Why was it appropriate for Gabriel Garcia Marquez to talk about a political issue in his Nobel speech?

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February 21, 1988, Section 7, Page 1Buy Reprints

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about to publish ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' a work he calls a novel of manners: the story of two people whose love, thwarted in their youth, finally flourishes when they are close to 80.

A Colombian by birth as well as by literary inspiration, he will soon be 60 and seems as busy, vigorous and playful as ever. After mediating in the early 1980's between the Colombian Government and leftist guerrillas, he has not returned to Colombia because of widespread violence there. These days, he and his wife, Mercedes, divide their time between Mexico City, their permanent home for the last 25 years, and Havana, where he is organizing and directing the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema. Film is an old love of this Nobel laureate, and the dramatic possibilities of television also fascinate him.

Though widely viewed as a political activist of the left, to his friends he is simply unorthodox, a storyteller who objects to theorizing and generalizations and who likes to deal with life in the unexpected anecdotal way it comes. Over several afternoons in Mexico City recently, we talked about his interest in plagues, politics and cinema, as well as his latest book. I asked him to comment on his extraordinary productivity:

You have just finished a play and are writing film scripts and directing a film institute. Are you changing your life?

No, because I am writing a novel. And I am finishing this one so I can start another. But I have never had so many things going on at the same time. I think I have never before felt so fulfilled, so much in the prime of my life.

I'm writing. Six different stories are being filmed. I'm at the cinema foundation. And the play will be opening this year in Argentina and Brazil.

For a long time, of course, things did not work out for me - almost the first 40 years of my life. I had financial problems; I had work problems. I had not made it as a writer or as anything else. It was a difficult time emotionally and psychologically; I had the idea that I was like an extra, that I did not count anywhere. And then, with ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' things turned. Now all this is going on without my being dependent on anyone. Still, I have to do all sorts of things. I have to sit on a bicycle in the morning. I am on an eternal diet. Half my life I couldn't eat what I wanted because I couldn't afford to, the other half because I have to diet.

And now, in your latest book, ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' the theme and style seem very different. Why did you write a love story?

I think aging has made me realize that feelings and sentiments, what happens in the heart, are ultimately the most important. But in some way, all my books are about love. In ''One Hundred Years'' there is one love story after another. ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold'' is a terrible drama of love. I think there is love everywhere. This time love is more ardent. Because two loves join and go on.

I think, though, that I could not have written ''Love in the Time of Cholera'' when I was younger. It has practically a lifetime's experience in it. And it includes many experiences, my own and other peoples'. Above all, there are points of view I didn't have before. I'll be 60 this year. At that age, one becomes more serene in everything.

Also more generous, perhaps. Because this is a tremendously generous book.

A Chilean priest told me it was the most Christian book he'd ever read.

And the style? Do you see this as a departure from your earlier work?

In every book I try to take a different path and I think I did here. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean. You can take my books and I can tell you line for line what part of reality or what episode it came from.

There was an insomnia plague in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' and in one of your stories a plague killed all the birds. Now there is the ''Time of Cholera.'' What is it that intrigues you so about plagues? Cartagena really had a great plague at the end of the last century. And I've always been interested in plagues, beginning with ''Oedipus Rex.'' I've read a lot about them. ''A Journal of the Plague Year'' by Daniel Defoe is one of my favorite books. Plagues are like imponderable dangers that surprise people. They seem to have a quality of destiny. It's the phenomenon of death on a mass scale. What I find curious is that the great plagues have always produced great excesses. They make people want to live more. It's that almost metaphysical dimension that interests me.

I have used other literary references. ''The Plague'' of Camus. There is a plague in ''The Betrothed'' of Alessandro Manzoni. I'm always looking up books that deal with a theme I'm dealing with. I do it to make sure that mine is not alike. Not precisely to copy from them but to have the use of them somehow. I think all writers do that. Behind every idea there is a thousand years of literature. I think you have to know as much as possible of that to know where you are and how you are taking it further.

What was the genesis of ''Love in the Time of Cholera''?

It really sprang from two sources that came together. One was the love affair of my parents, which was identical to that of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza in their youth. My father was the telegraph operator of Aracataca [ Colombia ] . He played the violin. She was the pretty girl from a well-to-do family. Her father was opposed because the boy was poor and he was a liberal. All that part of the story was my parents'. . . . When she went to school, the letters, the poems, the violin serenades, her trip to the interior when her father tried to make her forget him, the way they communicated by telegram - all that is authentic. And when she returns, everyone thinks she has forgotten him. That too. It's exactly the way my parents told it. The only difference is they married. And, as soon as they were married, they were no longer interesting as literary figures. And the other source? Many years ago, in Mexico, I read a story in a newspaper about the death of two old Americans - a man and a woman - who would meet every year in Acapulco, always going to the same hotel, the same restaurants, following the same routine as they had done for 40 years. They were almost 80 years old and kept coming. Then one day they went out in a boat and, in order to rob them, the boatman murdered them with his oars. Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them. They were each married to other people.

