Published in Cogitations, Summer 1984.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the exiled Colombian novelist, won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and delivered the customary acceptance speech in December of that year. In it, he quoted “my master, William Faulkner,” who told the Stockholm audience in his 1950 Nobel address, “I decline to accept the end of man.” “I would feel unworthy of standing in his place that was his,”Garcia Marquez said, “if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize 32 years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility” the power “to annihilate, a hundred times over… the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.” In the face of mass death Garcia Marquez nonetheless “feel[s] entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of…a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.” In this, he probably intends to echo Faulkner’s celebrated avowal, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”
The echo is a faint one, a distortion of the original voice. In 1950, William Faulkner already understood what Garcia Marquez understands about nuclear weapons. He said, “Our tragedy today is a general and physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” But Faulkner did not feel entitled to oppose the nightmare of nuclear war with the dream of utopia. He did not reply to a mass dilemma with a mass-answer.
Instead, he addressed an individual “the young man or woman writing today.” He urged this writer to remember one thing and forget another. Do not forget, he said, “the human heart in conflict with itself”; it “alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” But do forget something else: the writer “Must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Man will not only endure but prevail “because he has a soul,” a soul capable of apprehending these universal truths. He has that soul now. Human beings do not have to wait for some future utopia for love to “prove true” and “happiness to [be] possible.”
But Garcia Marquez did not want his audience to think that. For an ideological passion rules him, not so much old verities and truths of the heart. It emerges slowly and incompletely from his baroque chambers of oratory. But it does emerge.
Garcia Marquez titled his speech “The Solitude of Latin America.” This solitude arose, he said, because, to the European mind, and perhaps to anyone’s, the reality of Latin America “resembles a venture into fantasy,” even “madness.” In years past, for example, a Mexican dictator “held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War.” Today, the region has seen thousands of deaths and over a million exiles caused by Rightist governments. “[W]e have had to ask little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”
Garcia Marquez lists the criminal governments: Paraguay, Argentina, Somozist Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay. Not Cuba, however, which has produced more than its share of the dead and the exiled in the last 25 years. Not Sandinist Nicaragua. Not leftist terrorism. Garcia Marquez–shall we say?–forgot them.
But not entirely. To end Latin American solitude, Europeans should “see us in [their] own past,” which is no less bloody and bizarre. “Why not think,” Garcia Marquez asked, “that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions?” He was not so crude as to describe those methods, asking only that Europeans not forget “the fruitful excesses of their youth.”
Surely they should not. Nor should we forget that we shall know a tree by its fruits. Garcia Marquez evidently prefers that we not look too hard at the fruits of the Latin American Left’s fruitful excesses. Judge our Rightist past and present according to its mad reality, he advises; understand our Leftist present and future according to its utopian promises.
In speaking propaganda to the mass of Europeans, Garcia Marquez ‘forgot’ what Faulkner wanted individuals to remember: the human soul, here and now, permanently. The soul would be inconvenient for Garcia Marquez to remember. It would dim his pretentious vision of utopias built by “by different methods for different conditions.” It would muffle his appeal to the fear of violent death, which he hopes will make his audience go along with the scam. Garcia Marquez will deceive only those who cannot forget the baseness of fear because they never learned that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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