America† and a â€Å"link between postcolonial fiction and a desire to think historically† in the works of Gabo (p. 54). If Vibha is indeed right, then there is strong reason to believe that what Gabo did in his works is to provide that link and, in the end, to capture the significance of those ‘third world conditions’ into a piece of literature which depicts the stark reality in Latin American societies. Apparently, the works of Gabo, if not the course of his life, present the struggles faced by Latin Americans in their own territory as well as in others. In effect, it can be said that Gabo’s ‘magical realism’ is indeed a combination of the depiction of the social realities that the author saw in his lifetime and of the literary magic that he used in depicting those realities. Although European readers may get the impression that the literature of Gabo is ‘magic’ in itself, it should not be the case that the substance of his works be confined to that magic alone for it transcends the barriers of that magic by portraying reality at its highs and lows. Works Cited Aizenberg, Edna. â€Å"Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in Garcia Marquez and Ouologuem. † PMLA 107. 5 (1992): 1239. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane, and Raymond Leslie Williams. â€Å"Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. † PMLA 104. 5 (1989): 897. Maurya, Vibha. â€Å"Gabriel Garcia Marquez. â€Å" Social Scientist 11.1 (1983): 54. Molen, Patricia Hart. â€Å"Potency Vs Incontinence In â€Å"The Autumn of the Patriarch† Of Gabriel Garcia Marquezpotency Vs Incontinence In â€Å"The Autumn of the Patriarch† Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. † Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 33. 1 (1979): 4. Posada-Carbo, Eduardo. â€Å"Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. † Journal of Latin American Studies 30. 2 (1998): 401. Williams, Raymond Leslie. â€Å"The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. † PMLA 104. 2 (1989): 135.