 All right, we'll get started. Welcome to the 17th annual John Howard Burst, Jr. Memorial Lecture. This year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a book that many argue is the great novel of Latin America with many others extending that argument to say it is the great novel of the Americas. This afternoon, we are honored to have Dr. Maria Elena Roeda here to deliver the keynote address. Robert Blaze, an RWU alumnus, class of 1970, surreptitiously met John Howard Burst, former professor from Rutgers, as well as a leading figure in the Melville Society at a sandwich shop in Providence. They forged a great friendship, a great relationship that was a combination of friendship and mentorship. To honor the memory of Professor Burst, Robert Blaze funded and endowed the John Howard Burst, Jr. Memorial Lecture and Book Fund in order to allow future RWU students the opportunity to engage in important books with the idea that students would be able to learn as he did from his mentor and friend. The inaugural book, in large part due to Professor Burst's academic scholarship and interest in Herman Melville, was Moby Dick, which also happened to coincide with the 150th anniversary of its publication, and thus began a tradition of showcasing books of literary or cultural significance that were celebrating a milestone anniversary. On that note, on behalf of the Burst Committee, I'm pleased to share that next year's selection will focus on a book that played an important cultural role in the black rights movement, particularly at the late 1960s and 70s. It is a book not without controversy on many fronts, some even further heightened from our 20th century perspective, but still is a book that is crucial to its time and, in many ways, still informs the issues and discussions of our time. The book by Eldridge Cleaver, a one-time leader of the Black Panthers, is called Soul on Ice, a memoir written while Cleaver was jailed in Folsom Prison, exploring his shift in thinking about race and race in America. And as a sneak preview for those who really are planners, the 2019 selection will be Kurt Vonnegut's seminal novel Slaughterhouse 5, also celebrating its 50th anniversary. And I cannot believe what I say 50 years are some of these books, but indeed they are. This year's book has brought some lively discussion from the annual one credit course, and thanks to students from that course who are here, who are attending today, as well as many other students who are here for other reasons, and the Rogers Free Library Reading Group, who also read 100 Years of Solitude. It also saw the first two Burst Fellows, Allie Galerie and Emily Stopel, who along with Christine Fagan traveled to Austin to engage with the Garcia Marquez Archive, which ultimately led to the exhibit here in the library put together by Christine, as well as an exhibition opening that included Colombian food and dance. And I hope you'll spend some time with the exhibit before the end of March, which is just outside, and sign the guest book with comments. In addition to our heartfelt thanks to the generosity of Bob Blaze and his daughter Jennifer Murphy, who is here sitting in the back. I'd also like to thank Jim Takatch for more than a decade of leadership on the Burst Memorial Lecture. And to our current committee, Becky Spritz, Meg Case, Ted Delaney, Betsy Learned, Cheryl Stein from Roger Free Library, Christine Fagan, Cindy Jones, sort of a de facto member who sits in on all our meetings and does a lot of the work for us. And lastly, Lee Jackson, who now will introduce this afternoon's distinguished guest. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for today's event. I know that this is a particularly busy period in the semester, so I really appreciate you taking this time and sharing this event with us here today. I first met Professor Ruella as a grad student at the University of Texas at Austin when she was a guest lecturer in a course that I was taking on violence and literature. Here, she introduced us as students to the social and cultural impact of the period in Colombia's history known as la violencia. I would later have the opportunity to work with Professor Ruella when she agreed to be a reader on my dissertation. Her insight proved invaluable in my own formation as a scholar and I am eternally grateful to her for her collaboration. As an academic, Professor Ruella has contributed significantly nuanced research on the relationship between cultural production and conflict throughout Latin America. Her 2011 book, La Violencia y Sus Huellas, una mirada desde la narrativa colombiana, published by Iberoamericana for their collection, Nexos y Differencias, reflects on the ethical aspects of narratives of violence in Colombia. Also from 2011, her co-edited Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America, published by Paul Grave McMillian, provides interdisciplinary perspectives for understanding the increasingly complex forms of violence appearing throughout the region. Professor Ruella also presented at the Coloquio celebrating the arrival of the Garcia Marquez archives to the University of Texas at Austin and many of those elements we can see in the exhibition just outside, as Adam mentioned. She has published articles on the cultural production in Latin America, particularly Colombia, ranging from film and visual arts to culture and literature in general. Her recent work on magical realism was included in the MLAs teaching the Latin American boom published in 2016. She is currently the chair at the Department of Spanish in Portuguese at Smith College. It is an honor and a privilege to have her here with