SOURCE: Carvalho, Susan de. “Origins of Social Pessimism in García Márquez: ‘The Night of the Curlews.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (summer 1991): 331-38.

At the end of 1949, the Colombian journalist Alfonso Fuenmayor said of his friend García Márquez: “Gabito parece ser el gran cuentista que con tanto paciencia y con tanto escepticismo ha venido esperando el país” [“Gabito appears to be the great storyteller that the country has been waiting for with such patience and such skepticism”].¹ By that date, the young author had published only five short stories,² toward which later critics have shared little of Fuenmayor's enthusiasm. These early stories were not seriously studied until after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even today, however, most critical references to these stories tend to isolate them from the main body of García Márquez's fiction, rather than to note the thematic and stylistic development of preoccupations that would continue to direct the author's literary trajectory. Perhaps the harshest, and most often quoted, critic of these stories is Mario Vargas Llosa; in his study of García Márquez he labels this phase of production “a morbid prehistory” whose common element is “a pattern which we might term metaphysico-masturbatory” (“Morbid Prehistory” 451, 453). He assumes that García Márquez shares his critical assessment of the stories, for he calls them “ten short stories … that would never be gathered together as a book” (452); however, the following year they were in fact published as the collection Eyes of a Blue Dog (1972), later included in the Collected Stories (1984).

It is true that the earliest short stories (1947-49) are completely fantastic elaborations by narrators who are either delirious or in some state between life and death, and the stories occur with no apparent social context whatsoever. The narrators often express surprise or fear at the lack of rationality in their worlds, and the tumbling, erratic narrative style approaches stream of consciousness in its attempt to convey the terrors of the trapped protagonists. However, in the short story “The Night of the Curlews” (1950), the author uses a similar style toward a different end; the protagonists are trapped in a very real Colombian society, facing aloneness not beyond, but rather within, a human context. This shift from existential to social pessimism represents an important development in García Márquez's progression toward his more realistic fiction of the early sixties (In Evil Hour, No One Writes to the Colonel).

In his journalism of the 1950s, García Márquez turns away from creations of pure imagination to explore a world that is in many ways even more difficult to categorize: the interior or isolated regions of his own country. Alejo Carpentier's landmark novel The Kingdom of This World appeared in 1949, postulating in its introduction the concept of “the marvelous reality” of Latin America—not a real world with metaphorical legendary elements, but rather a world in which fantasy and reality are indistinguishable in the perceptions of the native population. While not yet fully realized, the concept of a Colombian folkloric or mythical reality does clearly appear in García Márquez's contemporaneous journalism, for example in the “Marquesita of La Sierpe” series of the early 1950s.

This four-part series describes in a factual tone the customs and superstitions of La Sierpe, described as

un país de leyenda dentro de la costa atlántica de Colombia, donde uno de los episodios más corrientes de la vida diaria es vengar una ofensa con un maleficio como ese de hacer que al ofensor le nazca, le crezca y se le reproduzca un mico dentro del vientre.

(Textos costeños 117)

[a legendary country on the Atlantic coast of Colombia, where one of the most common occurrences of daily life is to avenge an offense with a curse, like that of causing a monkey to be born, grow, and reproduce itself inside the belly of the offender.]

Various critics have detailed thematic relationships between this series and the later short story “Big Mama's Funeral” (published in 1962). However, more relevant to the present study is the change this series reflects in García Márquez's use of the fantastic. In the earlier journalism, as in the first stories of Eyes of a Blue Dog (e.g., “The Third Resignation” [1947], “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” [1948]), the use of fantasy is explicit and artificial; the protagonists' own initial reaction is one of incredulity. The reader is invited to imagine that the fantastic events could occur, but is not told directly that they do happen. It is this more subtle technique that García Márquez begins to explore in the Sierpe series and in the contemporary fictional stories. The incorporation of fantasy into a concrete social context blends subjective and objective realities; it questions the dividing line between empirical reality and individual interpretations of that reality. “The Night of the Curlews,” based on the Colombian legend that these diving birds pluck out the eyes of those who dare to imitate their song, is one of the earliest literary examples of this new focus in García Márquez.

