Ulysses, James Joyce, and Márquez 2 - 2003-05-24

Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the creator of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" and many other works, says: "In journalism, including one false fact is enough to devalue the entire work, whereas in fiction, including one true fact legitimizes the entire piece." Márquez states that he first learns the technique of interior dialogue from James Joyce; he prefers its application by Virginia Woolf and ultimately discovers that the innovator of this technique is the anonymous author of the book "Lazarillo de Tormes." It should be noted that the mentioned book, Lazarillo de Tormes, is five hundred years old and is one of the most important texts in the Spanish language, a book that also influenced Cervantes' Don Quixote. Most importantly, the book contains a story that I have seen in the works of Obaid Zakani, even though Obaid lived two hundred years before the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes. The protagonist, Lazarillo, is a poor, orphaned, and always hungry boy who serves as the guide and staff-bearer for a blind, illegitimate, and deceitful beggar. The important subject for Márquez, in order to move away from the intellectual stories of his early work, was finding the connection between literature and life, and Latin American literature greatly assisted him in this regard. He advises young writers (a recommendation that almost everyone makes) to write about something that has happened to them: "Anyone can write anything as long as it is believable... In the creation of my books, an image has always been involved. Construction is purely a matter of technique, and if the writer does not learn it at the beginning, they will never learn it... One of the most difficult tasks is writing the first paragraph of a story." Like many professional writers who fill a certain quota of pages each day, Márquez often does not write a final paragraph and saves it for the next day's quota because he wants to have a paragraph ready to start with when he sits down again, avoiding starting from scratch.