us today. So please join me in welcoming Professor Maria Elena Ruella to our Roger Williams University. Thank you, thank you for that very nice introduction, Lee, and thank you for all the work that you did to bring me here. Thank you to everyone, really, who has worked to make this possible. Thank you to Roger Williams University and thank you to Lee in particular and to Adam. And thank you to all of you for being here. I'm very happy to see so many people interested in the Garcia Marquez. That's, that makes me really happy as someone who has worked on his literature and as a Colombian. So, so precisely, I mean, I am from Colombia and I've been sure. Great. Yes, I wanna be heard. So, as a Colombian who has been living and working in the US for a number of years, I have been very interested because I started, I really started reading Garcia Marquez in high school when I was very young. And I have read him, you know, throughout the years, many times. And I've been very interested in how he interacted with his country of birth. He was someone who left Colombia very early and I'm gonna talk about that and really became a writer of the world. So, the way he saw himself with regards to his country and the world is something that I've been very interested in. And also how he saw himself as someone who was personally and intellectually very interested in his theory of violence in his country. So, that's what I'm gonna talk about. So, so that's when you think about Garcia Marquez, people think about magical realism. It's like the first thing that comes to mind. But magical realism is really something very complex. So, that's something that I also interested in understanding just the complexity of magical realism. So, that's also something that I'm gonna be talking about. So, the talk is called Violence and History in 100 Years of Solitude, The Politics of Magical Realism. And I'm gonna be reading. So, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born, grew up and lived in Colombia well into his early adulthood. He published his first literary works and became well known as a reporter there. Before living for Europe in 1955, he was also deeply influenced by the cultural scene in both Barranquilla and Bogota. The majority of Garcia Marquez's life after those formative years was spent elsewhere, particularly in Mexico, where he wrote 100 Years of Solitude. He often spoke critically of some Colombian literature, but he also was, he also always stressed and praised the stamp of his native country on his writing. This helped pave the way over the years for a relatively unproblematic adoption of his work by the Colombian government as part of the national patrimony and a tool of global public relations. 100 Years of Solitude was published in May, 1967 in Argentina and almost immediately attracted worldwide attention at the time Garcia Marquez was living in Mexico. Its first edition sold out in a few days Renown, and I'm gonna just show you, oops, sorry, a picture of him, that's him with the book in his head. So 100 Years of Solitude was published in May, 1967 in Argentina and almost immediately attracted worldwide attention. Its first edition sold out in a few days, Renown writers and critics throughout Latin America were quick to praise it and translation deals swiftly followed. The main Colombian newspapers, however, barely registered this success at first, and several months passed before the book reached local bookstores in Colombia. While this was in part the result of Garcia Marquez relative detachment from the national cultural scene at the time, it was also due to bureaucratic hassles in a country that was more preoccupied with the aftermath of a recent internal war that were ensuring expediency in the circulation of cultural production. So I did some research into the newspapers that were published around the time that Cienas de Soledad was published, which was May, 1967, and there was barely any reference to the novel and the only thing I could find was a small note by some columnist who was complaining that the book, that the import license for the book was sitting on some bureaucratic office. So they thought that everyone in Latin America would be reading 100 years of solitude before Colombians, which was, they thought was pretty unacceptable. But anyway, so Garcia Marquez developed his literary style in the years after this war, known as la violencia, which took place in the 50s. Local debates about how to represent this violent period in literature deeply influenced his writing, eventually leading him to adopt the magical realist approach that we associate with 100 years of solitude. Many years later in 2013, the Colombian government launched a campaign to promote tourism in the country with the slogan Colombia is magical realism and these are some images that are associated with that campaign. There are a lot, you can Google it and you'll find a lot of images like this. At that time, 2013, negotiations were on their way to end a six-decade long conflict with the FARC, that is the largest guerrilla movement in the country and this is a guerrilla that had started precisely as an after effect of la violencia. The campaign, this campaign, invited potential tourists to imagine the country in its post-violence era. By this time, magical realism was a globally known mode of representation, so it provided a readily available template to construct social and imaginary landscape. The campaign gave further traction after the wave of international attention towards the novel and its author that followed his death in 2014. This sad event also led to other efforts to honor the memory of