“The Night of the Curlews” is probably the least studied story of the entire collection, scarcely mentioned in Donald McGrady's 1972 article or Raymond Williams's study of this period. Yet Vargas Llosa marks this story as “the dividing line between the prehistory and the history of the fictional reality” because it is the first story to incorporate specifically Colombian folklore and a coastal setting. He says that “only in this text had [the author] begun in earnest his life as a substitute for God,” as creator of his own universe, with its own natural laws (“Morbid Prehistory” 459-60).

In order to evaluate and appreciate this progression from pure fantasy toward magical reality, an accurate chronology of the stories is essential. Surprisingly, of the few critics who deal extensively with this body of fiction, none uses the correct dates of original publication of the stories. They all appear to use as their reference the publication data provided by Vargas Llosa in Historia de un deicidio [History of a Deicide], published in 1971. He can label “The Night of the Curlews” a turning point and the other stories “prehistory” because of the former's supposed publication date of 1952; the date would make “The Night of the Curlews” one of the latest stories of Eyes of a Blue Dog. In fact, however, Jacques Gilard's extensive chronology of García Márquez's journalism establishes that this story was first published in July 1950, in the Barranquilla magazine Crónica, placing it not only earlier than the completion of García Márquez's first novel Leaf Storm, but also before other, less “Latin-American” stories of Eyes of a Blue Dog. Thus, the progression toward a specifically regional focus was not a smooth and consistent one; however, Vargas Llosa is correct in asserting that “The Night of the Curlews” marks a significant step toward the style and content of the later fiction.

The link between Franz Kafka's fantasy and the stories of Eyes of a Blue Dog is obvious and is verified by García Márquez, as well as his friends (fellow members of the literary “Group of Barranquilla”), who mention him in their journalism.³ Both García Márquez and Kafka depict in their stories a nightmarish world, where the separation between dream and reality is as unclear as is the separation between life and death. Reality and fantasy are inseparable, described with no change of tone, no narrative incredulity. As in many of García Márquez's stories, the characters simply adjust their lives to incorporate unforeseen and, for the reader, bizarre circumstances. This clear influence has led some critics, such as Vargas Llosa, to separate the early use of fantasy by García Márquez from that of his mature fiction and to label the former as purely imitative; Vargas Llosa calls this influence “devastating” (“Morbid Prehistory” 451).

Because of the evident Kafkan influence, critics have been satisfied to label the fantasy of both Kafka and the early García Márquez as profoundly pessimistic and to end their comparative analyses with this thematic similarity rather than to note a crucial difference—the early revelation of a perspective that will continue to occupy García Márquez and that clearly distinguishes him from Kafka. The latter author's pessimism reflects a belief that humanity is fundamentally not merely unvirtuous but actually evil. His stories are filled with human falseness, relentless persecution, and sadism. The imagery is often grotesque, even repulsive, and many stories end with death as an escape from the horror of life. García Márquez's stories, especially “The Night of the Curlews,” are no less pessimistic, are equally lacking in possibilities for redemption, and are unmitigated by the humor of his later fiction. However, the pessimism stems not from the cruelty of mankind, but from the isolation of man within his society, a concept that underlies most of García Márquez's subsequent works.

Many of the earlier stories contain only one character who faces alone his terror of the unknown. The characters are also physically immobilized, their fear exacerbated by their inability to escape or act in any way. In “The Night of the Curlews” a relationship among characters is depicted, but it is always unclear, marked by barriers of communication. The dominant atmosphere is one of isolation; the three protagonists exist in their own newly created world, unaided by outsiders.

