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Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
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The depth and range of García Márquez's fiction--and, therefore, of the possible critical approaches to it--can best be conveyed by a citation from the editors' introduction to the volume of essays entitled Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings (1987): "The present volume of essays on Gabriel García Márquez was originally conceived in 1983, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Apart from extending critical appreciation of his work to an English-reading public, its principal objective was to reflect the breadth and variety of current critical approaches to literature applied to a single corpus of writing. By no means all of the writer's prolific output is dealt with here, though his major novels and a selection of his short fiction are covered. Equally, the range of critical method, while not exhaustive, seeks to encompass practical criticism, thematic, formalist-structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist, philosophy of language and deconstructionist readings."
The phrase "while not exhaustive" originally seems almost comical in light of the lengthy list of approaches that follows it, and yet there is clearly some basis for this qualification, when one considers that the patterns and underpinnings of García Márquez's work virtually compel a MYTHOLOGICAL treatment, and when one reflects further on the fact that man-woman relationships, and the analogous issue of woman's restricted roles within traditional Latin cultures, have always been a theme of García Márquez's fiction, from his earliest stories through Of Love and Other Demons (1994), thus calling for GENDER-based analysis of his work.
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