Garcia Marquez Says He Believes in Both Reality and “Parareality”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was interviewed by Ernesto Gonzalez Bermejo in 1971. The interview was translated by Gene H. Bell-Villada. It included the following comments by Garcia Marquez:

“…I’ve come to believe there’s something we can call ‘parareality,’ which…doesn’t have to do with superstitions or imaginative speculations, but which exists as a result of deficiencies or limits in scientific research, and so we still can’t call it ‘real reality’…my commitment is to all reality, to a literature that refers to all reality…And my big problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude was credibility, because I believed it. But how was I going to make my readers believe it?…”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Garcia Marquez believed in the complete reality of all the fantastic phenomena in his novel. But it does mean that he did believe in them to some degree or extent, and that, to him, they were not simply “superstitions or imaginative speculations.”

It is part of my thesis in this blog that perhaps 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public have their own versions of “parareality” subjective experiences, as part of their own normal multiple personality.

One of Garcia Marquez’s “parareality” experiences may have been the basis for his short story about multiple personality, “Dialogue with the Mirror,” which I discussed in a recent post.

Gene H. Bell-Villada (Ed.). Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2006.