APPLAUSE - AND A DIVERSITY OF OPINIONS
Author: By Robert Taylor Globe Staff
Date: Friday, October 22, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
When Prof. Juan Marichal of Harvard's Romance language department
yesterday morning announced to his students that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the
Colombian author, had been awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, the
class burst into applause. Boston's literary community seemed to agree, by and
large, despite notes of dissent and regret that once again the judges had
passed over Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer.
In New York, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, mentioned in Stockholm dispatches as
a leading American candidate, said: "I'm naturally pleased to be in such
company. No writer is going to object to the naming of Garcia Marquez. Of
course, you hear random rumors. I knew my name had come up. Usually, there
aren't leaks like that. But what the hell."
Here, a diversity of opinions was voiced. John Updike, author of 26
novels, books of poems and belles lettres, said: "Garcia Marquez certainly
deserves it. One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a thrilling piece of work, the
apogee of the Latin-American literary renaissance in novels. A fine choice,
but the Nobels, owing to geographical and other considerations, strike one as
slightly pinched. I'd rather have seen Borges get it; he's at the end of his
career. Marquez is a writer of true significance, yet offhand, I can't think
of anyone who has received the Nobel who has published less."
Justin Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said: "The award is
very important because it breaks open the Anglo-Saxon notion of what the novel
genre is all about. . . . Borges is a grand old man of international letters;
Marquez is fierce and adamant and completely new. Reading him can present an
unpleasant but overwhelming sense of reality. A terrific choice!"
Kaplan's wife, novelist Anne Bernays, said: "It's not a mistake. Every
writer I know will agree."
"He's an original," commented novelist and editor Robie Macauley. "Most
fiction writers will cheer about this one. I'm delighted not only with his
work but with the influence he's had on other writers. He's done so much for
putting the lavish imagination back into prose; younger writers aren't quite
so afraid of swimming freely. As for the Borges or Marquez question, I really
think it's a revival of the old Philip Rahv concept of writers as either
Palefaces or Redskins."
"I do not grudge Garcia Marquez the award, and I am glad he got it," said
Prof. Roberto Ruiz of Wheaton College, author of five novels and a volume of
poems, all in Spanish. "On the other hand - and I feel strongly about this -
there are at least a half-dozen Latin American writers more deserving of the
Nobel Prize: Juan Carlos Onetti, for example, or Adolfo Bioy-Casares, or
Borges. I suppose it depends on your concept of literature. If you consider
the novel depends on fantasies, fine; but the philosophical depth of those
older writers is absent, I'm sorry to say, in Garcia Marquez."
"He reaches across barriers and touches the lives of people in an
extraordinary way," Harvard's Marichal observed. "In a sense, Borges is at the
end of a more formal tradition; Garcia Marquez is at the turning point. He
combines critical appeal with a wide popular audience. When I was in Mexico on
a brief visit last year, my host and his chauffeur discussed One Hundred
Years of Solitude' in an intense and intelligent manner. Not since Cervantes
has there been an Hispanic writer capable of bringing together people like
that. It's a return to the old art of story-telling, an extraordinary proof of
the effect of a great novelist.
"Fifteen years ago, when Borges was Norton Lecturer at Harvard, we were
awaiting the announcement any second, but the Nobel went to a second-rate man,
Asturias. . . . Borges offended the Swedish judges many times with his remarks
about politics, especially with his favorable comments on the regime of the
Chilean generals. But Borges and Marquez are at opposite poles. Borges is very
much the writer, despite his disclaimers; Garcia Marquez is serious, and never
takes the pose of a writer. Though he's a man of the left, he confronted
Castro about the release from prison of Cuban poets and states his political
credo is the independence of people.' "
"I'm neither hot nor cold over the choice," declared Tim O'Brien, novelist
and short-story writer. "I would have preferred to find the judges taking into
consideration the human quality in the art of John Updike - that would have
made me very very excited indeed. Sooner or later, that's got to happen,
probably within the next decade."
"I don't have considered thoughts on the subject," said novelist A.G.
Mojtabai at Harvard, "but every year I look in vain for Borges."
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