His epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude established Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the best-known living Latin American novelist outside that continent and with his other work won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. A friend of Fidel Castro, he has been a consistent supporter of revolution in Latin America, most recently of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In this extract from a new book of interviews* and discussions with his fellow-novelist and compatriot Colombian, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he talks of the meaning of his work and of his politics.
What did you mean to do when you sat down to write One Hundred Years of Solitude?
I wanted to find a way of expressing in literature all the experiences which had influenced me in some way as a child.
Many critics see a parable or an allegory of the history of the human race in the book.
No, all I wanted to do was to leave a literary world of my childhood which [illegible] a house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesied the future, and [illegible] the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity.
Yet the critics always find much more complex intentions.
These must be quite unintentional if they exist at all. What happens is that, unlike novelists, critics find what they want to in books, not what is there.
[illegible] why do you [illegible] them so much?
Because most critics don't realise that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so with some pre-ordained right to pontificate, they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves. I remember, for instance, one critic who thought he'd discovered an important key to the novel when he noticed that one of the characters — Gabriel — takes the complete works of Rabelais to Paris. Having made this discovery he then attributed all the exaggerations and Pantegruelesque excesses to this literary influence. I actually threw in that illusion to Rabelais as a banana skin, and many critics have slipped up on it.
Leaving aside what the critics say, I do think the novel is much more that a simple poetic revival of your childhood memories. Didn't you once say that the story of the Buendia family could be an account of Latin American history?
Yes, it is. Latin American history is also made up of immense useless enterprises and great dramas that are condemned to oblivion in advance. We also suffer from the plague of memory-loss. With the passage of time, nobody remembers that the massacre of the banana company workers actually took place. All they remember is Colonel Aureliano Buendia.
And the thirty-three wars Colonel Aureliano lost could be an expression of 'our' political frustrations. What would have happened, by the way, if the Colonel had won?
He would have been very much like the Patriarch. When I was writing the novel, at one stage I was tempted to let the Colonel take power. If I had done, I would have written The Autumn of the Patriarch rather than One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Must we assume then, that through some [illegible] himself when he takes power?
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of Colonel Aureliano [Buendia]'s [illegible] says to him, 'What worries me is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so [much], you've ended up as bad as they are.' He concludes, 'At this rate you'll be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history.'
[illegible] your father is a Conservative. In Colombia we say being a Conservative or Liberal depends on what your father is, but your father obviously didn't influence your politics at all because you opted for the left very early on. Was this political stance a [illegible]?
Not against my family as such because you must remember that, although my father is a Conservative, my grandfather the colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government. My grandfather also told me about the massacre of the banana workers which took place in Aracataca the year I was born. So you see my family influenced me towards rebellion rather than towards upholding the established order.
Do you remember where and when you read your first political texts?
In my secondary school in Zipaquira. It was full of teachers who'd been taught by a Marxist in the teachers training college under President Alfonso Lopez' leftist government in the thirties. The algebra teacher would give us classes on historical materialism during break, the chemistry teacher would lend us books by Lenin and the history teacher would tell us about the class struggle. When I left that icy prison I'd no idea where north and south were but I did have two very strong convictions. One was that good novels must be a poetic transposition of reality, and the other was that mankind's immediate future lay in socialism.
Did you ever belong to the Communist Party?
I belonged to a cell for a short time when I was twenty but I don't remember doing anything of interest. I was more of a sympathiser than a militant. Since then my relationship with the Communists has had many ups and downs. We've often been at loggerheads because every time I adopt a stance they don't like, their newspapers really have a go at me. But I've never publicly condemned them, even at the worst moments.
You and I travelled around East Germany together in 1957 and, in spite of the fact that we'd pinned our hopes on socialism, we did not like what we saw. Did that trip alter your political conviction?
It did affect my political ideas quite decisively. If you think back, I put my impressions of that trip on record at the time in a series of articles for a Bogota magazine. The articles were pirated and published some twenty years later — not, I imagine, out of any journalistic or political interest, but to show up the supposed contradictions in my personal political development.
Were there any contradictions?
No, there were not. I made the book legal and included it in the volumes of my complete works which are sold in popular editions on every street corner in Colombia. I haven't changed a single word. What's more, I think [illegible] explanation of the origins of the current [illegible] paid for by the United States. The amusing thing is that those dogmatists today, twenty-four years later, are ensconced in the comfortable armchairs of the bourgeois political and financial establishment while history is proving me right.
And what do you think of the so-called Peoples' Democracies?
