Entre linhas e pegadas: os animais na produção jornalística de Gabriel García Márquez e as tensões entre o real e o fictício

Abstract

The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez is globally recognized as one of the authors who most significantly contributed to the boom of Latin American literature in the second half of the 20th century. However, García Márquez began his professional career as a journalist, having worked for newspapers in different countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Spain. Heloiza Herscovitz (2004) explains that in García Márquez’s journalistic writings there prevails a style that rejects descriptions of reality grounded in the objectivity of traditional journalism, insofar as the compositional elements of journalistic narrative appear interwoven—indeed, “entangled”—with expressive resources that evoke the supernatural (or almost supernatural) aspects of reality. Highlighting characteristics and specificities of García Márquez’s production, Cristóbal Pera, in the book El escándalo del siglo (2018), compiles fifty of his journalistic texts, published between 1950 and 1984. In these texts, the constant presence of animals is evident—a feature that had already been noted by Jacques Joset (1974) as one of the significant aspects of García Márquez’s work that has yet to receive due critical attention. Aiming to help fill this gap, this research seeks to analyze the tension between the real and the fictional, as well as the presence of animals, through an approach that draws on Carlo Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm to detect the traces, tracks, or clues left by García Márquez—the great writer, Nobel Laureate in Literature (1982)—within García Márquez the journalist, across eleven texts from El escándalo del siglo: “Una equivocación explicable” (1950), “El asesino de los corazones solitarios” (1950), “El tigre de Aracataca” (1955), “Sólo doce horas para salvarlo” (1958), “6 de junio de 1958: Caracas sin agua” (1958), “Los cubanos frente al bloqueo” (1978), “Cuento de horror para la Nochevieja” (1980), “La poesía, al alcance de los niños” (1981), “El río de la vida” (1981), “Bogotá 1947” (1981), and “Vuelta a la semilla” (1983). To conduct this study, we have drawn upon the contributions of philosophers and theorists who have addressed the intersections between journalism and literature, the boundaries between reality and fiction, and the concept of animality, including Gustavo Castro (2010), Felipe Pena (2022), Jacques Gilard (2006), Luiz Costa Lima (2006), Umberto Eco (2024), Carlo Ginzburg (2007), Wolfgang Iser (2002), Jacques Derrida (2002), Maria Esther Maciel (2023), J. M. Coetzee (2002), Gabriel Giorgi (2011), Irlemar Chiampi (2015), among others.