I always thought I would write my parents' story, but I didn't know how. One day, through one of those absolutely incomprehensible things that happen in literary creation, the two stories came together in my mind. I had all the love of the young people from my parents and from the old couple I took the love of old people.

You have said that your stories often come from a single image that strikes you. Yes. In fact, I'm so fascinated by how to detect the birth of a story that I have a workshop at the cinema foundation called ''How to Tell a Story.'' I bring together 10 students from different Latin American countries and we sit at a round table without interruption for four hours a day for six weeks and try to write a story from scratch. We start by going round and round. At first there are only differences. . . . The Venezuelan wants one thing, the Argentine another. Then suddenly an idea appears that grabs everyone and the story can be developed. We've done three so far. But, you know, we still don't know how the idea is born. It always catches us by surprise.

In my case, it always begins with an image, not an idea or a concept. With ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' the image was of two old people dancing on the deck of a boat, dancing a bolero. Once you have the image, then what happens? The image grows in my head until the whole story takes shape as it might in real life. The problem is that life isn't the same as literature, so then I have to ask myself the big question: How do I adapt this, what is the most appropriate structure for this book? I have always aspired to finding the perfect structure. One perfect structure in literature is that of Sophocles' ''Oedipus Rex.'' Another is a short story, ''Monkey's Paw,'' by an English writer, William Jacobs.

When I have the story and the structure completely worked out, I can start - but only on condition that I find the right name for each character. If I don't have the name that exactly suits the character, it doesn't come alive. I don't see it.

Once I sit down to write, usually I no longer have any hesitations. I may take a few notes, a word or a phrase or something to help me the following morning, but I never work with a lot of notes. That's what I learned when I was young. I know writers who have books full of notes and they wind up thinking about their notes and never write their books.

You've always said you still feel as much a journalist as a writer of fiction. Some writers think that in journalism the pleasure of discovery comes in the research, while in fiction the pleasure of discovery comes in the writing. Would you agree?

Certainly there are pleasures in both. To begin with, I consider journalism to be a literary genre. Intellectuals would not agree, but I believe it is. Without being fiction, it is a form, an instrument, for expressing reality.

The timing may be different but the experience is the same in literature and journalism. In fiction, if you feel you get a scoop, a scoop about life that fits into your writing, it's the same emotion as a journalist when he gets to the heart of a story. Those moments occur when you least expect them and they bring extraordinary happiness. Just as a journalist knows when he's got the story, a writer has a similar revelation. Of course, he still has to illustrate and enrich it, but he knows he's got it. It's almost an instinct. The journalist knows if he has news or not. The writer knows if it's literature or not, if it's poetry or not. After that, the writing is very much the same. Both use many of the same techniques. But your journalism is not exactly orthodox. Well, mine isn't informative, so I can follow my own preferences and look for the same veins I look for in literature. But my misfortune is that people don't believe my journalism. They think I make it all up. But I promise you, I invent nothing either in journalism or fiction. In fiction, you manipulate reality because that's what fiction is for. In journalism, I can pick the subjects that suit my character because I no longer have the demands of a job.

Do you remember any of your journalistic pieces with special affection?

There was one little one called ''The Cemetery of Lost Letters,'' from the time I was working at El Espectador. I was sitting on a tram in Bogota. And I saw a sign that said: ''House of Lost Letters.'' I rang the bell. They told me that all the letters that could not be delivered - with wrong addresses, whatever - were sent to that house. There was an old man in it who dedicated his life entirely to finding their destination. Sometimes it took him days. If it couldn't be found, the letter was burned but never opened. There was one addressed ''To the woman who goes to the Church de Las Armas every Wednesday at 5 P.M.'' So the old man went there and found seven women and questioned each of them. When he had picked the right one, he needed a court order to open the letter to be sure. And he was right. I'll never forget that story. Journalism and literature were almost joined. I have never been able to completely separate them.

What are you trying to achieve at the cinema foundation?

I'd like to see film-making as an artistic expression in Latin America valued the same way as our literature is now. We have very fine literature, but it has taken a long time to be recognized. It has been a very hard struggle. And sometimes it is still difficult.

The literature now seems to have a life of its own.

You know, this really started to happen when we conquered our own readers at home. When they started to read us in Latin America. We had always thought the opposite was important. When we published a book, we didn't care if it was sold here as long as we could get it translated. And yet we knew what would happen. It would be translated and get a few obligatory critical notes from the specialists. The book would stay within the Spanish Studies ghettos of the universities and never get out. When we started to be read in Latin America, everything opened up.

