Gabriel García Márquez and the Art of Exposition · 1:29am Jan 2nd, 2021
Yet another non-pony essay, but here's a pony! Artist: pridark
It should come as no surprise that I have a soft spot for Latin American authors. I’ve read stuff from Manuel Muñoz, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and more. On my desk there’s a copy of Julia Avarez’s Afterlife, which I have yet to read, and I have Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones on my Kindle. There’s something incredibly wonderful about many of these Latin American authors who span eras and styles—something that tickles beyond merely good storytelling and compelling narratives. Yet, for all these listed authors and more, I think it’s impossible to escape the giant shadow of Gabriel García Márquez.
In some respects, current Latin American literary culture may have a lot to thank Márquez for. He helped lead to the prominence of Magical Realism, shaped the Latin American and even South American literary culture into something that could compete with its American and European counterparts, and, much like Pablo Neruda, championed a social climate on the brink of great change.
I’m a recent fan of Márquez, having read his magnificent One Hundred Years of Solitude just a year ago—an act which cemented my desire to formally study Spanish, and for which I now have a Spanish copy of that book sitting on my bookshelf. I’ve read a few of his short stories since then, most notably “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” and for this past Christmas I received a copy of his book, Love in the Time of Cholera. Having already begun reading it and also exponentially writing my own things, I can see myself mirroring many of the syntactical techniques Márquez employs. As with any author I read, I am unconsciously influenced by the manner in which sentences are written, more than the way characters act; I suppose that is because there is an inherent mimesis going on when you read and write, for how else are you supposed to learn?
As I read the beginning of Love, though, I noted a curious thing which, upon greater reflection, I recognize as appearing also in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel García Márquez loves exposition.
Play again that word, “exposition.” Does it make you shudder? I’ve heard many writers spit on its name, and even non-writers, reviewing ideas and stories, consider it a shameful attribution. To say that a story uses exposition is to say, implicitly, that a story is garbage. We consider it wasteful and amateurish, the easy-way-out of writing a story. I remember one joke from a certain comedian (his name, unfortunately, escapes me) about how you can spot exposition coming by a certain phrase. If a writer writes, “One thing led to another,” that’s exposition; the punchline is, “That’s your job as a writer to show me, not tell!”
Inevitably, lessons and arguments about exposition consist of the holy matrimony of showing and subterfuge, pitted against the crime of telling or expositing what ought not to be told or exposited explicitly. I’ve had workshops where a common complaint about a fellow student’s story was that it became downgraded in exposition, to the point where the narrative felt forgotten. It would seem that, nowadays, we have a natural tendency to sniff our noses at exposition, and we are wary of its presence. If an author has it, then surely that means that author is bad!
Yet, Márquez doesn’t seem aware of this wariness, this distaste towards all things expositional. A glance through Love in the Time of Cholera reveals this almost immediately:
Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise his sprits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people’s pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixed together. (8)
What makes this particular quote interesting, though, is that it’s completely separate from the narrative at hand. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had just discovered the body of his friend, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, and was in the process of finalizing the discovery, spreading the word about his death, and determining the next course of action regarding burial and funeral rites. Yet in this paragraph, we are no longer with him there: instead we are suddenly jumping backwards into a history of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a history that consists of not necessarily showing us his strangeness (the mixing of medicines and the hypocrisy of doing so, for instance), but rather, telling us outright, in a catalogue of sorts, what kind of man this doctor fellow is.
Such exposition does not stay within the confines of one paragraph. Oh, no. Márquez instead spends a total of eight paragraphs, each one long and languid, telling us the history of Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his contributions to the city in which he lives, before leaping back into the narrative with a single sentence: “Yet instead of going straight home as he had intended after certifying the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he allowed himself to be carried along by curiosity.” (11) The pattern continues with more than just the doctor: his wife, Fermina Daza, gets the same treatment, and by the time we’ve reached the second chapter, the story’s male lead, Florentino Arizo, has his entire history laid out in a similar manner:
His good sense attracted the attention of the telegraph operator, the German émigré Lotario Thugut, who also played the organ for important ceremonies in the Cathedral and gave music lessons in the home. Lotario Thugut taught him the Morse code and the workings of the telegraph system, and after only a few lessons on the violin Florentino Ariza could play by ear like a professional. When he met Fermina Daza he was the most sought-after young man in his social circle, the one who knew how to dance the latest dances and recite sentimental poetry by heart, and who was always willing to play violin serenades to his friends’ sweethearts. He was very thin, with Indian hair plastered down with scented pomade and eyeglasses for myopia, which added to his forlorn appearance. Aside from his defective vision, he suffered from chronic constipation, which forced him to take enemas throughout his life. He had one black suit, inherited from his dead father, but Tránsito Ariza took such good care of it that every Sunday it looked new. Despite his air of weakness, his reserve, and his somber clothes, the girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled on spending time with them until the day he met Fermina Daza and his innocence came to an end. (54)
The observer will note the length of this paragraph. Márquez spends seven sentences here, and most are incredibly long, jumping from clause to clause like a weird game of hopscotch. Half of it is spent in detailed backstory, with Márquez explaining part of Florentino’s past: his work as a telegram operator and also as a violinist. Then the second half is spent describing him in two or three sentences, details which do not present themselves as part of the narrative, but rather, seemingly separate from it. At the end, we suddenly return to a plot point: that of his connection to Fermina Daza.
Márquez, it seems, is quite fond of not just the lengthy paragraph with sentences that ebb and flow out of the ether, but also with presenting information as quickly and as rapidly as possible. This is perhaps because of his background as a journalist, but unlike, say, Hemingway, who insisted on keeping many details hidden as by his Iceberg Theory, Márquez loves to cling to exact details and discuss them at length. In this way, he exposits greatly, and does so without a shred of shame or fatigue.
Márquez’s other book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, exhibits a similar decision, but it also demonstrates a perspective that Márquez seems insistent on. