Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born today, March 6th, in 1928. His grandmother’s storytelling was one of the inspirations for his own distinctive writing style, “magical realism.” When he was a child she told him tales of magic and fantasy as if they were reality. I like this passage for the way it speaks of what happens in the mind alongside the physicality of history and woodworking.

Interviewer: What is the origin of the insomnia plague in One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Garcia Marquez: Beginning with Oedipus, I’ve always been interested in plagues. I have studied a lot about medieval plagues. One of my favorite books is A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, among other reasons because Defoe is a journalist who sounds like what he is saying pure fantasy. For many years I thought Defoe had written about the London plague as he observed it. But then I discovered it was a novel, because Defoe was less than seven years old when the plague occurred in London. Plagues have always been one of my recurrent themes – and in different forms. In The Evil Hour, the pamphlets are plagues. For many years I thought that the political violence in Columbia had the same metaphysics as the plague. Before One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had used a plague to kill all the birds in a story called One Day After Saturday. In One Hundred Years of Solitude I used the insomnia plague as something of a literary trick, since it’s the opposite of the sleeping plague. Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

Interviewer: Can you explain that analogy a little more?

Garcia Marquez: Both are very hard work. Writing is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard word are involved. And as Proust, I think, said, it takes ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. I never have done any carpentry, but it’s the job I admire most, especially because you can never find anyone to do it for you.

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (born March 6, 1928)
from The Paris Review Interviews, II
image – mediterraneaaan

Tags: Creativity, Writing
Posted in Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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