Monstrous Innocence and Its Expression in García Márquez’s Tales

Vulnerable outsiders obsess García Márquez. Each of the three books of tales he published between 1962 and 1992 offers more than one telling of a newcomer’s reception in a community to which he does not belong. “La siesta del martes” and “Un día después del sábado,” in Los funerales de la mamá grande (1962); “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” and “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo,” in La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972); and nearly all of the Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992) narrate the indignities, outright violence, and, occasionally, kindness with which new arrivals to a community are met. García Márquez’s “outsider” stories not only rehearse one of his most emblematic plot lines but also show his fascination with what this article calls “monstrous innocence.” Especially in his magical realist and later work, he conjoins the physically or morally grotesque with innocence, understood now as childlike vulnerability, now as the premodern “inexperience” of Caribbean folk beliefs. This article analyzes how, in the course of his career, García Márquez comes to relate the motifs of the vulnerable outsider and monstrous innocence. Drawing at times on García Márquez’s autobiography Vivir para contarla (2002) and detouring briefly to show how Cien años de soledad invests a whole community with monstrous innocence, the article concludes by showing that, in his final tales, García Márquez identifies in death itself the signal source of vulnerability and casts the artist as monstrous, his work as innocent.