In 1996, while on tour with Radiohead, Virginia-born singer Mark Linkous, leader and often sole member of the band Sparklehorse, all but died in his hotel room after a massive overdose. He lay for several weeks in a hospital bed, undergoing operations to save what was left of him. *Blanket … me, sweet nurse … and help me keep from burning*, he sings, in *Saint Mary*. The song, like all of Sparklehorse’s masterpieces, lingers in this hospital bed, the supreme dark place, a cradle of dreaming where he somehow touches death from both sides at once. Indeed, this simultaneous dimming and brightening of consciousness defines Sparklehorse’s musical universe.



Many of Linkous’s songs yearn to nestle into very quiet places – deep underwater, hovering in mist and rain, sprawled out in the desert, on the moon or in the coldness of outer space: *I'm so sorry … my spirit's rarely in my body; it wanders through the dry country … looking for a good place to rest*. But there’s always a demonic counterpoint to this, so that his weary soul expects no quarter in its slumber: *I would sleep in the fire, with snakes I have sired*. From the title of his penultimate album – *Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain* – through the songs: *with rocks in my dress, and smoke in my hair … I walked into a lake, to get some sleep down in there … will you promise me not to rest me out at sea, but on a fiery river boat that’s rickety*, he searches for a place to sleep, and watches as legions of phantoms emerge from behind his closed eyes.



Fourteen years ago, after a brief run of mainstream popularity, Linkous awoke from his hospital bed and began to create more intentionally cultish and transcendentally strange music, knowing that he had his greatest work still to do. Today, perhaps, he has finished it. He has, at the very least, come as close as he ever will: a few weeks ago, he shot himself in the heart in Knoxville, TN.



 



1. American Suicide / Ghost Folk



The news was shocking, as suicides always are, and for faithful listeners the end of his musical output will always have come too soon. But, in the larger scheme of his artistic landscape, his death is something other than a tragedy. It is, rather, a deepening of the same sleep from which the music issues. His final act is prefigured by and in many ways completes his musical project: that of tracing the contours of deathly America, of the dead that inhabit America, of dying in America and America the dead. But in a way, this realization only increases its own mystery: where does death, let alone suicide, find itself in a nation founded on the mythic assurance of novelty and youth, the headlong rush of the immortal Frontier?



This suicide raises another unanswerable question: who is it that we have lost? Someone named Mark Linkous, or something called Sparklehorse? It seems rash and insensitive to answer with a band name, as opposed to a real individual who in the end must somehow have been more than the sum of his sonic experiments. But what has silenced itself goes beyond the human, under death to some other place, into the inhuman staticky whisper that distilled an impossible space-time of fevered innocence and rot, both always-already gone and only just dawning. *Good morning my child, you’ve not got anyplace … to be.*



Sparklehorse’s America is one with a lonely interior, haunted by specters of decay, windswept stasis, unheeded wisdom festering unseen *to break and rot a whispered fate*. But he’s not without company in this America: that of the subgenre that has burgeoned in the last two decades into what might be called *ghost folk*. At the nexus of alt-country, lo-fi, and rugged, raspy balladeering, its constituents range from Bonnie “Prince” Billy and M. Ward; to Band of Horses, Iron & Wine, and Bon Iver; to the more pastoral melodies of Fleet Foxes and Midlake; back to the Wilco of *A.M. *and *Summerteeth*, and forward into the more beguiling corners of their *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* and *A Ghost is Born*; incorporating the starker, sparer ruminations of Vic Chesnutt and Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, who meet on Sparklehorse’s *Dark Night of the Soul*, his final work, with DJ Danger Mouse and David Lynch (which we’ll come back to).



Sparklehorse was squarely at the vanguard of ghost folk in the mid-90’s, already cutting his Appalachian instrumental core – banjo, finger-picked guitars, violin – with a strong dose of synths, organs, vocal distortions, mechanical drum triggers, and heavy blankets of feedback and reverb, both coddling the timorous acoustic lines and breathing waves of plague across them, corroding his whispered vocals into a far vaster tide of digital sequencing and stray radio bleeps, static, groans, bees buzzing at the margins of the melody. *Can you feel the rings … of Saturn on your fingers? Can you taste the ghosts who shed their creaking hosts?* he whispers, and, as long as he keeps whispering, you’re pretty sure you can. But by the time he stops, something else has come into view.



