Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
With this year's Nobel Prize in Literature
to Gabriel García Márquez the Swedish Academy
cannot be said to bring forward an unknown writer.
García Márquez achieved
unusual success as a writer with his novel Cien años
de soledad in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The
book has been translated into a large number of languages
and has sold millions of copies. It is still being reprinted
and read with undiminished interest by new readers. Such
a success with a single work could be fatal for a writer
with less resources than those possessed by García
Márquez. He has, however, gradually confirmed his
position as a rare storyteller richly endowed with a material,
from imagination and experience, which seems inexhaustible.
In breadth and epic richness, for instance, the novel El
otoño del patriarca, 1975, (The Autumn of the Patriarch)
compares favourably with the first-mentioned work. Short
novels such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961
(No One Writes to the Colonel), La mala hora, 1962 (An Evil
Hour), or last year's Crónica de una muerte anunciada
(Chronicle of a Death Foretold), complement the picture
of a writer who combines the copious, almost overwhelming
narrative talent with the mastery of the conscious, disciplined
and widely read artist of language. A large number of short
stories, published in several collections or in magazines,
give further proof of the great versatility of García
Márquez' narrative gift. His international successes
have continued. Each new work of his is received by expectant
critics and readers as an event of world importance, is
translated into many languages and published as quickly
as possible in large editions.
Nor can it be said that any literary
unknown continent or province is brought to light with the
prize to Gabriel García Márquez. For a long
time Latin American literature has shown a vigour as in
few other literary spheres. It has won acclaim in the cultural
life of today. Many impulses and traditions cross each other.
Folk culture, including oral storytelling, reminiscences
from old Indian culture, currents from Spanish baroque in
different epochs, influences from European surrealism and
other modernism are blended into a spiced and life-giving
brew. From it García Márquez and other Spanish-American
writers derive material and inspiration. The violent conflicts
of political nature - social and economic - raise the temperature
of the intellectual climate. Like most of the other important
writers in the Latin American world, García Márquez
is strongly committed politically on the side of the poor
and the weak against oppression and economic exploitation.
Apart from his fictional production he has been very active
as a journalist, his writings being many-sided, inventive,
often provocative and by no means limited to political subjects.
The great novels remind one of William
Faulkner. García Márquez has created a world
of his own round the imaginary town of Macondo. In his novels
and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where
the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight
of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales
and facts, literary allusions and tangible - at times obtrusively
graphic - descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness
of reportage. As with Faulkner, the same chief characters
and minor persons crop up in different stories. They are
brought forward into the light in various ways - sometimes
in dramatically revealing situations, sometimes in comic
and grotesque complications of a kind that only the wildest
imagination or shameless reality itself can achieve. Manias
and passions harass them. Absurdities of war let courage
change shape with craziness, infamy with chivalry, cunning
with madness.
Death is perhaps the most important
director behind the scenes in García Márquez'
invented and discovered world. Often his stories revolve
around a dead person - someone who has died, is dying or
will die. A tragic sense of life characterizes García
Márquez' books - a sense of the incorruptible superiority
of fate and the inhuman, inexorable ravages of history.
But this awareness of death and tragic sense of life is
broken by the narrative's unlimited, ingenious vitality,
which in its turn is a representative of the at once frightening
and edifying vital force of reality and life itself. The
comedy and grotesqueness in García Márquez
can be cruel, but can also glide over into a conciliating
humour.
With his stories García Márquez
has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos. In
its tumultuous, bewildering yet graphically convincing authenticity
it reflects a continent and its human riches and poverty.
Perhaps more than that: a cosmos in
which the human heart and the combined forces of history
time and again burst the bounds of chaos-killing and procreation.
Monsieur García Márquez,
Ne disposant que de quelques minutes,
je n'ai pu donner de votre œuvre littéraire
qu'une image d'aspect general et assez abstraite. Certes,
vos romans et vos nouvelles sont d'ordre general, ce qui
revient à dire qu'elles ont une portée et
une signification humaines de cet ordre. Mais elles ne sont
pas abstraites. Au contraire, vos~uvres se caractérisent
par un rendu du vivant peu commun et une concretion realiste
auxquels aucun condense abstrait ne saurait rendre justice.
Le mieux que je puisse faire, c'est d'exhorter ceux qui
ne les ont pas lues à les lire. C'est bien ce que
j'ai fait.
Sur ces paroles, je vous presente les
felicitations les plus cordiales de l'Académie Suédoise
et je vous invite à recevoir le prix Nobel de littérature
des mains de Sa Majesté le Roi.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990.