The central premise of those articles is that the Peoples' Democracies were not authentically socialist nor would they ever be if they followed the path they were on, because the system did not recognise the specific conditions prevailing in each country. It was a system imposed from the outside by the Soviet Union through dogmatic unimaginative local Communist Parties whose sole thought was to enforce the Soviet model in a society where it did not fit.
Lets move on to another of our shared experiences — our days in Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency. You and I both resigned when the old Cuban Communist Party began taking over many of the institutions of the Revolution. Do you think we made the right decision? Or do you think it was just a hiccup in a long process which we failed to see as such?
I think our decision to leave Prensa Latina was correct. If we'd stayed on, with our views, we'd have ended up being slung out with one of those labels on our foreheads — counter-revolutionary, imperialist lackey and so on — that the dogmatists of the day used to stick on you. What I did, if you remember, was to remove myself to the sidelines. I watched the evolution of the Cuban process closely and carefully while I wrote my books and filmscripts in Mexico. My view is that although the Revolution took a difficult and sometimes contradictory course after the initial stormy upheavals, it still offers the prospect of a social order which is more democratic, more just and more suited to our needs.
Are you sure? Don't the same causes produce the same effects? If Cuba adopts the Soviet system as a model (one-party state, democratic centralism, government controlled unions, security organisations exercising a tight control over the population), won't this 'just, democratic order' be as difficult to achieve there as it is in the Soviet Union? Aren't you afraid of this?
The problem with this analysis is it's point of departure. You start from the premise that Cuba is a Soviet satellite and I do not believe it is. I think that the Cuban Revolution has been in a state of emergency for twenty years thanks to the hostility and incomprehension of the United States, who will not tolerate an alternative system of government ninety miles off the Florida coast, This is not the fault of the Soviet Union, without whose assistance (whatever its motives and aims may be) the Cuban revolution would not exist today. While hostility persists, the situation in Cuba can only be judged in terms of a state of emergency which forces them to act defensively and outside their natural historical, geographical and cultural sphere of interest. When the situation returns to normal we can discuss it again.
Fidel Castro supported Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (with certain reservations it is true). What position did you take?
I made a public protest at the time and would do the same again should the same situation arise. The only difference between my position and Fidel Castro's (we don't see eye to eye on everything) is that he ended up justifying Soviet intervention and I never would. However, the analysis he made in his speech on the internal situation of the Peoples' Democracies was much more critical and forceful than the one I made in the articles we were talking about a moment ago. In any case, the future of Latin America is not and never will be played out in Hungary, Poland or Czechoslovakia, but in Latin America itself. To think anything else is a European obsession; and some of your political questions smack of this obsession too.
Fidel Castro is a friend of yours. How do you explain your friendship with him? What influences it most — your political affinities or the fact that he, like you, is from the Caribbean?
Look, my very close and affectionate friendship with Fidel Castro began through literature. I'd known him casually when you and I were working for Prensa Latina in 1960 but I'd never felt we had much in common, Later on when I'd become a famous writer and he was the best-known politician in the world, we met several times but still, in spite of mutual respect and goodwill, I never felt there could be more to the relationship than political affinity, However, in the very early hours of one morning about six years ago, he said that he was having to leave because he had a lot of reading waiting for him at home, He remarked that, although he was obliged to do it, he found this task boring and tiring. I suggested that he relieve the tedium of required reading with something lighter but which, at the same time, was good literature. I gave him a few examples and was surprised to find that he'd read them all and, what's more, had a good appreciation of them. That night I discovered what few people realise — that Fidel Castro is a voracious reader, that he loves good literature from all periods and that he is a serious conoisseur of it, Even under the most difficult circumstances, he has a good book with him for filling in the odd spare moment, When we said good night, I left him a book to read. When I saw him again at twelve the next day, he'd already read it. He is such a careful, assiduous reader that he finds contradictions and factual errors in places where you'd least expect them. After he'd read The Tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor, he came to my hotel just to tell me that I'd calculated the speed of the boat incorrectly and that the time of arrival could not be what I said. He was right. So before publishing Chronicle of a Death Foretold I took him the manuscript and he pointed out a mistake in the specifications of the hunting rifle. You get the feeling that he really likes the world of literature, that he feels at ease in it, and that he [illegible] taking pains with the literary style of his increasingly numerous written speeches. On one occasion he told me, with a hint of melancholy, 'When I'm next re-incarnated, I want to be a writer.'
*The Fragrance of Guava, Verso/NLB, April 1983.