 



2. The Dim Interior



What makes Sparklehorse literally more visionary than other ghost folk singers is his willingness to peer more deeply into dead America, to see beyond the drifting specters, to where new, living forms are taking shape: *the tree you planted has become fecund … with kamikaze hummingbirds … wings of hundreds of beats per second, of people whose wings are just a blur. *Whereas M. Ward or Iron & Wine channel the ghosts of Guthrie and Dylan, and the ghosts of abandoned lovers or the Holy Ghost, Sparklehorse sings *as* a ghost; his voice comes from the near side of death rather than the far side of life. Now, as Linkous finally slumbers in eternity, Sparklehorse’s music reaches us from a place “deeper than death” (as Jeffrey Eugenides once described suicide), maybe hell, maybe the Fountain of Youth, maybe both at once. As a ghost, he sees beyond ghosts, to a multitude that erupts, with renewed complexity, back into the carnal.



His music strains to overflow itself in the very site of its finitude, at the base of its unconsciousness, deeper than death. *Please … doctor, pleeeeeeeease*, he pleads from his hospital bed. *Please send me more … yellow birds … for the dim interior, *he pleads in another song, readying to go into this place, both graveyard and nursery, with only his horse for company. This dim interior is our leitmotif, the place we want to know about, Sparklehorse’s America. It’s a place of terror and solace, resignation and possibility: simultaneously the only place left to hide, and also the source of all that’s frightening, a womb of both Oedipal retreat and unpredictable fecundity, breeding uncanny juxtapositions of the grotesque and the comforting: *in the bloody elevator, rising, for their first cup of tea (of the day)*.



Like falling asleep, lying ill, or readying to die, fading into the dim interior brings it with a gathering haze of non-differentiation, whereby the mind draws fewer and fewer moral and interpretative distinctions among things, approaching a state where it can hardly distinguish among them physically, where edges and borders fall away, or reveal that they have always been provisional. Here the creatures of the world breed together into one body that is also infinitely many. This un-differentiating “dimness” can, to the sufficiently wonderstruck, open up the combinatory powers of plastic dream: the demonic craft of fusing what sunlit nature endeavors to keep apart.



This is what Renaissance alchemists called *Coincidentia Oppositorum*, the merging of opposites. It’s the basis for the grotesque creatures Hieronymus Bosch painted under cover of medieval Christianity. Bosch’s chimeras, in turn, live on in Sparklehorse: *I wore a rooster's blood when it flew … like doves, I'm a bog of poisoned frogs … I wish I had, a horse's head, a tiger's heart, an apple bed … she was born, with the wings of a hawk, but now she combs her hair with blood.* “Sparklehorse” itself, of course, is Linkous’ supreme chimera, a compound of physical beast and trick of light: Sparkle, a fantasia, the irreducible awed shine at the core of all terror and poignancy, plus horse, whose breadth of American symbolism can never be put into words.



The journey into the dim interior yields the discovery of a nation as well as a self, the United States as states of being as well as swaths of turf. The world of childhood and of an America returned to its youthful, unstable origins come together, at once alluring and obscene, ripe for reinvention, suffused with nostalgia but never despair. Like Jeffrey Beaumont rooting through the dirt in search of a “real mystery” buried under his ostensibly placid North Carolina town in Lynch’s *Blue Velvet*, Sparklehorse makes all of America seem alive and ready for adventure, but this life is a kind of death, or un-death, the seething presence of things that only children can see, but that maybe only adults ought to.



