Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the translations
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Characterization in the early fiction of Gabriel García Márquez
- 2 Beware of gift-bearing tales: reading ‘Baltazar's Prodigious Afternoon’ according to Marcel Mauss
- 3 The body as political instrument: communication in No One Writes to the Colonel
- 4 Magical realism and the theme of incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 5 Translation and genealogy: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 6 The humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 7 On ‘magical’ and social realism in García Márquez
- 8 Aspects of narrative structure in The Incredible and Sad Story of the Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
- 9 Language and power in The Autumn of the Patriarch
- 10 Writing and ritual in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- 11 Free-play of fore-play: the fiction of non-consummation: speculations on Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- 12 A prospective post-script : apropos of Love in the Times of Cholera
- The solitude of Latin America: Nobel address 1982
- Select bibliography
- Index
7 - On ‘magical’ and social realism in García Márquez
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the translations
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Characterization in the early fiction of Gabriel García Márquez
- 2 Beware of gift-bearing tales: reading ‘Baltazar's Prodigious Afternoon’ according to Marcel Mauss
- 3 The body as political instrument: communication in No One Writes to the Colonel
- 4 Magical realism and the theme of incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 5 Translation and genealogy: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 6 The humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 7 On ‘magical’ and social realism in García Márquez
- 8 Aspects of narrative structure in The Incredible and Sad Story of the Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
- 9 Language and power in The Autumn of the Patriarch
- 10 Writing and ritual in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- 11 Free-play of fore-play: the fiction of non-consummation: speculations on Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- 12 A prospective post-script : apropos of Love in the Times of Cholera
- The solitude of Latin America: Nobel address 1982
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Although you have every right not to believe me after putting up for so long with my sly tricks and falsifications, I swear to you by the bones of my mother that what I am now about to show you is no illusion but the plain and simple truth …'
(García Márquez, ‘Blacamán the Good, miracle-salesman’)What interested me in my novel was above all to tell the story of a family obsessed by incest, and which, in spite of every precaution taken for several generations, ends up having a child with a strange pig's tail.
(García Márquez on One Hundred Tears of Solitude, 1968)The true history of Latin America is as yet an almost totally blank book, save for a few phrases recorded in such equivocal terms that no one troubles to try and understand them … Through misinterpreting their past, Latin Americans construct false projects for the future, and every step they take in the present in accordance with those projects, vitiated by that initial falseness, only serves to sink them deeper in their sickness, as in a circle from which there is no way out.
(H. A. Murena, The Original Sin of America)They wanted nothing to do with that series of conflicts, revolts, alternations between dictatorship and anarchy. In past history they found nothing constructive, nothing they aspired to be. […]
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- Information
- Gabriel García MárquezNew Readings, pp. 95 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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