Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Page A

novel doesn’t condemn or expose anything,” they said. I find this notion very simplistic and mistaken now, but atthe time, I felt I should involve myself with the country’s immediate political and social reality more, and I moved a long way away from my initial literary ideas. Luckily I was able to get back to them. In the meantime, I ran the serious risk of getting my head kicked in.
    Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour
, and
Big Mama’s Funeral
all reflect the reality of life in Colombia, and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don’t regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality. However good or bad they may be, they are books which finish on the last page. I find them too limiting now. I believe I’m capable of writing something better.
    MENDOZA : What made you change course?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Thinking about my own work. I thought about it a long time and finally came to the conclusion that it was not to the social and political reality of my country that I was committed but to the total reality of this world and the next without wishing to show favor or belittle any particular aspect.
    MENDOZA : This means that, through your own experience, you have rebuffed the famous “committed literature,” which has caused so many rifts in Latin America.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : As you know very well, when it comes to my own personal political choices, I do have a commitment, a political commitment.
    MENDOZA : To socialism …
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I want the world to be socialist, and I believe that sooner or later it will be. However, I have a great many reservations about what came in Latin America to be called “committed literature,” or more precisely the novel of social protest (the high point of this literature). This is mainly because I think its limited view of the world and life does not help achieve anything in political terms. Far from accelerating any process of raising consciousness, it actually slows it down. Latin Americans expect more from a novel than an exposé of the oppression and injustice they know all too well. Many of my militant friends who so often feel the need to dictate to writers what they should or should not write are, unconsciously perhaps, taking a reactionary stance inasmuch as they are imposing restrictions on creative freedom. I believe a novel about love is as valid as any other. When it comes down to it, the writer’s duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write well.
    MENDOZA : Having freed yourself from this commitment to an immediate political reality, how did you come to find this other—let’s call it mythical—approach to reality which produced
One Hundred Years of Solitude
?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : As I’ve already said, my grandmother’s stories probably gave me the first clues. The myths, legends, and beliefs of the people in her town were, in a very natural way, all part of her everyday life. With her in mind, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t inventing anything at all butsimply capturing and recounting a world of omens, premonitions, cures, and superstitions that is authentically ours, truly Latin American. Remember those men in Colombia who get worms out of cows’ ears by saying prayers, for example. Our day-to-day life in Latin America is full of this kind of thing.
    I was able to write
One Hundred Years of Solitude
simply by looking at reality, our reality, without the limitations which rationalists and Stalinists through the ages have tried to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand.
    MENDOZA : And the larger-than-life element, the exaggerated proportions in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
The Autumn of the Patriarch
and your latest stories—is that real as well or is it literary license?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : No, disproportion