Rather than through a European esoteric lineage, Sparklehorse relates to his family of animal totems in ways that seem innately ritualistic, as if improvised rituals were the only means by which men could commune with nature, today as in antiquity: *I drink my liquor from the palm, of a child who spoke in tongues … and smelled like sun*; *white blood of wolves must be drained*; *I closed my eyes and killed a cock; bring me some luck, little Juuuuuuuuunebug. *Blood, feathers, bees, oceans, sky: these are the elements, and they return again and again, stewing in one another’s heat, recombining in an infinity of new forms, genesis and apocalypse in nature's very essence: *seas will always boil, trees will turn to soil.*



The American backcountry is our theater of alchemy and ritual, the place not only where these rituals are performed, but where they are invented, and not only where they are invented but where they actually *work: the only things that I really need, is water, a gun ... and rabbits.* In this regard, Sparklehorse is the heretic of ghost folk, riding off on his own into uncharted territory, where wandering and sleep, grotesquerie and nothingness, resting and restlessness, can never be separated. They combine to make Sparklehorse’s best songs at once intricate and urgent, bizarre but never alienating.



3. The Dark Night of the Soul



Frederick Jackson Turner opens his famous 1893 *Frontier Thesis* with the claim that, in penetrating the North American continent, the colonists lost their European identity and fell in with the land’s primal ways, exchanging their cultural inheritance for an implacable ethos of progress, striving, movement.



Sparklehorse’s dim interior is the corollary and hidden ground of this defining American myth. It’s the shadowy Doppelgänger of the sunbaked West – a stand-in for the uncharted, still-primal territory lying in wait when the fantasy of endless discovery can no longer be maintained, or even convincingly reconstructed in celluloid – a graven image of American death.



This location (or the image thereof) is the core of David Lynch’s films, and it’s the source of the ever-widening field of the American Surreal, which he, more than anyone, has brought into being. In *Lost Highway, *it’s the no-where desert at midnight, the flaming cabin, the naked woman disappearing over the horizon, and the “Mystery Man” wielding his camera like a weapon of satanic vengeance. This is where the legend of speed, gangsters and porn stars, the 20th century’s answer to cowboys and Indians, flickers and forms the forbidden image of its own terrifying, nonsensical authority, before warping and finally fading to black. But even then, the Highway insists on continued, frenzied adventure, even as it veers past what can be defeated, discovered, domesticated, or even enjoyed.



Lynch’s fidelity to the Highway's code of wandering has something of the quintessentially American naïve in it, enough to invite comparison with Sparklehorse’s ride into the unknown. But there is a difference: Lynch is all too knowing, and so his assumption of innocence smacks of irony. Sparklehorse was always an artist of the palpable and the all-at-once, while Lynch is first and foremost an artist of the fantasy and desire of cinema itself; the fact that he’s also a filmmaker is secondary. This self-referential twist means that Lynch’s art is fully aware of how the cinematic is constituted by that which it purports to hide – the hallucinatory frontier of action, romance, celebrity and detective work is not just circumstantially but *necessarily *founded on disorientation and horror.



Because of this, Lynch could only commit genuine suicide through cinema, raising the Mystery Man’s weapon to his own head (while, perhaps, Linkous could only achieve artistic fullness through real, physical suicide). Lynch’s filmic suicide arrived with 2006’s *Inland Empire, *his self-professed final Hollywood project and first to be shot on digital video rather than film. Here, his trademark interplay of reality and illusion curls back in on itself into an undifferentiated gloom where things can only *appear*; any exchange across a frontier can no longer have any meaning. *Inland Empire* no longer skirts the dim interior but becomes it, sucked into its own mystery.



Here at last, in his most disturbing creation, Lynch found the true seriousness of childlike dream, which he’d long evaded through his sophisticated irony. He also found himself about to collide with the imminently suicidal Sparklehorse. In 2009, hailing from two different reaches of the American Surreal, they merged under the auspices of DJ Danger Mouse's concept album *Dark Night of the Soul*. Curiously, mashup artist Brian Burton’s DJ moniker shares with “Sparklehorse” the same chimerical form (there were debates at the beginning of their collaboration as to whether it would be credited to  “Dangerhorse” or “Sparklemouse"). Burton himself has an alchemical propensity for heretical fusion, starting with his blend of the Beatles' *White Album* and Jay-Z's *Black Album* to create *The* *Grey Album*, which provoked a virtual inquisition from the label EMI to prevent its release. *Dark Night of the Soul* faced similar legal hurdles, so that at first it could only be heard in L.A. and Miami gallery spaces displaying Lynch’s accompanying photographs. It was not until recently, at almost exactly the time of Sparklehorse’s death, that news came through that the album will finally be available in stores this summer.