The sense of self-enclosure is reinforced by the unusual use of narrative voice employed by the author. The story is narrated in a collective first-person. While theoretically one of the three characters is telling the story, a singular “I” form never appears. Many sentences seem uttered by all three, preceded by “we said,” and thus the characters grow indistinguishable. When a protagonist does separate himself from the others, he is referred to only as “one of us” (83), and he quickly moves back to blend with the group again. Even physically the three at times fuse into one; while still in the bar, the newly blinded men recognize each other “in the joints of the thirty fingers piled up on the counter” (83).

This narrative device serves multiple functions. First, it contrasts with the concrete setting to lend the story a more vague, nebulous tone; the reader tries to separate the characters, to sort them out, but finds their reality inaccessible. Second, the use of a collective narrative voice presumably should imply some kind of bond among the characters themselves. Even if the exterior world is hostile or silent, the characters should find some solace in their solidarity. But in fact the narrators are as impassive to each other as the outside world is to them. This impassivity is perhaps the most startling feature of the story, for none of the newly blinded characters ever expresses pain or even surprise. During the three days that they wander, trying to find their way home, not a single emotion is articulated; the protagonists are united only by circumstance, and among themselves they neither seek nor offer comfort. This same narrative technique was used with equal success in the short story “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” published the preceding year.

The structure of the story is also calculated to undermine the reader's natural surprise at the bizarre incident and to emphasize the aftermath rather than the anecdote itself. The story begins not with the attack of the curlews, but with the moments immediately afterward. The narrators relate how the men calmly found each others' hands, “and we stood up as if nothing had happened. We still hadn't had time to get upset” (83). The reader thus knows from the beginning that the men fumble in the darkness, but discovers only piecemeal that the men have been blinded and how this accident occurred. The entire narrative emphasis shifts away from what traditionally would have been the dramatic climax and deals instead with the struggle to survive afterward in an unchanged and largely unsympathetic real world. After the curlews' attack, there is no reaction from the others at the café; someone plays the usual Wurlitzer record, and the three characters calmly leave the room. As they leave, they pass a woman in a rocking chair who, upon seeing their search for the door, stands up and leaves. Then another voice, apparently that of a waiter, asks them to move out of the way. None of these characters shows any awareness of the characters' need for help, even after the blind men attempt to explain their situation. We later learn that the story was reported in the newspaper, but “nobody wanted to believe it and they say it was a fake item made up by the papers to boost their circulation. No one has seen the curlews” (87).

Finally, when the protagonists ask a boy to guide them home, the youth refuses because other children may tease him; and “Besides, I'm reading Terry and the Pirates right now” (87). The entire story is a chronicle of the inhumanity surrounding the three characters and of their eventual relinquishment of hope. This same image of a hostile society reappears throughout García Márquez's fiction in stories from Big Mama's Funeral (notably “Tuesday Siesta” and “Montiel's Widow”) and Eréndira [Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories] (for example, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” “Death Constant beyond Love,” and “Eréndira”), as well as in many of the novels.

The distortion of time and space in the narration underscores the protagonists' sense of disorientation. The opening lines of the story demonstrate clearly that the narrators have lost touch with their surroundings; without explaining what “it” is, the narrator says, “It happened before we could remember where we were, before we could get back our sense of location” (83). The reader is forced to follow the narrative voice into this darkened world of confused sensations and impressions and consequently to lose track of any objective spatial or temporal measurements. For example, as the characters attempt to leave the café, they hear many doors, but never seem to escape the building. One seems to pass through a doorway, implying that he has reached the outdoors, but then he says: “We must be close. … There's a smell of piled-up trunks around here” (84), contradicting the previous impression. Whether the men move in and out of various buildings or wander through only one is never clarified and in fact becomes unimportant, as the narrative focuses only on identifying “the things that surrounded us” (84).

Time is equally difficult to ascertain in this chaotic narration. After what seems like only moments since the accident, the narrator feels “the harsh, cutting breeze of an invisible dawn” (84). The synaesthesia of this passage connotes a new way of measuring time, a subjective perception impossible to verify. The next woman whom the protagonists encounter has already read the newspaper account of the attack, implying that quite a bit of time has passed; she adds, “The courtyard [of the bar] was full of people the next day” (85). She is privy to a perspective and a level of awareness completely denied to the blind men, who seem not even to wonder at the time that has passed.