Gabriel García Marquez in Colombia. Social efforts highlighted the links between his globally admired literature and his country of birth, turning him into a symbol of national pride. So, around that time, the currency in Colombia was redesigned and one of the bills features his image in the bills. And there were also a lot of different events just to honor his memory. So, García Marquez wrote his first novels and short stories in the late 1950s when Colombia was just coming out of la violencia. In 1957, an agreement between the warring parties called the Frente Nacional or National Front had ended a brutal confrontation that ravaged the country for almost a decade. The text that the young author published during those formative years provide clues into the creative process that eventually led to the writing of 100 Years of Solitude. And these are pictures of the first editions, both in Spanish and English, and you actually have in the display the English one, which is pretty exciting. You have the first edition here. So, the text that he published during those formative years in the late 50s portray a writer deeply interested in capturing local stories of violence in his fiction, but also enriching a world audience with it. The result was a smooth integration of local and transnational elements that is one of the most recognizable traits of García Marquez's literature and a major reason for his worldwide success. So, 100 Years of Solitude tells the story of a family, the Wendyas, in a town called Macondo, situated in an unidentified Caribbean territory. There are various references in the novel to places in Colombia and to events in this country's history, but the narrator and the characters never mention it by name. Many Latin American writers and critics, particularly early on, were quick to point out that this strategy allows the author to talk about events that could have happened in any country in the region. Elsewhere in the world, writers like Salman Rushdie described how the novel captured their own region's histories of colonialism and troubled relations with modernity. But 100 Years of Solitude was also, and still is, read in many other parts of the world and interpreted as a novel about quintessential literary topics, such as love, debt, war, family ties. García Marquez had been trying to write this novel for a number of years before he published it. According to the author, a breakthrough happened in 1965 and remember, it was published in 1967. So this was two years before that. While he was driving with his family from Mexico City to Acapulco, he not only figured out the well-known first sentence of the novel, but also discovered that he could write it in the straightforward tone that his grandmother used to talk about extraordinary things when he was a child. The story of how this led him to turn the car around, cancel the family vacation, go back to Mexico City, and bury himself in his story for 18 months to write the novel has been repeated many times. We know how García Marquez's wife, Mercedes Varcha, was left in charge of paying the family's bills. First by using up their meager savings, then by pawning every object she could find in the house, and then by selling their car, the one they had used for the vacation that they never took. Another often repeated story is that when the novel was finished, they owed several months of rent and could only afford to send half the manuscript to the publisher, though they soon managed to send the rest. We can see elements of García Marquez's literature in the stories about the origins of 100 years of solitude, perhaps not surprisingly. Since they were stories first told by him, his biographers have, for the most part, only repeated these stories, placing emphasis on a moment of epiphany, something close to a magical revelation as determinant in the creative process that led to the novel. Many, including the author himself, promoted the idea that this book was a break with everything that he had done in the past. García Marquez's previous work, however, clearly prefigures what he did in his seminal novel. His reading of European and North American authors, his work as a reporter and his engagement with the local literary scene in Colombia, his contact with other Latin American writers and intellectuals in his travels, and his encounter with the work of Mexican writers, Juan Rulfo in particular, all played an important role in the shaping of what would eventually become 100 years of solitude. I would like to focus now on a handful of his earlier writings. Before publishing his masterpiece, García Marquez wrote three novels. And these are the Spanish first editions, but you can read the translations there and the years when they were translated. So these three novels are La Ojarazca, published in 1955, translated as Lift Storm. El Coronel no tiene quien escriba, translated as No One Rise to the Colonel. And La Mala Hora, translated as In Evil Hour. When talking about presidents for 100 years of solitude, most critics point to Lift Storm because it introduces places and characters that would later appear in the author's best known novel. Among them is Macondo, who those who had read the novel probably know very well, is the town where 100 years of solitude happens. And the Colonel Arellano Wendia, who in this novel is only mentioned a number of times in passing, and he's one of the main characters in 100 years of solitude. The links to In Evil Hour and the Colonel are less obvious and they have therefore been less explored. These two novels are mostly seen as part of García Marquez's realist period, the only time when he directly