As a piece of music, it doesn’t really register. It’s too diffuse, filled out by a variety of vocalists who don’t seem to share a vision, even though Sparklehorse wrote most of the lyrics, including the two songs that David Lynch sings. But as a work of conceptual art, it’s brilliant, even a touch devastating: fusing two great American guerilla artists at the twilights of their respective careers, it’s a Dark Night for all Souls concerned, but also a reflection on the possibility of American goodbyes, and unanticipated rebirths, and the real abiding mystery that underlies both.



For us, the most immediately pressing mystery is: what becomes of the horse? It’s a question that Linkous anticipates, and leaves us with a question of his own: *will my pony recognize my voice in hell? Will he still be blind or do they go by smell?* As the dim interior fades into night, he wanders in a fever of synaesthetic confusion that seems eerily prescient, as though his horse had regressed into a pony at the same rate as he had regressed from adulthood through sickness, drug abuse, depression, maybe insanity, into the delicately recast form of a childlike seer, singing just loud enough into the dark to wake the spirits from their *spirit ditch,* for *one last dance in this parking lot, *as* the sun burned down the West*. His despair that *I’ll never find my pony along the roiling swells *remains thankfully unwarranted: Sparklehorse glimmers unflaggingly among the dead, no matter who manages to find what, and no matter what remains forever lost.



This is what finally allows us to say:



goodnightsparklehorseasleepinthebellyofamerica.

REPRINTED FROM 1980 MARCH ISSUE



 



*Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1928. His *No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories* was published in America in 1968. *One Hundred Years of Solitude* followed in 1970; *Leaf Storm and Other Stories* in 1972; *The Autumn of the Patriarch* in 1976;* Innocent Erendira and other Stories* in 1978; and *In Evil Hour* in 1979.*



* *



*The following interview was arranged by Adam Nossiter, and took place on December 2, 1979.*



* *



*This is a direct transcription from the Spanish; *The Advocate* is grateful to Rodrigo Garcia for his kind service as interpreter.*



* *



**Advocate**: I’ll begin by asking how you started writing.



 



**García Márquez**: By drawing.



 



**Advocate**: By drawing?



 



**García Márquez**: When I was very little, before I could read or write, I would draw stories in cartoons.



 



**Advocate**: You then went on and became a journalist. How do you feel your training in journalism affected your writing?



 



**García Márquez**: I think they’re complementary activities. Working in journalism on an every-day basis lets you get loose and lose that timid respect you have toward writing, in the beginning, that is, when you begin doing journalism or fiction. Then you get to a point where journalism *has *done exactly that: enabled you to get used to writing, easily and every day. And then fiction gives you ideas for your journalism. So they are complementary activities. And, very important, journalism was a way of living, to make money while writing. In the long run, fiction has enabled me to improve the literary quality of my journalistic work, and journalism has helped me to be aware of every-day events, or every-day life, which is helpful for my fiction. With time, literature and journalism—which so far have been parallel activities—with time they will converge. Right now I am looking for a synthesis, similar to what Truman Capote did with *In Cold Blood*. That’s simply an example; I don’t consider it an influence. The ideal thing right now would be to find an event in every-day life that I could deal with from a literary point of view, in order to prove that there is very little difference, a very small gap, between journalism and literature. Also to prove that every-day events, that reality has the same literary value as, for example, poetry.



 



**Advocate**: Is that actually what you are working on now?



 



**García Márquez**: Right now I still haven’t come across that event to work on. So what I am doing is writing short stories based on true experiences of Latin Americans living in Europe. I am dealing with these events, these experiences not from a journalistic point of view, or as memoirs, but simply from a literary point of view, giving them a *literary *value. In any case, in all my books, in my entire work, I can demonstrate that there is not one single line, not one single sentence, that is not based on real life. I consider my great problem to be that I lack imagination. If life doesn’t give me a fact, I am unable to invent one. I am perfectly willing and able to prove that, line by line, sentence by sentence, in every single one of my books. If I had the time, I would consider writing a book in the form of memoirs, talking about the origins of every single fact and adventure in my books. This book would let me make fun of all the critics and analysts of my books, who come up with facts that have nothing to do with what is written.



