“Vocation is something that decides the destiny of people. It does not always coincide with what one would like, but with what one must do. If one has a true vocation, it is something inevitable. It is a passion that takes possession of us, and the only way to be happy is to respond to that call, because it is something that surpasses us and transforms us.”
Mario Vargas Llosa
On August 27, I finished teaching the course in person “The Literary Universe of García Márquez“. It is worth noting that this experience It was completely different from the time I gave it online at the San Lázaro Cultural Space of the Chamber of DeputiesThis time the virtual room was replaced by the restaurant LAK Rincón Deli www.lakrincondeli.com who generously opened its doors to us.
The reasons for this may seem obvious, but I will point them out nonetheless. And since we are talking about literature, I will present them in the form of a literary analysis:
The atmosphere. When it is possible to look at and feel the other, the temperature of the bodies together allows for exchange, a fundamental condition for the teaching-learning process. That is, we learned as I wrote Garcia Marquezwith all the senses.
The charactersIn real reality, as the author of our epigraph would say, in a classroom with real students, the protagonist is not the teacher, but the group of voices gathered together because one knows about music, another about history or ecology, and all about life.
The plot. In eight sessions we reviewed the life and work of Gabo, as we ended up calling him, because we got to know him a little better: we tried to see him first as a man and then as a writer. Thus, we identified the differences between two fundamental literary styles to understand his narrative: marvelous realism and magical realism. We imagined his creative process, we saw him interacting with Carmen Balcells, his literary agent, and we enjoyed the success that consecrated him as the greatest representative of the Latin American Boom.
Before analyzing his first three publications, a short story written in 1968 and his recently published posthumous novel —“The Leaf Storm,” “The colonel has no one to write to him,” “Chronicle of a death foretold”, “The most beautiful drowned man in the world” and “See you in August”—, we review some of the tools that authors use to build the scaffolding of a well-written novel. I am referring to rhetorical figures, narrative voices, etc. We also identify which narrative strategies, inaugurated by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Alejo Carpentier, García Márquez emulated, taking them to their most beautiful and perfect expression.
Now, I invite you to close your eyes and enter our classroom, after all, experts say that the brain does not distinguish, just like literature, between truth and lies. Here are some of our findings, we found them like someone who strips an onion and palms the texture of the first layers until reaching its firm and white heart: Gabriel García Márquez, like some of his contemporaries, created a credible world where fantasy, myths and magic are normal. Just as it happens in the multiple cosmogonies of impoverished Latin America where miracles, reincarnation, prodigies and pacts with the dead are part of daily life. To describe this reality, where time is cyclical, Gabo resorted to long paragraphs full of adjectives just like William Faulkner. But not all his narrative was like that. Faithful to his profession as a journalist, he also told us stories that mix journalistic chronicles and detective novels, as is the case of “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” a novel based on a true story and far removed from magical realism.
But the most important thing for me is that on this wonderful journey I confirmed that my vocation is to read, write and teach.
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