Some of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Best Characters Were Dead People

Shortly after the Second World War came to an end, a young man from the village of Aracataca got on stage in Zipaquirá and delivered an improvised speech. His name was Gabriel García Márquez, and one of his phrases stuck in the minds of the people listening—the first bit of fame he would receive for his words.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he said, invoking the American president who had died that same year, “who, like El Cid, knows how to win battles after death.” The people loved the way García Márquez had put it, and the simple yet memorable phrase began to appear on street posters and even on portraits of Roosevelt in the windows of stores. “And so my first public success was not as a poet or novelist,” García Márquez wrote wryly in his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, many decades later, “but as an orator, and what is even worse, as a political orator.” In a way, it was fitting that García Márquez, who died this day in 2014, braided together death and life in the first set of words to bring him some fame. The great Colombian writer had a particular obsession with death, and death animates his work in a striking way both indebted to literary Modernism and distinct from it all the same. His work was an affirmation of life, filled everywhere with death, a vast cemetery blooming with roses.

That puts it lightly. Death, really, is inextricable from García Márquez’s work. It breathed life into his art. It is in the towns rotting away, the ghosts, the funereal haze of diseases over his characters, the decay in the river from Barranquilla that partly inspired Love in the Time of Cholera. And, like that novel’s title, García Márquez often paired death with exquisite, sad images of love.  He invoked such imagery in his autobiography when he was speaking to a psychiatrist friend about the difficulty of quitting cigarettes; he asked his friend why tobacco is so hard to give up, and his friend provided the answer that would allow García Márquez to quit: “for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love.” It appears in “Death Constant Beyond Love,” an autumnal short story that begins with a foreshadowed death and ends with lost love.

Braiding together death and life was a notable trait of a novel García Márquez claimed he could “recite… whole… forwards and backwards,” Juan Rulfo’s seminal Pedro Páramo, which is set in a kind of literal ghost town, populated for most of its pages by the living dead. Yet García Márquez’s fixation on how living and dying are intertwined—harkening to the European and American Gothic—went beyond Rulfo. This was partly because of another of García Márquez’s obsessions, something he struggled with as a young writer: how he depicted time. For the Colombian author, death and time were intimately linked; to die, after all, is to have one’s time stop. Death happens in time, but is also timeless and timelessness, something exemplified by García Márquez’s frequent equation of a lack of motion—being frozen in time—with being dead. This perhaps appears most clearly in an early short story, “The Sea of Lost Time,” wherein two men dive to the bottom of a sea that a village throws corpses into—“the sea of the dead”—and find it contains frozen fragments of the past, as well as countless corpses and roses: a beautiful bizarre space, lost to most clocks, where death blooms.

García Márquez was obsessed with Modernist experimentation with time and structure, like Béla Bartók’s dark dissonant music and the sprawling novels of Joyce and Faulkner—but it was Virginia Woolf, most of all, who set him on his aesthetic course. “The great Virginia” and “tough old broad,” he admiringly called the Bloomsbury writer. How García Márquez would treat time and death owes a particular debt to a passage from Mrs. Dalloway, which he read at 20 and was able to recite at will in Spanish decades later. The passage, he said, “completely transformed” how he viewed time. Notably, Woolf’s excerpt shows life slipping, seamlessly, into death:

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.

Here, London, full of life in the present, alters in a sentence into annihilation, where city and inhabitants alike are rotted away; Woolf is able to move through centuries in a few clauses. When time becomes so elastic, it is easier to braid death to life, as it is only in a simple linear conception of time as an inexorable arrow that death must come at the end. For Woolf and García Márquez alike, time was as malleable as perspective in Cubism. The passage he quoted may seem unexceptional to dedicated readers of Woolf, but for the young Colombian it was the germ of dreaming up One Hundred Years of Solitude. (So enamored was García Márquez with Mrs. Dalloway that he wrote columns for the paper El Heraldo in the early 1950s under the pseudonym Septimus, meant to evoke the novel’s shell-shocked soldier.)

The line between living and dead in García Márquez’s fiction is blurry. His most extraordinary characters are often nearly as moribund or dead as they are alive. His fiction is filled with fantastical corpses imbued with life, or living figures who should be cadavers. Indeed, in “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” the gargantuan corpse of a drowned man, which washes ashore near a village and gains the name “Esteban,” is easily the liveliest character in the story—and, despite being dead, Esteban outshines all the men in the village for his handsomeness, as his body has been preserved like a saint’s. Like a less monstrous version of Madeline Usher in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” Esteban ironically seems to die twice, as the story ends with his corpse being given a second funeral, with the villagers hoping he will “return” to the village once more. Simón Bolívar, the protagonist of The General in His Labyrinth, begins the novel floating in his tub so still that his attendant thinks he has drowned, even as his bath is “medicinal,” life-prolonging.

In the prologue to his extraordinary operatic novella, Of Love and Other Demons, García Márquez again invests a corpse with life à la Esteban, when he reveals the book’s genesis: he had gone on journalistic assignment in 1949 to investigate crypts being emptied, and in one he uncovered the body of a woman whose hair had continued to grow after death to Rapunzel lengths. “The impassive foreman explained that human hair grew a centimeter a month after death,” García Márquez writes, “and 22 meters seemed a good average for 200 years.” The woman, whose name was Sierva María de Todos Los Ángeles, morphed in his mind into the girl who would become the novella’s protagonist; the real-life cadaver is a wondrous gothic avatar, dead for centuries and yet filled with the magical vitality such hair growth suggests. “[W]hen I saw that the mother was dead, she became alive and real,” he said of Fermina’s mother in Love in the Time of Cholera, explaining how the character became realest when he realized her death was why he couldn’t visualize her while writing.

