READINGS of RELATO DE UN NAUFRAGO by DANIEL ROBERT LACKEY, B.A

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ AND THE LITERATURE OF FACT: READINGS OF RELATO DE UN NAUFRAGO by DANIEL ROBERT LACKEY, B.A. A THESIS IN SPANISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved Accepted August, 1992 Copyright 1992 Dan Lackey ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes first to gratefully acknowledge the help of his Master's Thesis Comnúttee in the Department of Classical and Modem Languages and Literatures at Texas Tech University. Professor Harley D. Oberhelman, conunittee chairperson, provided relevant materials throughout the research. He also gave the author the freedom to read, by offering an individual study course on the major fiction of García Márquez. In conversations dealing with the literature of fact, Professor Norwood Andrews, Jr., played Devil's Advocate, causing certain passages to be written defensively and therefore, perhaps, more clearly. Professor David H. J. Larmour introduced much of the literary theory crucial to this thesis, and his sympathetic use of the concept of the sensational fact was nearly as helpful as his sharp criticism of the chapter on the collaborative narrative. He also provided technical and finandal assistance. Outside the committee but within the department, Professors Janet Pérez and Ted McVay made helpful comments on the thesis proposal, and provided, or suggested, books without which the research would have been greatly diminished. Professor Roberto Bravo read the chapter on the sensational fact in an earlier form and offered several helpful comments. Professor Harry Miller, of the University of South Carolina, provided invaluable feedback, espedally on material in Chapters V and VI. Mary Ann Lesh, a student colleague, proofread all the final manuscript, as well as a considerable number of earlier drafts, many of whose pages were wisely discarded at her behest. The staff of the Advanced Technology Leaming Center at Tech was most helpful. Finally, the author would like to express his deep gratitude to Jeff Gilbreath, now of Hoh Rinehart & Winston, for his excellent introductíon to the Spanish language. u / CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii CHAPTER L INTRODUCnON 1 n. ACTION NARRATIVES OF THE STRUGGLE FORSURVIVAL 6 m. THE FALL FROM A STATE OF GRACE IN NATURE 19 IV. THE COLLABORATIVE NARRATTVE 26 V. THE SENSATIONAL FACT AS LTTERARY CONTRABAND 52 VI. GABRIEL GARCL\ MARQUEZ, THE LITERATURE OF F ACT, AND RICHARD RORTY'S PRAGMATISM 81 Vn. CONCLUSION 133 ENDNOTES 139 BIBUOGRAPHY WORKS CITED 164 WORKS CONSULTED 171 ui CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This thesis draws together a general interest in the joumalism of Gabriel García Márquez and a critical interest in a genre called "the literature of fact." The critical interest will be grounded, mainly but not entirely, in a reading of one of Gartía Márquez's most exemplary journalistic texts, Relato de un náufrago, an excellent narrative, produced on short notice in newspaper offices, by a reporter on assignment,^ and a text in which one finds almost ideal ground for discussion of certain compelling artistic, ethical and practical issues arising from the literary "imagination of the real."2 The tale itself is simple: On February 28,1955, Luis Alejandro Velasco and seven other sailors on the Colombian naval destroyer ARC Caldas are swept overboard in the Caribbean Sea en route to Colombia from Mobile, Alabama. Only Velasco survives, managing to swim to a raft that contains no provisions. Without food or water, he spends ten days lost at sea. Turning between hope and despair, he has a series of small adventures. He is threatened by sharks. He catches a sea guU and tries to eat it. Having tied himself securely to the floor of the raft, he is nearly drowned when the raft flips upside down in the ocean, trapping him underneath. Exhausted, he begins to suffer what may be hallucinations. On the tenth day, he spots land—the Colombian coast—and swims two kilometers to shore, avoiding dangerous coastal shoals. He receives care in a primitive village, then returns to a hero's welcome in Bogotá. The endurance and valor of the sailor receive their just due in a journalistic tour de force. The annals of journalism are replete with accounts of reportorial grace under pressure: one thinks of Tom Wicker composing, on scraps of paper in a telephone booth, the first New York Times reports of the JKF assassination. In like vein, one may find in Relato deun náufrago evidence of what can be called narrative grace under reportorial pressure: García Márquez manages not only to fashion a fascinating story out of basic facts already known to most of his readers, but to transcend what amounts to an occupational hazard in joumalism, namely, an obsession with the one sensational fact it was his to report first. According to the author's prologue in the book version of the text,^ Gartía Márquez discovered, during his fourth day of interviews with Velasco, what he calls "una bomba relojería" (8). At the time of the Caldas tragedy, the destroyer was carrying domestic appliances, a violation of naval regulations for a warship. The contraband items had been privately purchased by the sailors for their personal use at home.