Truth in fiction

THE COLOMBIAN Nobel laureate for literature Gabriel García Márquez died April 17, 2014 at the age of 87. Celebrated universally for the “magic realism” of his fiction, Marquez’s political perspective—he was a socialist and opposed the political hegemony of the United States in Latin America and the rest of the world—is seldom mentioned by the critics. And yet that perspective informs his novels and short stories as much as they’re driven by the artistic and literary responsibility of making sense of the human condition as defined by the specifics of time and place.

“The Autumn of the Patriarch”, which Márquez described as “a poem on the solitude of power,” assumes the point of the view of “the eternal dictator” (i.e., the dictators who, save for brief interruptions, ruled Latin American countries for much of the 20th century), whose unlimited power has isolated him from all of humanity and all that is human. It is a compelling portrait of dictatorship and all its terrors—the assassinations, the torture and even the vulgarity of it—but by focusing on the dictator himself reduces him to an object of both pity and contempt.

Márquez was also a journalist, having begun his writing career as a reporter while he was a law student. He was also a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He continued in journalism even after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

One of his most well known reports, written in 1986 after “The Autumn of the Patriarch” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and reissued in 2010, is “Clandestine in Chile”. “Clandestine in Chile” is on the 1985 visit, while disguised as an Uruguayan businessman, of the Chilean film director Miguel Littín, who had fled Chile in 1973 after a US-supported military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende, and installed a military dictatorship in its place.

The dictator Augusto Pinochet, a general in Chile’s armed forces, launched a brutal reign of terror from 1973 to 1990, that arrested, tortured and murdered thousands of labor, student and political leaders in one of the most vicious dictatorships of modern times. The dictatorship was established with the support of the US CIA upon the assassination of Allende to assure the local elite of continued dominance in Chile and such US multinationals as International Telephone and Telegraph of an endless and cheap supply of Chilean copper. (Then US President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was the mastermind of the coup that killed Allende and put Pinochet in power.)

Littín and three film crews from three countries, under the pretense of shooting a film promoting tourism, chronicled life under the Pinochet dictatorship. Márquez then wrote down Littin’s account of his journey, which has been described as a triumph of human ingenuity and determination to prevail against the machinery of repression and death that Pinochet had erected on the ruins of Chilean democracy.

Literature and journalism seem worlds apart. Conventional wisdom—the very term “fiction” itself—thus suggests that fiction, of which the short story and the novel are the primary examples, has nothing to do with truth, in that its province is what is “merely” imagined. Journalism, the ethics of which celebrates truth-telling as a primary ethical duty, is on the other hand assumed to be about truth, and nothing but, whether it be in the form of a news report, a commentary or an analysis.

And yet not only Márquez among the great writers of the age has been both fictionist and journalist. Ernest Hemingway was both, and so was another Nobel Laureate (1957), Albert Camus. Even more examples abound in the Philippines, where the country’s first National Artist for Literature, Nick Joaquin, was a novelist and short story writer, a poet, a playwright and a journalist.

Joaquin rejected the conventional belief that journalism, although often described as “literature in a hurry,” is inferior to literature, arguing that like the novelist, poet and playwright, the journalist too must take his work as seriously as if it involved the parting of the Red Sea and the splitting of the atom.

Beyond issues of craft, however, Joaquin, like Márquez, also demonstrated that there can be as much truth in fiction as in journalism. Like every other fictionist, Joaquin’s novels and short stories do reflect the particularities of his time and place, and are “real” in that they’re able to convey a sense of what it meant to be a human being in that space called the Philippines during that time between the late Spanish period and the early 1950s. The woman who had two navels, the anti-heroine of his novel of the same title, did not exist and had never existed, but as metaphor encapsulates the realities—the truth—of the condition of that portion of humanity known as Filipinos. His accounts of real events including crime, on the other hand, were as much about the meaning of those events as they were about their who, what, where, when, why and how.

Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch” does even more. Drawn from the reality of Latin American dictatorship, the dictator of his novel is an amalgam of all the dictators who have ever imposed their will on others through deceit and violence. Released in 1975, during a decade when the US policy of promoting dictatorships led to the rise of Pinochet in Chile as well as Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the world of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” was eerily similar to the world that Marcos had created in the Philippines.

One episode in Márquez’s novel is illustrative. The dictator causes the construction of white-washed walls to conceal from foreign eyes the teeming slums of his capital city during an international beauty pageant. Marcos had done the very same thing in Manila, the co-incidence suggesting thereby how very much the same in their deceit and lies are all dictatorships.

What’s clear is that, despite the supposedly imagined details of fiction, a novel or a short story, like a journalistic work, also draws its material from reality. Márquez himself has declared that “There is not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” But the difference is that the details in the world a novelist creates vary in terms of emphasis and even in the specifics, which the novelist can and often does select and modify, in furtherance of the aim to accurately and convincingly describe the human condition. The paradox is that fiction can thus be truthful, even as it modifies the details of the fictional reality it creates.

No such paradox enlivens journalism, a discipline that values a one- to- one correspondence between what it reports and what has happened in reality. Journalism’s province is literal truth, while that of fiction—of all literature for that matter—is that of the truth suggested by the details of human existence as lived, explored and understood by the author.

It helps explain why novelists and poets, playwrights and short story writers are often journalists as well. Both literature and journalism are disciplines ideally and deeply committed to truth—the latter in reporting it, the former in explaining it in the context of the human condition. Márquez and Joaquin were not surprisingly at home in both worlds.