The same is beginning to happen with film. There are now good films being made in Latin America. And this is being done not through great productions with a lot of capital. It is done within our own means and with our own methods. And the films are appearing at the international festivals and are being nominated for prizes. But they still have to conquer their own audience here. The problem lies with the big distributors. They need to spend a lot of money to promote unknown films and then they get no returns. The day our films make money, the whole focus will change. We saw it in literature; we will see it in films in the years ahead.

Politics is so important to you. But you don't use your books to promote your political ideas.

I don't think literature should be used as a firearm. But, even against your own will, your ideological positions are inevitably reflected in your writing and they influence readers. I think my books have had political impact in Latin America because they help to create a Latin American identity; they help Latin Americans to become more aware of their own culture.

An American asked me the other day what was the real political intention behind the cinema foundation. I said the issue is not what is behind it but what lies ahead of it. The idea is to stimulate awareness of the Latin American cinema, and that is fundamentally a political objective. Of course, the project is strictly about film-making but the results will be political. People often think that politics are elections, that politics are what governments do. But literature, cinema, painting and music are all essential to forging Latin America's identity. And that's what I mean by politics.

Would you say that is different from placing artistic talent at the service of politics? I would never do that. Well, let me be clearer. The arts are always at the service of politics, of some ideology, of the vision the writer or the artist has of the world. But the arts should never be at the service of a government. What is your vision for Latin America? I want to see a Latin America that is united, autonomous and democratic. In the European sense? In the sense that it should have common interests and approaches.

Is that the reason you are now writing about Simon Bolivar?

Not really. I picked the theme of Bolivar because I was interested in his personality. No one knows what he was really like because Bolivar became enshrined as a hero. I see him as a Caribbean, influenced and formed by Romanticism. Just imagine what an explosive combination. . . .

But the ideas of Bolivar are very topical. He imagined Latin America as an autonomous and unified alliance, an alliance that he thought could become the largest and most powerful in the world. He had a very nice phrase for it. He said: ''We are like a small mankind of our own.'' He was an extraordinary man, yet he got badly beaten and was ultimately defeated. And he was defeated by the same forces that are at work today - the feudal interests and traditional local power groups that protect their interests and privileges. They closed ranks against him and finished him off. But his dream remains valid - to have a united and autonomous Latin America.

You see, I'm looking for different words. I really detest political-speak. Words like ''the people,'' for example, have lost their meaning. We have to fight against fossilized language. Not only in the case of the Marxists, who have petrified the language most, but the liberals too. ''Democracy'' is another such word. The Soviets say they're democratic; the Americans say they're democratic; El Salvador does, and Mexico too. Everyone who can organize an election says he's democratic. ''Independence'' is another one. These are words that have come to mean very little. They're disconnected; they don't describe the reality they represent. I'm always looking for words that aren't exhausted. You know what my biggest failing in life has been? One that can no longer be remedied? It's not being able to speak English perfectly as a second language. If only I had spoken English . . . Would you have written in English? No, no. But after Latin America, my best audience is in the United States, and in the universities there. There's a vast readership that interests me. But I could never become their friend because I don't speak English. I have French and Italian. Of course, it's also their failing for not speaking Spanish. But I think I'm more interested than they are.

What was it like to write the play? Did that give you any trouble? Well, it's really a monologue that I wrote for Graciela Duffau, the Argentine actress. It's called ''Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man.'' An angry woman is telling her husband everything that passes through her head. It goes on for two hours. He is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper and doesn't react at all. But a monologue isn't entirely a play. That is, there are many rules and laws of the theater that don't apply here. And what is your next writing project? I'm going to finish ''Bolivar.'' I need a few more months. And I'm going to write my memoirs. Usually authors write their memoirs when they can no longer remember anything. I'm going to start slowly and write and write. They won't be normal memoirs. Every time I have 400 pages ready, I'll publish a volume and see. I could go up to six. NOT HIS CUP OF CAFE Gabriel Garcia Marquez decided not to go to a meeting of Nobel Prize-winners in Paris last month. The reason:

''I try not to go to conferences. I don't know what to do there. And I found this one very intimidating. President Mitterrand - as you know he's a friend - personally invited me and I told him I would go. But then I looked at the agenda and at the 80 or so prize-winners and saw the French had drawn up subjects that were entirely abstract. 'Culture and Society,' for example. What would I do at a seminar with Claude Simon on culture and society? . . .

''I think a lot about culture, but about popular culture. And I'm the product of a culture of immediate and burning problems. The French move in the thoroughly glacial sphere of pure ideas. And they don't succumb easily. They are brought up and formed in academic tournaments. I don't like to theorize. I told Mitterrand that I considered myself culturally incompatible and that recognizing one's own limitations is a privilege of age. Mitterrand, who is a man of culture, understood this very well.''