addressed the horrors of la violencia. As a result of the author's own declarations, most critics talk of this period as something that he left behind when he developed the magical realist approach to writing that would bring him fame with 100 years of solitude. There is, however, a clear continuity in how all these novels approach the experience of a society that has been torn apart by violence. So In Evil Hour was first published in 1962, but according to García Marquez's own testimony, took many, many years to write. No one writes to the Colonel, started as a side story of In Evil Hour and was published in 1961. The author began working on these novels while living in Paris in 1956. He would continue working on them while he traveled through Europe for several months and upon his return to South America in 1957. There was a lot of movement in García Marquez's life during this period. He worked for a while as a reporter in Venezuela and shortly after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he went to Havana with his friend Plinio Apuley-Mendoza. Thanks to his trip, they were asked to set up an office in Bogota for the newly formed Cuban news agency, Prensa Latina, at which point García Marquez returned once more to live in his home country. And this is him as a young writer and reporter. According to his biographers, the office of Prensa Latina in Bogota became a magnet for left-leaning Colombian writers and intellectuals. At the time, Colombia was enjoying the relative peace brought by the National Front Agreement and there was a lively debate on how to write about the recent war. During this period, García Marquez published two articles on Colombian literature that provide a window into his thinking about his own writing. These articles are the quotes and I'm gonna just tell you the English translation. Two or three things on the novels of la violencia and of quotes, which was published on October, 1959 and the other article is Colombian Literature, A Fraud to the Nation. This one was published shortly after in April, 1960. The question on how to represent violence in literature and how he viewed his work with regard to his country's literary corpus were among the main topics of these pieces. They most likely made tacit reference to not only In Evil Hour and The Colonel, but also to a major novel he was writing at the time called La Casa or The House. That project would eventually be abandoned but serve as the basis for 100 years of solitude. Presented as a response to left-leaning colleagues who pressured him to write political literature, the first article criticized all Colombian novels that narrated events from la violencia with morbid descriptions of crime and bloodshed. Questioning this approach, García Márquez suggested that the real drama of violence resides not in the killings and the cruelty associated with it, but in their effects of those who survive. Stating in a rather categorical way that all Colombian novels that dealt with the war had failed to portray violence in an effective way, the author predicted that a future great novel about the drama of survival would inevitably appear. It is hard not to read now this reference as an announcement for the years-long project that eventually became 100 years of solitude. The second article criticized the corpus of then-existing Colombian literature for not responding to the needs of the nation as a community of readers. García Márquez argued that Colombian writers should offer this community, this national community, a literature with what he called universal value. The idea of responding to the needs of a national readership with a literature that can be read anywhere in the world may sound paradoxical, but makes plenty of sense in his historical context. Throughout Latin America, there was at the time a shift of focus in cultural production from an interest in national culture to a more cosmopolitan vision. And this is the time of, some of you may have heard of the Latin American literary boom, which was precisely just a group of writers who suddenly starting gaining a lot of international attention. So this was something that was just happening because of several historical conditions that were taking place at the time. So García Márquez argued that Colombian writers had either do not have worldwide appeal because in his words, those writers lacked and this is quote, this is a quote, these those writers lacked an authentic sense of the national, which was without a doubt a condition to assure that their work would have universal projection, end of quote. This authentic sense of the national he maintained had to be grounded in what he termed a national drama. Looking historically, he saw la violencia, that civil war, as the first and only national drama which had produced a body of literature. The problem, as he saw it, was that the craft of literary writing in Colombia was at the time still not developed enough to produce works of universal value on the subject. Once again, we might speculate as to whether these hints at his own literary attempt to capture this national drama in a way that could be read anywhere in the world. The novel in which he most directly looked at la violencia is In Evil Hour. Its realist, almost cinematic style differs markedly from the magical realism of 100 years of solitude. Nonetheless, this earlier novel foreshadows his later treatment of violence. In both novels, for instance, people who are killed in communities wracked by violence maintain a presence among those who survive. Although the murdered never come back to chat with the living in In Evil Hour, as they do in 100 years