 



**Advocate**: How did the extraordinary popularity of *One Hundred Years of Solitude *affect your writing? I think there’s a certain break there: *The Autumns of the Patriarch *is very different in style and theme.



 



**García Márquez**: Do you know *Leaf Storm*?



 



**Advocate**: Yes.



 



**García Márquez**: I’m not sure if people have noticed this, but I feel there is a very close relationship between *Leaf Storm *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch* my first and last books. A lot has been said to the effect that *One Hundred Years of Solitude* was the culmination, the climax, of all the books that came before. I feel that the culmination of my work thus far has been *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. The book I was looking for from the very beginning was *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. I’d even started *The Autumn of the Patriarch *before *One Hundred Years of Solitude*, but I’d found there was a sort of wall, something stopping me from actually getting into the book. The thing that stopped me was *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. I have the impression that every book is an apprenticeship for the next. There’s a progression from book to book—but it’s a progression that can be in one direction or another. Not really a progression, in fact, but an investigation, which takes place from book to book. In parentheses, within my own process of investigation and evolution, I believe that one book is the best of them all, and that is *No One Writes to the Colonel*. I say sometimes, jokingly, but I do believe it, that I had to write *One Hundred Years of Solitude *so that people would read *No One Writes to the Colonel*.



And with respect to the change in style between *One Hundred Years of Solitude *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch*, I found it easy for two reasons—no, three reasons. First of all, there was the relaxation created by my having written *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. I was less scared of any literary adventure. Secondly, *The Autumn of the Patriarch *was a very expensive book to write. I wrote for seven years practically every day. On lucky days, I’d be able to finish three lines the way I liked them. So in fact *One Hundred Years of Solitude* financed *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. The third reason for the different approach in *The Autumn of the Patriarch* was that the theme demanded it. Written in the rather linear fashion of *One Hundred Years of Solitude* or the other books, *The Autumn of the Patriarch *would have turned out to be just another story of a dictator. It would have been a very long story, and much more boring than it actually is. All the literary resources I used in *The Autumn of the Patriarch*, among which were flagrant violations of Spanish grammar, enabled me to say more in a shorter space and penetrate more deeply into all aspects of the book, because you don’t go down straight as in a lift, but in a sort of spiral.



The relationship between *Leaf Storm *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch* is that they are both basically on the same theme: they are both monologues around a corpse. When I wrote *Leaf Storm*. I had had very little literary experience, writing experience. I wanted to find a way of telling a story that happened within someone. At that time I found only two models to help me with this. One was Faulkner’s *As I Lay Dying*. The book is a series of monologues, in which each monologue is preceded by the name of the character it belongs to. I liked Faulkner’s method, but I didn’t like the fact that he had to pinpoint each of the characters; I think character has to identify itself in the course of the monologue. The second model was *Mrs. Dalloway, *though I realized that the technique of interior monologue in Virginia Woolf’s work required an extraordinary literary training, which I didn’t have at the time. I found a compromise between these two models, a formula for monologue that lets you recognize the characters without having to be given their names. That of course is a limitation, because in order to avoid confusion I had to deal with only three characters. I chose an old man, whose voice was recognizable because hew was old, his daughter, whose voice is easily recognized. Mixing together these monologues and leading the reader around, that was my approach in structuring the novel. Twenty-five years later, with five books behind me, and with the security from every point of view which *One Hundred Years of Solitude *had given me, I could plunge into the adventures of *The Autumn of the Patriarch* without fear of breaking my head. It’s a multiple monologue, where it no longer matters who is speaking. It arrives at what I’d been looking for for twenty years, which is a social monologue. What is talking in the books is the whole of society; it’s everyone. They just simply pass the words from one to another: it does not matter who is speaking.



 



**Advocate**: Which suits the subject, because it is to such a large extent a political novel.



 



**García Márquez**: I feel a theme like that cannot be treated in any other way. I can tell you about the other formula I had for *The Autumn and the Patriarch*, which I didn’t use.



