Gratuitous Multiple Personality in Garcia Marquez’s “Big Mama’s Funeral”

In my post of 13 February 2014, I gave two previous examples of gratuitous multiple personality: Charles Dickens’s Miss Twinkleton and Sue Grafton’s Tom Padgett. Multiple personality is gratuitous when it is included in a story unnecessarily.

When stories include multiple personality gratuitously, it is a clue that the writers, themselves, had multiple personality. Writers casually and unnecessarily give multiple personality to characters, when—based on their own personal experience—they think of multiple personality as an ordinary feature of the psychology of everyday life.

“Big Mama’s Funeral” (1959/1962) (1) “must be counted, without a doubt, the most important short story he ever wrote…’Big Mama’s Funeral’ was something quite new: it is one of the key texts of Garcia Marquez’s entire literary and political trajectory, the one which unites his two literary modes—‘realist’ and ‘magical’—for the very first time, and which paves the way for the whole of the mature work over the next half century, in particular for those two definitive masterpieces, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch”  (2, p. 246).

In discussing this story, I may be the only one who has ever focused on this seeming triviality: “…the youngest of the nieces…terrified by hallucinations…made Father Anthony Isabel exorcise her…” (1).

Of course, you exorcise someone if they are possessed, just as Jesus exorcised the man possessed by demons in Mark 5:1-20. Demon possession is the religious interpretation of multiple personality.

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

2. Gerald Martin. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.