of solitude, the fatal victims of violence are still a haunting presence in the lives of the earlier novel's characters. The narrative takes place in a town that has been pacified by means of violence. It is now governed by a corrupt mayor who belongs to the party responsible for much of the killing. At one point, the mayor compels a woman to serve him a bowl of soup. She complies, but tells him, may God give you indigestion. When the mayor asks how much longer townspeople like her will maintain that kind of attitude, she responds, until you people bring back to life the dead that you killed. Her comeback effectively tells him that the people they try to eliminate through violence will never be gone. They remain ever present, not as ghosts who interact with the living, like the ones in 100 years of solitude, but as spectral forces that sustain the defiance of survivors. In 100 years of solitude, there are many references to violent events in the history of Columbia. Most are evoked obliquely rather than depicted explicitly. One exception is the massacre of banana workers. And these are pictures from that time. An event describing the novel and based on a real incident that took place in December 1928. And what happened is that, so the banana plantations in the Caribbean, in the Caribbean and Colombian Caribbean coast, like in many other places in the Caribbean, had some very harsh working conditions. And some workers just, they were just making a strike to just to improve their conditions. And the army just came in and killed many of them. So that was a very, very traumatic event. And there was several writers wrote about this and García Marcos was one of them and in 100 years of solitude. So this event is perhaps the best known episode in the novel and it signals the downfall of Macondo. While the massacre itself is conveyed in a realistic straightforward way, the aftermath is full of magic. There is a phantasmagoric train full of dead victims of the massacre and a long lasting deluge that comes close to destroying the town. There is also a survivor, one of the Wendyas who tells his nephew about the massacre to make sure that the carnage is never forgotten. This nephew, the last in the family line will be in charge of the ciphering manuscripts that contain, we find out later, the story that we're reading. As he reads the manuscript pages, they disappear in a fatal wind engulfing the town. But we, the readers, know that the tale was not lost because it is contained in the book that we're holding. So the novel, and this is the 40th anniversary of the edition of 100 Years in Solitude in Spanish. So the novel is the ultimate survivor of a violent history. It is an act of resilience, attesting to a past full of conflict and killing now contained in the body of the book. Its magical realism makes manifest the lasting pressings of this painful past. That traumatic event, that traumatic dimension of the magical realism is not surprisingly erased from the reappropriation of Garcia Marquez's work for the promotion of tourism in the Columbia's Magical Realism Campaign. The promotional videos and photographs contain images of magic and wonder, a strip of any historical reference, understanding how the novel came to be, gives us a richer perspective on what is unproblematically portrayed in this campaign as the magical realist landscape of Columbia. We see a nation struggling to make sense of its violent past and a writer striving to find the right tone to narrate this past, to both his compatriots and the world. Thank you. So I would be very happy to hear some questions if anyone has. So first of all, thank you once again for presenting with us today. You mentioned the Banana Massacre in the second half of the book. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more information about some of the other historical moments that appear in the novel and where he points to that. I know it's a bit ambiguous in the book, but what would be the historical background for some of those moments? So the Civil Wars are probably the most obvious. So if you have read the novel, you know that the Colonel Aureliano Endia was involved in a series of Civil Wars and the Civil Wars took place throughout the history in Columbia in several moments and they were mostly between members of the liberal and conservative parties and they were really, they were derived from just a battle between liberal factions and conservative factions really from the 19th century and it was really a battle in Columbia that happened in other places in Latin America but in Columbia was particularly strong, just a confrontation just on how they envisioned the nation, what they wanted to do with the nation. So there was part of the people who were deciding what to do, wanted to keep a lot of the Spanish heritage and the institutions of the religion and all that and another part of the country just wanted to be modern. They wanted to separation of state and church, church and state, a lot of the secular institutions. So they wanted a much more secular society while the other part wanted a much more traditional society tied to the Spanish rule and that really had been going on for years, for centuries. I mean, it was really a conflict that was not resolved for a long time and the two factions just kept engaging in Civil Wars one after the other and the most recent and brutal one was la violencia. It was just really like it ended the confrontation between these two parties because he was just so brutal, he was just awful and the Coronial Aureliano-Wendia was a liberal, he was part of just the liberal section, sector of the society and he