^ According to the account offered in Relato de un náufrago, it was this contraband which forced the sailors off the deck during a period of high waves, and which prevented the destroyer from effecting maneuvers necessary to rescue the castaways. The offirial explanation had been that a storm caused the tragedy. During one of his interviews with Velasco, García Márquez—according to his own account in the prologue—became the first reporter to leam of the contraband, of its role in the tragedy, and, by extension, of the official culpability of naval authorities and the military government of Rojas Pinilla (9). Chapter 11 offers a formal reading of the text as an action narrative under the auspices of the theme "the will to live as a biological reflex." This formal reading stems from the assertion that it is a practical impossibility to ignore Relato de un náufrago as a species of historical document. To attain a dearer notion of its "fictionalization," however, it may be well to ask what of the text endures as a story, apart from the spedfic historical drcumstances outiined in the prologue. Leaving aside, for the moment, its significance as a Latín American documentary narrative,^ it might be useful to ask what interpretations can be offered if one at least feigns treating the text as if it were a work of imaginative invention. Since factual discourse hardly precludes conventíonal thematic and formal readings of the text, Chapter in offers an allegorical reading illuminated by a conventional mythic theme. Chapter IV examines Relato de un náufrago as a "journalistic reconstmction." The thesis advanced by this project is that we need a dearer idea of what we mean when we say that a given text, especially an ostensibly journalistic text, has been "fictionalized," and that we must often venture beyond the use of the term "fictionalization" as a mere synonym for "imaginatíve invention," asking ourselves what options other than fabrication are available to—and might have been utilized by—an author working within journalistíc conventions. Such a thesis requires a critic to find evidence of literary strategies that eschew the invention which is the prerogative of the fiction writer. Chapter IV, therefore, treats Relato de un náufrago as the product of a particular kind of working condition, the virtual intimacy of reporter and subject developed through the protracted interview. Chapter V examines the conflation of literary and political interests in Relato and offers a theory of sensationalism which explains the deployment in Relato (and by implication in other texts) of what is isolated as a sensational fact. This sensational fact functions as contraband in the literary sense of information that must be diffused by narrative interpretation. Chapter V belabors an argument of Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty and others to the effect that there is no such thing as "unmediated reality," that we live among a web of overlapping interpretatíons of the world, and that while the world may present us with forces that cause us to change our beliefs, it can never present us with sensory data that relieve us of the responsibility to interpret. Although Fish's work was not consulted untíl the thesis was nearly completed, his interpretivist, doggedly anti-positivist stance is everywhere implidt in Chapters V and VI. Chapter V characterizes sensationalism as a flight in panic from interpretation. Since the flight, according to our theory, is futile, Chapter V suggests a meta-message for sensatíonalism, which involves the recognitíon of the conventíonal and therefore possibly provisional and even "fictional" nature of the ideologies which form the skeletal structure of a culture. Chapters II through V can be described as an experiment in literary criticsm. Each chapter is an attempt to "thematirize" Relato deun náufrago, in the sense that it attempts to redescribe the text by raiding ". other disciplines for vocabulary, distinctions, concerns ... "6 Chapter n borrows from literary criticism itself, using techniques of formal analysis; Chapter in borrows from religion and pragmatism; Chapter IV, from psychotherapy; Chapter V, from soriology (though only implirity), and Chapter VI, from pragmatism, sperifically Richard Rorty's. Chapters II, IV, V, and VI also borrow from joumalism itself. This may seem an incredible statement, considering that Relato de un náufrago can obviously be read as a member of the journalistic genre. Yet one of the axes being ground in this thesis is that the language and concerns of journalistíc canons can be—should be—applied more rigorously to the joumalism of García Márquez. This truism can easily be forgotten in the msh to see the joumalism of Gartía Márquez solely as a kind of literary apprentíceship.

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