 



**Advocate**: Please do.



 



**García Márquez**: Many years before writing *One Hundred Years of Solitude* I started writing *The Autumn of the Patriarch *as a very long, single monologue, that of the dictator as he was being put on trial. The first line of the book was “Before we begin, take those lights away from here!” That monologue enabled me to explore the whole of the dictator’s life, but it had many problems. First, I was subject to only one point of view—that of the dictator. I was also subject to the style of the dictator, and worst of all, to the cultural level of the dictator, which is very low, like that of all dictators. So of course that didn’t work for me, because I was not so much interested in what the dictator thought as in what the whole of the society under the dictator thought.



 



**Advocate**: What is in Latin American history, od you feel, that lends itself to literary transmutation? All your works are set very specifically in the Latin American experience, and yet they’ve been internationally popular. To what do you attribute that?



 



**García Márquez**: I am an enemy of all theoretical speculation. What is amazing about critics is how from one point, which they declare a starting point, they draw all sorts of conclusions. For example, the critics tell me that my books have a universal value. The fact that the books are very popular throughout the world the world probably proves this is so. But if one day I realize why my books are internationally popular, I will not be able to keep on writing, or I will have to keep on writing for purely commercial reasons. I feel that literary work has to be done honestly and in order to write honestly you have to have an enormous unknown, unconscious zone. Hemingway talked of what he called the iceberg, because above the water you can see only a tenth of an iceberg, but that tenth is there only because the other nineteenths are underneath, holding it up. Even if I could explore what all the unconscious factors in my work are, I wouldn’t do it. I feel there is something intuitive that partly accounts for my popularity. When a writer writes about things that actually happened to people, then people all over the world want to hear about them, regardless of culture, race, or language. I feel that man is the center of the universe, that he is the only thing that matters. I remember reading, when I was very young, an interview with Faulkner in which he said that he believed man was indestructible. At that time I didn’t exactly understand what he meant, but now I am convinced he was right. When you think in terms of an individual, you realize that the individual has an end with death, but if you think in terms of a species, you realize that the species is eternal. This conviction obviously leads to a political belief and it also leads to a literary belief and whoever has this conviction can write literature of universal value.



 



**Advocate**: Are your books—I know you say they are based on reality—at all influenced by folklore and fairy tales> In structure, at least, there is a resemblance.



 



**García Márquez**: Not folklore. Folklore is a word that is badly baptized. It shouldn’t be used like that. Folklore is a word employed by the English to describe manifestations of other peoples, of other cultures, which probably aren’t manifestations of those people at all. It ends in tourism. I’d rather not talk about folklore at all. With popular legends, it’s different. My original influences, in fact, are from popular legend. Every popular legend has already had a literary evolution, and it incorporates two realities. All of my books have their source in reality, but definitely by way of those popular legends. I don’t know if it’s a reality or not that the dead sometimes come out of their tombs, but it’s a reality that people believe it. So what interests me is not whether it happens, but the fact that some people believe it does. And if you just add up these beliefs you can create a whole new universe.



 



**Advocate**: So the distinction between folklore and legend is that folklore has an element of condescension?



 



**García Márquez**: Worse than that, commercialization.



 



**Advocate**: When Americans think of Latin America, they see it as very religious, and I’m interested in what seems to me the small role that organized religion plays in your works.



 



**García Márquez**: Americans are right when they think of Latin America as very religious, but you’re wrong if you think of it as very Catholic, or very Buddhist, or any other official religion. People are very religious in Latin America because they live in such a state of forsakenness. For many years, they have been expecting the Coming- of some natural force. And the force they are waiting for is probably within themselves. But until they discover the force, they will have to fall back on all kinds of religious help. My books are charged with that sort of religiosity. In general, the main religion is Catholicism as you can see in my books, but also present is the inadequacy of the religion to answer the questions one asks oneself.



 



**Advocate**: You’ve chosen to leave Colombia, and you’ve led a somewhat nomadic life ever since. Why is this, and has the perspective gained helped [sic] your work?



