La ficcion de Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Repeticion e intertextualidad.
Marquez, Ismael P.
The subject of textual repetition and intertextuality in the fiction
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez has attracted the attention of countless
critics - Seymour Menton, Mario Vargas Llosa, Michael Palencia-Roth, to
name a few - for many years. The rich body of existing critical works on
Garcia Marquez's oeuvre has been recently enhanced by the
publication of Edward W. Hood's incisive and thoroughly researched
study of this distinctive feature in the narrative style of the
Colombian Nobel laureate. Hood's book departs from previous studies
by concentrating specifically on the concept of autointertextuality (the
repetition of material from text to text among the texts of one given
author) as applied to the literary production of Garcia Marquez.
Drawing from a vast but carefully selected bibliography, Hood
succeeds in establishing a solid theoretical framework that informs his
keen analysis of a representative body of Garcia Marquez's texts.
In a clear and pleasant prose, Hood reviews the most notable works on
the subject by recognized critics, such as Derrida's Ecriture et la
difference, Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, and J.
Hillis Miller's Fiction and Repetition. Derrida provides the basic
premise that repetition and the original are in a continuous process of
definition and redefinition; thus repetition ceases to be a mechanical
process producing inferior copies to become a truly creative process.
Hood shows how Deleuze builds on Derrida's ideas by positing the
existence of two types if repetition: the traditional, based on
mechanical repetition faithful to the original; and another one, based
on the differences that characterize natural phenomena. Miller in turn
appropriates Deleuze's philosophical thought and applies it to
literary texts. Though Miller's work is important as a tool to
determine the meaning of a given literary text, Hood is more interested
in the conceptualization of repetition in Garcia Marquez's works
and the techniques that the novelist uses in the autointertextual
repetition prevalent in his narrative fiction. On the complex subject of
intertextuality itself, the author resorts to the canonic works of Julia
Kristeva, Gerard Genette, and Lucien Dallembach.
One of Hood's most notable achievements in the statement of his
hypothesis is his recognition of the change that takes place in the
trajectory of Garcia Marquez's writings. He traces the evolution
from a purely mimetic autointertextual repetition (works preceding and
including One Hundred Years of Solitude) to a higher level of repetition
with variances (after One Hundred Years of Solitude), a change
reflecting the author's views on the place of the individual in the
universe. The extensive textual analysis that follows the exposition of
theory is concentrated on specific instances of repeated plots, repeated
characters, and repeated episodes, each covered extensively in
well-documented separate chapters.
Edward Hood has made a valuable contribution to the study of Garcia
Marquez's fiction by the application of sophisticated literary
theory in a straightforward language devoid of cliches and jargon. His
textual analysis is precise and illustrative of the concepts he sets out
to prove. The book will certainly become indispensable reading for those
interested in the fascinating subject of repetition and intertextuality
in the narrative of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Ismael P. Marquez University of Oklahoma