The more you read García Márquez’s fantastical work, the more common this macabre-yet-lovely imagery becomes. In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the eponymous old man is alive yet so ill that a doctor who listens to his heart is astonished. “The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to the angel’s heart,” García Márquez tells us, “and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive.” (The scene echoes García Márquez’s own later description in his autobiography of visiting a physician, who told him “in horror” that his interminable smoking would leave him unable to breathe in two or three years.) “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship”—the entire story of which is written in one feverish Faulknerian sentence—features the phantom of a sunken ocean liner (named Halálcsillag, Hungarian for “death star”) that occasionally appears on the water, frozen in the moment it sunk, and at the end the protagonist, holding a lantern like a lighthouse beam, guides it to shore to prove to everyone the spectral ship exists; it crashes into a seaside village, for the vessel has become physical, a ghost no longer, even as “the ancient and languid waters of the sea of death” drip down its sides.

In “Light Is Like Water,” a boyish tale from Strange Pilgrims, life and death are linked again. The story follows two brothers who learn that when they break lightbulbs, illumination jets out like a living liquid, allowing them to swim in light and even steer a rowboat through their apartment while their parents, clueless, are out watching movies. Light and life are often paired, but too much of almost anything leads to death, and at the story’s end, the children have broken so many bulbs that the light “spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the façade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to Guadarrama.” The result of this fatal deluge of illumination is worth quoting in full:

In response to the emergency, firemen forced the door on the fifth floor and found the apartment brimming with light all the way to the ceiling. The sofa and easy chairs covered in leopard skin were floating at different levels in the living room, among the bottles from the bar and the grand piano with its Manila shawl that fluttered half submerged like a golden manta ray. Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, flew with their own wings through the kitchen sky. The marching band instruments that the children used for dancing drifted among the bright-colored fish freed from their mother’s aquarium, which were the only creatures alive and happy in the vast illuminated marsh. Everyone’s toothbrush floated in the bathroom, along with Papa’s condoms and Mama’s jars of creams and her spare bridge, and the television set from the master bedroom floated on its side, still tuned to the final episode of the midnight movie for adults only.

At the end of the hall, moving with the current and clutching the oars, with his mask on and only enough air to reach port, Toto sat in the stern of the boat searching for the lighthouse, and Joel, floating in the prow, still looked for the north star with the sextant, and floating through the entire house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalized in the moment of peeing into the pot of geraniums, singing the school’s song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa’s bottle. For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded, and two entire classes at the elementary school of Saint Julian the Hospitaler drowned on the fifth floor of 47 Paseo de la Castellana.

Not only is the light filled with death, but everything is floating; just as the schoolchildren have perished, inanimate objects seemed to have gained life, floating through the light as if they are sea creatures. Life and its cessation, once again, exist together in a way at once playful and morbid, gorgeous and grisly, just as García Márquez writes in “The Sea of Lost Time” that a character who has drowned smells of roses.

There is a deeper truth to all this, of course. Murder permeated García Márquez’s world; he began his career as a writer during the bloody massacres of La Violencia, and, many years later, compared Colombia to a “Biblical holocaust.” In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche tells us that “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Because of its splendor, it’s easy to overlook how bloody, how mausoleum-scented, how abyssal García Márquez’s fiction is—but that, in of itself, is its darker beauty. His dark art, his night music. For García Márquez, death was ever-present, efflorescent, incandescent. In a broader sense, we are always in a process of dying, of transformation—as death is, above all, change, albeit a more final one. Perhaps accepting this is one thing we are meant to learn from looking into the abyss of his art.

*

Despite death’s overwhelming presence, García Márquez’s fiction is unquestionably an affirmation of life; death is simply so tied to being alive in his fiction that it is impossible to avoid walking in her blue-rose shadow. Indeed, his first big piece, a nonfiction account of a shipwrecked sailor, is a stirring narrative of survival, and, in Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, Eréndira’s grandmother is so filled with a mythic vitality that she survives multiple should-have-been-successful attempts at assassination. His setting themselves live: “the society of the Caribbean coast,” García Márquez said of Love in the Time of Cholera in a 1988 interview, is an “important character, one that has no name.”

This reifying not just of survival but of living to the fullest reaches a peak in his love stories—though it is hard to ignore in some of these a less salubrious leitmotif in his fiction, a cult-like Nabokovian adoration in some of his adult male characters for the bodies of very young girls, most overt in Of Love and Other Demons and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and which, as with Lolita, adds an uncomfortable, unsettling dimension to some of his art. If death is akin to stillness, the fact that Memories of My Melancholy Whores—echoing Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, which García Márquez alluded to in an earlier short story, “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane”—features an elderly protagonist who lovingly admires the drugged body of a 14-year-old virgin only makes the situation more disturbing. (Years ago, I taught Of Love and Other Demons to a freshman class; one student angrily declared she was disgusted that so young a girl was a much older clergyman’s love interest. Gabo’s fiction is beautiful and flowery in the best of ways—but, as with some pretty plants, thorny, as well.)

The message of cherishing life in his work perhaps reached its apex the year he won the Nobel Prize. Against “oppression, plundering and abandonment,” García Márquez said in his 1982 Nobel Lecture, “we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.” He then quoted Faulkner’s own Nobel banquet speech from 32 years earlier. “On a day like today,” the great novelist from Aracataca wrote, “my master William Faulkner said, ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’” He finished by invoking his dream for a “new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”

His work was an ornate cemetery of shipwreck victims and people who would never see the sea alike, strange yet familiar flowers blossoming over their graves. García Márquez’s art may be full of death—but only because it blooms so richly with life.