At the end of the story, the objective time frame of the young boy is revealed to the protagonists, as he discusses serial episodes of Terry and the Pirates: “That was Friday. Today's Sunday and what I like are the colors” (87). The narrator grasps at this temporal reference and reveals to another of the blind men, “We've been lost for almost three days and we haven't had a moment's rest” (88). This news comes as a complete surprise to the reader, as it does to the protagonists, since there has been no mention of hunger or of fatigue; the quantity of time, three days, seems completely arbitrary.

This narrative manipulation, which undermines traditional expectations about time and place, forces the reader to share the blindness of the protagonists, in effect to see through their eyes. The style of the story creates two separate universes, one external and impassive, and the other consisting only of the three men: “Then the three of us looked for ourselves in the darkness and found ourselves there” (83). Mere contact with the external world provides no real help for the protagonists, who remain trapped in their own senselessly sightless universe.

The bleak ending to the story strikes the deepest note of social pessimism, as the three men slip into physical and emotional abulia: “We sat down. An invisible sun began to warm us on the shoulders. But not even the presence of the sun interested us. We felt it there, everywhere, having already lost the notion of distance, time, direction” (88). Again, subtle changes in the narrative voice underscore the growing sense of isolation and despair, for in the final lines “someone” of the three proposes a course of action, but “the others” prefer to remain motionless (88); for the first time, the speakers are not “we” or “one of us,” but instead are indicated in the third person: “they.” This impression of distance mirrors a new distance among the protagonists themselves; as confusion forces them into passivity and silence, “their heads lifted toward the invisible light” (88). This unrelenting pessimism recurs throughout García Márquez's fiction of social criticism, primarily in the stories of Big Mama's Funeral, and the novels In Evil Hour and No One Writes to the Colonel. This sense of futility underlies the political aspects of One Hundred Years of Solitude as well, for Colonel Aureliano Buendía and José Arcadio Segundo, the two most politically aware characters, also lapse into immobility.

Thus, although this story marks an important shift in García Márquez's use of Colombian legends to depict a unique reality, it is equally important in terms of its introduction of social pessimism. While the content forecasts the future magical realism, the narrative techniques and the story's structure highlight society's impassivity toward the suffering of individuals. The later socially oriented works chronicle the greed and corruption of power figures, but here the sins are those of omission rather than of commission; society is as deaf as the protagonists are blind. The sense of solitude and isolation in the former stories is thus elaborated, casting blame now not on the individuals' physical or emotional inability to reach out, but rather on the hostile society as a whole.

Notes

1. Alfonso Fuenmayor, El Heraldo 17 December 1949: 3; qtd. in Gilard 14.

2. “The Third Resignation” (1947), “Tubal-Caín Forges a Star” (1947), “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” (1947), “The Other Side of Death” (1948), “Dialogue with the Mirror” (1949).

3. For a detailed exploration of the literary group and its influences, see Gilard, “El grupo de Barranquilla,” and Rufinelli.

Works Cited

García Márquez, Gabriel. Collected Stories. New York: Harper, 1984.

———. Textos costeños. Obra periodística, Vol. 1. Ed. Jacques Gilard. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1981.

Gilard, Jacques. “El grupo de Barranquilla.” Revista Iberoamericana 50 (1984): 905-35.

———. Introduction. García Márquez, Textos costeños. 7-72.

McGrady, Donald. “Acerca de una colección desconocida de relatos por Gabriel García Márquez.” Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 27 (1972): 293-320.

Rufinelli, Jorge. “Gabriel García Márquez y el grupo de Barranquilla.” La palabra y el hombre Nueva época 10 (1974): 23-29.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. Barcelona-Caracas: Ed. Barral, 1971.

———. “A Morbid Prehistory: The Early Stories.” Books Abroad 47 (1973): 451-60. [First published in Historia de un deicidio, 217-32.]

Williams, Raymond. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984.