engaged in many of these Civil Wars and if you read through the novel, you can find references to several moments in that history of Civil Wars and several references to just what the liberals did and the conservatives did and how basically in Garcia Marquez's view they were both wrong. I mean, it was just, yeah and I think this was very much what the idea was at the time in Colombia that this was just, it didn't make sense and the conflict really moved into a different direction at the time in the country. Yes. I think of great war fiction, I often think of realism. Right. In any way, if there are well to arms mentioned, Kurt Vonnegut, the bombing of Dresden, why did Garcia Marquez Cho choose this magical realism rather than a real gritty, here's how the war went, here were the political issues. Why did he choose this? Yes, well Hemingway was big influencing him and he, I guess he was just, he just thought that that was not the right approach. He just thought there was a lot of the gritty as what you call gritty literature on violence in Colombia at the time, a lot. He just thought that was not the right way to show violence. He just thought that the real drama was the drama of survival. So the people who survived the killings, the massacres, the torture, the cruelty, he thought that that was the story. I mean, and he said it many times, the real story is the story of the people who survived. And I think he was very influenced by the work of Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo is one of the greatest novels of Latin America also. And it's funny because this year we're also celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Juan Rulfo. And this is something that has not been very explored but Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo is a novel that talks about a town also where all the people are dead, where the dead are just around the town. And I think that's something that was very influential for Garcia Marquez, just the idea of how the way which people remember violence is through the memory of the dead, like the dead, the people who have been killed in the war just stay around the living and the memories of the war become ingrained in the people's population and become and translate into magical beliefs. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of the magic is really traumatic memories. So it's not always read like that. And there's a lot of aspects of the novel that are not just that, the novel is also about love, it's about family, it's about memory. But I think that that's something that is very important. It's just not, there are no, I mean, he was just consciously avoiding the description of violence itself, accepting the banana massacre where you do have is probably the only episode in the novel where you have just that. I'm gonna take another tack at what my colleague asked. How in, does in your opinion, his ears as a journalist and his practice as a journalist infuse this book or other of his literary masterpieces? He was very important, very important. His work as a journalist was very important, not only for his writing, but also, I mean, for his technique, but also to make him famous. He was, in Columbia, he was well known first as a journalist because he was publishing reports, reportages that were extremely popular. So he would tell stories, he just had an eye for the stories that were very interesting. And of course, he had a way to tell them that were very interesting. So people were buying the newspaper just to read his stories. So I think just in developing his craft as a writer and just being very sensitive to reader's expectations. So he was very much in tune to what was interesting to readers. So he really, well, his livelihood depended on it. I mean, he was a reporter and he was making a living through his writing. So he really needed to be interesting. So he needed the readers to be engaged with his writing. So I think that was very, very important for him. And that's also how he got to travel to Europe. He was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the newspaper where he was writing. And every job he got from then on for a while was always as a reporter and always traveling to different places as a reporter. Yeah. And he also was very informed of what was going on in the country. And not only in the country, but also in the world, because when he traveled to Europe, he was also covering international events and all that. Maria, I have one question for you. Maybe the last one is time's coming along. 50 years later, why do you see this book as still being celebrated, read, appreciated beyond it being the history that you're talking about? But as a book to fresh eyes, people might still find meaning in. I think it's just a great book. It's just amazing. It's just a lot of fun to read it. And I know some people, some young people find it challenging, like my daughters. But it's like if you really get into it, like if you go through the first pages, it's just like you get so much of it. It's just about so many things. It's about history. It's about love. It's about death. It's about a society, how society lives. It's about modernity, like how people experience changes, a society that is changing. It's really worth reading it once, it's difficult to read it once, but then when you read it the second time, it's easier. So read it twice. And you'll enjoy it a lot. Yeah. Well, thank you, Maria, if it's been fascinating. And sorry, everybody. I presume Maria will be here for a few minutes if you have questions that pop into your head at this point. But thank you for being here. Thank you. Thanks to everybody.