 



**García Márquez**: I left Colombia for purely casual reasons. I didn’t decide to leave. When I was very young, after having finished my first book, I had political problems—the only ones I’ve ever had in Colombia. So little by little, I just stayed away from Colombia. It wasn’t a decision, ever, really. I just realized after many years that I’d been living abroad. The fact that I left Colombia had a great effect on me, not merely from a literary point of view, but also a personal one. From Europe I acquired a totally different perspective not only on what Latin America was but on what the whole of America was. From that perspective I realized that although I come from a specific country, the most important thing is to belong to the whole of the continent. From Europe I saw the whole of America, including the United States, like a huge ship, a huge ocean liner, with first class, economy class, cellars, sections for sailors, with great injustices between the different classes, and I have the conviction that if this ship sinks, everyone sinks with it in Colombia, I knew only Colombians. In Europe, sitting at a café, I met the whole continent. All frontiers of America and Latin America disappeared when regarded from abroad. All the countries across the ocean seemed the same.



 



**Advocate**: Can one take this one step further and transcend all national and geographical boundaries? Or is the American experience so very different from anyone else’s?



 



**García Márquez**: No, I can’t transcend. I can only go so far. I am always conscious that, in that ship, I belong to the tourist class. And Sartre said that class consciousness begins when you realize that you can’t change class—you can’t move from one to the other. But to go back to your question, the Americas are definitely coming together. It’s a historic process that cannot be stopped. And ultimately the continent will unite. There’s a very evident process of trans-culturalization. There are conscious efforts on the part of the United States to impose a certain culture on Latin America. I don’t like the ways in which this culture is being imposed, I also don’t like the aspects of this culture that are being imposed, rather than those that I consider more important. I like, for example, the influence Latin America music has gotten from jazz. I don’t like the way people say the spark of life is Coca-Cola. That’s what they say in Spanish ads. But you can’t create a wall to stop all flow of culture in Latin America. Similarly, the United States can’t create a wall to stop what is happening in the other direction. Even with the enormous resources the Untied States has, it hasn’t been able to stop Spanish from being spoken more and more within the United States. Candidates for presidency must have in mind, more and more each day, the Spanish and Latin American vote within the country. And when a Latin American author comes to this country, American journalists want to interview him. These are just symptoms of a fusion that will take place—speaking in very broad historical terms. This will be a very dramatic process, a very hard one for both countries, but one that is fated. Personally, I am happy it will happen like that. Europe interests me less and les every day.



 



**Advocate**: Although you are setting your latest stories there?



 



**García Márquez**: These stories will demonstrate what I am trying to say. After many years of experience in Europe, Latin Americans have realized that they can never actually get to Europe.



 



**Advocate**: One of the most important causes of this trans-culturalization has been the blossoming of Latin American writing in the last thirty years. Do you see yourself as part of this development in Hispanic literature, or, influenced by Faulkner and Woolf as you’ve said, do you like to think of yourself in a broader international context?



 



**García Márquez**: I consider Faulkner a Latin American writer.



 



**Advocate**: Why?



 



**García Márquez**: Because he writes of the Gulf of Mexico, of Louisiana, and his books are filled with the black element. I don’t consider myself more international than other Latin American writers. All of us have been influenced by Faulkner more than by each other—those who haven’t ben influenced by Faulkner have been influenced by other writers, usually Hemingway.



 



**Advocate**: It’s been said that *One Hundred Years of Solitude* is the *Don Quixote* of South American literature, that one can look to a steady progression of Spanish literature. Do you agree with that, or do you think there is something unique in Latin American writing?



 



**García Márquez**: I’d like to make a correction. I didn’t mean Faulkner was a writer of Latin America; he is a writer of the Caribbean. Of course, I feel that Latin America literature is a branch of Spanish literature. I feel that that relation is more obvious in Latin America with regard to Span than it is in the United States with regard to England. There are moments in Hispanic literature when it is very difficult to distinguish who is Spanish and who is Latin American. In any case, we are all ultimately descendants of Cervantes, and of the heritage of Spanish poetry. And something that has always influenced this literature is that there are two ways to go. The Latin Americans influenced the Spanish writers as much as the Spanish influenced the Latin Americans. There is a unity in the development of Spanish literature, which starts with the first anonymous poetry, and which goes as far as today’s Latin American literature. Speaking in these terms, I am part of this big current, just as I am not part of a current beginning with Shakespeare or with Fielding, although I may have been influenced by them. I also believe I have been influenced by Greek classic theatre.



