Los Desastres De La Guerra

 Thursday, July 28, 2011 | | |

Big Mama's Funeral
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"Big Mama's Funeral" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is another of our authors to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1982; you will find here a very good biography about this remarkable person.
This particular story, like Isabel Allende's, utilizes elements of fantasy and myth, along with an ironic senseof exaggeration, to carry its rather activist message. Good literature is both entertaining and edifying, which is certainly true of the best Magical Realism has to offer.
As with the preceding story, here Marquez offers a fun introduction filled with both exaggeration and irony:
This is, for all the world's unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo,who lived ninety-two years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope. (808.1)
Consider what the narrator means by the truth! As you might imagine, the story has little to do with "facts" and more to do with "fiction," which has a way of getting very much to the truth.
On the other hand, the story attacks the political system, avestige of colonial days, that continues to inform the politics of Columbia and other Latin American countries. To this end, you could argue that the author is less interested in the facts than he is in the truth.
But he also likes to have some fun along the way, and Big Mama clearly supplies a good deal of fun.
As the narrator informs us, he intends to tell about this funeral attended by all thepowerful in the country, including the pope. The following quotation attests to the exaggeration, the fantasy, and the fun that pervades this particular narrative by one of the world's finest writers:
Now that the nation, which was shaken to its vitals, has recovered its balance; now that the bagpipers of San Jacinto, the smugglers of Guajira, the rice planters of Sinu, the prostitutes ofCaucamayal, the wizards of Sierpe, and the banana workers of Aracantaca have folded up their tents to recover from the exhausting vigil and have regained their serenity, and the President of the Republic and his ministers and all those who represented the public and supernatural powers on the most magnificent funeral occasion recorded in the annals of history have regained control of their estates; [ . . .] now is the time to lean a stool against the front door and relate from the beginnings the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance to get at it. (808.2)
The introduction is very funny, what with the juxtaposition of heavenly powers and secular leaders with bagpipers and prostitutes.
All come to take part in this funeral, which leaves a mess not unlike that atthe palace in Allende's story.
The bit about the historians screwing up the story is of particular interest because The Kingdom of Macondo is invented by Garcia Marquez and featured in his great novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude and other works.
The author was, in fact, born in an actual city mentioned in the story, Aracataca; in fact, his grandfather took part in a terrible surge of violencethere connected with banana--in fact, Macondo is the Bantu word for banana--plantations owned by the United Fruit Company. These labor disputes led to horrible violence in the area that feature in the author's prose.
Thus his work resembles in its narrative technique that of both Borges and Allende (and that of Octavia Paz, whom you will read next week) and, in its political commitment, that ofPablo Neruda.
In the story, the advanced age of all the luminaries, including Big Mamma, the President of the Republic, the Pope, and in particular Big Mamma's priest, Father Anthony Isabel, attests to the long-standing corruption the system Big Mamma epitomizes:
The priest, talking to himself and on the verge of his hundredth birthday, stayed in his room. (808.3)
And the matriarch's eldest...