One Hundred Years of Solitude: Resistance, Rebellion and Reading

Abstract

One might be tempted to think of a similarity between Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Walter Benjamin’s essay on Leskov and storytelling¹ perhaps provides the link, in that both Rushdie and Marquez seem especially skilled storytellers and it also seems to be the case that much of modern literature has given evidence of a denial of storytelling — exemplified by E. M. Forster’s grudging admission that ‘Oh my dear yes, the novel must tell a story’, when clearly he wished that it could do without that. Rushdie and Marquez seem significant in their resurrection of storytelling. They both have one virtue of storytellers that Benjamin points to, in that they bring news of exotic lands (I am aware of the bias, or point of view, in that statement). They both, also, are more or less explicitly critical of social structures that are alienating, and, as Benjamin points out, storytelling requires an audience of at least one: it is not an activity that can be carried out in solitude, hence it formally embodies the values of human community and communication. These were the values I hoped I was finding in Rushdie and Márquez. This neat little formulation must be allowed to remain in its undeveloped form, however, since it is more rewarding in the long run to trust one’s actual reading experience than to trust one’s hopes. My reading of Rushdie more and more insists that one ought to resist his cleverness and require less malicious, if entertaining, gossip in him, and more of a rigorous chastening of his fantasy by reality.