 



**Advocate**: You use an epigraph from “Antigone” for *Leaf Storm*.



 



**García Márquez**: I feel there’s something from Sophocles in all my books, because of what we were saying at the beginning, that every great writer’s main concern is what happens to people.



 



**Advocate**: I’m not sure this question can be answered, but can you say what characterizes or defines that current of Spanish literature?



 



**García Márquez**: It’s very complicated. For a complicated question I’ll give you a complicated answer. And for a grandiloquent question I’ll give you a grandiloquent answer. The main value of Spanish literature is the quest for true identity.



 



**Advocate**: What sort of differences do you see, then, between contemporary Latin American writers and Spanish writers? It’s been said that the Latin Americans are much more fertile and imaginative.



 



**García Márquez**: In any case, because of the development of two different geographies and of the two different countries—because what has happened to Spain and what has happened to Latin America is so different—there is a clear divergence. Spanish writers nowadays are still concerned with getting out of the drama of the Civil War and then out of the swamp which was the Franco regime. Whereas in Latin America, there’ve been many different political and social movements for many years—they’ve forced writers to ask themselves “Who the hell are we?” Literature is a social product, even if its elaboration is individual. I can’t think of a Latin American writer who today would think of writing “Hamlet”, for instance. Or for that matter a Spanish writer who could write *Pedro Paramo *by Juan Rulfo. In spite of the differences between Latin America and Spain that are due to certain political and historical events, Hispanic literature as a whole still has a certain continuity. Maybe Latin American literature is richer and more interesting than that in Spain. Although Spain had the Arabic influence in the Middle Ages—which is reflected still and will continue to be reflected forever in Latin America—Latin America has had the great black element, and the great contributions of immigrants from all the countries of the world. It’s been said that Latin American nations are made up of all the wastes of Europe. Of course, this makes Latin America different, but there can be no question that there is one single, united Hispanic culture.



 



**Advocate**: I’d like to ask a simpler question, and that’s merely what contemporary writers you admire?



 



**García Márquez**: There are many and varied ones, because there are many different reasons and motives for my admiration. Whenever I’m asked that question I have the fear, not of making mistakes with the ones I name, but of making the mistake of not naming many others. And sometimes I am scared that what I say about other writers might be more influential than I’m aware of. Within the Latin American context, the one I admire most is the one who has written the least, and that is Juan Rulfo from Mexico. What do you think of Graham Greene?



 



**Advocate**: I like some of his novels very much.



 



**García Márquez**: I mention him because he is the only living, great English novelist that comes to mind. I think he is one of the greatest novelists of this century. But there are not many good English writers now. Their ninetheenth-century [sic] achievement was what was most remarkable. No one’s ever equaled that. The Americans were the only people to come close. With Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and *el loco de Mississippi*.



 



**Advocate**: Mark Twain?



 



**García Márquez**: Mark Twain. And the next generation, with Hemingway and Faulkner. But no one’s ever come up to the English.



 



**Advocate**: What about the nineteenth-century Russians?



 



**García Márquez**: There are simply more English novelists—the total mass is so much greater. And that means there is more flexibility, more variety. The Russians have surpassed the English on some themes, on some particular topics, but not in everything, or even most things. They’re like the Americans, specializing in certain things. Is Melville read in America, outside of schools? He is full of splendid things. I think he was the greatest writer America has had.



 



**Advocate**: Do you have any advice for people beginning to write?



 



**García Márquez**: The only possible advice is to keep on writing, to continue and continue to write. 



 

Where does Marcia from Minnetonka go at night? Who’s the lucky man?

Mindy and I say things under the jasmine trellis during lunch break. Where does Yvonne from Iceland smoke? Does Katherine from Texas spend tip dollars on cocaine, or is that a lie good as any? If Talia from Denmark and Mark from Boston are fucking in the swamps, where do they fuck, and how? Does she lie on her back, does he? Who takes the weight, is what I’d like to know.