This is a García Márquez’s short essay about the art of short story writing versus novel writing. The title plays on the Spanish idiom “cuento chino” (literally “Chinese tale”) which means a tall tale or far-fetched story, like “cock and bull story” in English. I’ve translated it as “tall tale” to preserve the playful questioning nature of the original title.
The essay maintains García Márquez’s characteristic conversational and humorous tone, including his anecdotes about the shortest story ever written, his comparison of novels to laying bricks versus stories being like pouring concrete, and his candid discussion about how experimental short stories helped him break free from the style of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” to write “The Autumn of the Patriarch.”
Is Every Story a Tall Tale?
By Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Fausto Adams
Writing a novel is laying bricks. Writing a short story is pouring concrete. I don’t know whose precise phrase that is. I’ve heard and repeated it for so long without anyone claiming it that I might end up believing it’s mine. There’s another comparison that’s the poor relative of the first: the short story is an arrow in the bullseye, and the novel is hunting rabbits. In any case, this reader’s question offers a good opportunity to circle back once more, as always, on the differences between two distinct yet confusable literary genres. One reason for this might be the confusion of attributing the differences to the length of the text, with genre distinctions between short and long stories. The difference is valid between one story and another, but not between story and novel.
The shortest story I know is by the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso, recent Prince of Asturias Award winner. It goes like this: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
Nothing more. There’s another from The Thousand and One Nights, whose text I don’t have at hand, which gives me cramps of envy. It’s the story of a fisherman who asks to borrow a sinker for his net from another fisherman’s wife, with the promise of giving her in return the first fish he catches, and when she receives it and opens it to fry it, she finds in its stomach a diamond the size of an almond.
More than the story itself, stunning in its simplicity, this one interests me now because it raises another mystery of the genre: if the one lending the sinker weren’t a woman but another man, the story would lose its charm: it wouldn’t exist. Why? Who knows! One more mystery of a genre that’s mysterious par excellence.
Cervantes’ Exemplary Novels are truly exemplary, but some aren’t novels. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad wrote The Duelists, an equally exemplary story with more than one hundred twenty pages, which is often confused with a novel because of its length. Director Ridley Scott turned it into an excellent film without altering its identity as a story. The silly thing at this point would be to wonder if Conrad would have given a damn about being confused.
Intensity and internal unity are essential in a short story and not so much in the novel, which fortunately has other resources to convince. For the same reason, when you finish reading a story you can imagine whatever occurs to you about the before and after, and all that will continue being part of the material and magic of what you read. The novel, on the other hand, must carry everything inside. One could say, without throwing in the towel, that the difference ultimately could be as subjective as so many beauties of real life.
Good examples of compact and intense stories are two jewels of the genre: The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs, and The Man on the Street by Georges Simenon. The detective story, in its separate world, survives uninvited because most of its addicts are more interested in the plot than in the mystery. Except in the very ancient and never surpassed Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, a Greek drama that has the unity and tension of a short story, in which the detective discovers that he himself is his father’s murderer.
The short story seems to be humanity’s natural genre because of its spontaneous incorporation into daily life. Perhaps it was unknowingly invented by the first caveman who went out hunting one afternoon and didn’t return until the next day with the excuse of having fought a battle to the death with a beast maddened by hunger. On the other hand, what his wife did when she realized her man’s heroism was nothing more than a tall tale might have been the first and perhaps the longest novel of the Stone Age.
I don’t know what to say about the supposition that the short story is a refreshing pause between two novels, but it could be a theoretical speculation that has nothing to do with my experiences as a writer. Groping in the darkness, I’d dare to think that there are quite a few writers who have attempted both genres at the same time and not often with the same fortune in both. Such is the case with William Somerset Maugham, whose works—like Hemingway’s—are better known through cinema. Among his numerous stories, one can’t forget P&O—acronym for the Pacific and Orient shipping company—which is the terrible and pathetic drama of a rich English colonist who dies of relentless hiccups in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
(…) About the other supposition that the short story can be a practice genre for undertaking a novel, I confess I did it and it wasn’t bad for learning to write The Autumn of the Patriarch. My mind was stuck in the traditional formula of One Hundred Years of Solitude, on which I’d worked without lifting my head for two years. Everything I tried to write came out the same and I couldn’t evolve toward a different book. However, the world of the eternal dictator, resolved and written with the judicious style of previous books, would have been no less than two thousand pages of indigestible and useless rolls. So, I decided to seek at any risk a compressed prose that would get me out of the academic trap to invite the reader on a new adventure.
I thought I’d found the solution through a series of notes and ideas for postponed stories, which I subjected without the least shame to all kinds of formal arbitrariness until finding what I was looking for in the new book. They’re experimental stories I worked on for more than a year and were later published with their own life in the book of Innocent Eréndira: Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles; The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, which is a single sentence with no punctuation other than minimal commas for breathing; and others that didn’t pass the test and sleep the sleep of the just in the trash drawer.
That’s how I found the embryo of The Autumn, which is a Russian salad of experiments copied from other bad or good writers of the last century. Phrases that would have required dozens of pages are resolved in two or three to say the same thing, skipping over thugs, through the conscious violation of parsimonious codes and the dictatorial grammar of academies.
The book, right out of the gate, was a commercial disaster. Many faithful readers of One Hundred Years felt disappointed and demanded the bookseller return their money. To top it off, the Spanish edition was falling apart in people’s hands due to a manufacturing defect, and a friend consoled me with a good joke: “I read The Autumn leaf by leaf.” Many persisted in reading, others managed halfway through, and over time enough remained captive so I wouldn’t be embarrassed to continue in the trade.
Today it’s my most scrutinized book in universities of various countries, and new generations can read it as if it were the twilight of a two-hundred-year-old Tarzan. If someone protests and throws it out the window, it’s because they don’t like it, but not because they don’t understand it. And sometimes, fortunately, someone hasn’t been missing to pick it up from the floor.
Source: Gabriel García Márquez
More books by Gabriel García Márquez:
Fair Use Disclaimer
This website publishes excerpts of content from other authors under the Fair Use doctrine as permitted by the U.S. Copyright Office (17 U.S.C. § 107) for educational, informational, commentary, and criticism purposes. All excerpted content is properly attributed to its original source and copyright holder. If you believe any content infringes on your copyright, please contact us immediately at admin@faustoadams.com
