Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Me

            Whether Gabriel Garcia Marquez realizes it or not – of course he does, though – hopefully – his themes transcend further than just their surface level. Undeniably, he talks of people and their ineptness, but he also writes of how it damages us, and most importantly, others. For me, though, his mystical and dreamy writing makes it difficult to understand his voice – it’s weak. He may not be a better writer than Cortazar, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad writer, either. I feel that if he did have one booming voice in his stories, his theme would be comparison: human’s clumsily ability to either pick the defined black or white side, while sometimes not being able to see both at the same time. The last proposition that I also agree with, is that everything exists inside the gray, and that we’re still searching for it, even though it was the first thing presented to us.

            With this, I believe humans live by definition and design. It helps us relate to people, objects, and even feelings. I know it seems impossible to imagine this concept, to basically live without language, but I’m not proposing this. I’m simply saying that whatever we are chasing our entire lives for, we’ve already reached it - life. Sadly, though, some of us are not aware of this. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that our desire to reach and understand exactitude masks our vision. I don’t enjoy his writing, but I couldn’t happen to agree more on this issue!

            We happen to see this type of bewilderment everyday, too! We see it on the news, in the theatres, on the streets, inside our house, and even my words are a result of it – I should stop here and end my paper, but let’s just keep to the issues at here. In Marquez’s stories, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” I see a group of people wishing, and ironically, imagining their world of definitions and design. Both stories uncomfortably wrestle the subject of how people imagine this assumed “perfection.”

            With my generation, it also thrives on this kaleidoscope of black and white, and what is perfect. We can easily label someone by their clothing, the food they eat, and the sentences they construct. For every group of people, there is a label attached to them, and with this systematic grouping, there are limits to these definitions - I could label someone, but that doesn’t mean I understand them. With this process of categorizing, it is putting ideas, people, and things inside a confined box, and whenever it extends outside these boundaries, we deny whatever we see because it doesn’t fit our normal definition.

            Just like Marquez, I don’t agree with this process. I don’t want to be limited by someone’s misinformed opinion of me, and I don’t want to deny the improbable. I rather accept it how it is and go along my way rather than weigh stones for the rest of my life. This is certainly the problem with my generation, and it’s also a problem among much more people – comparison, the illusion of perfection, and the inability to compare the black and sides without seeing the gray.

            Overall, there isn’t much to write about these Marquez’s stories. I didn’t feel anything except for the banal agreement over the themes that I had to pull-out. I felt that his stories where too whimsy and were lacking a forceful deepened theme. He was too simple and too nice with his approach, but due to our agreement, I shouldn’t be labeling him. The only thing I can offer is my own confusion.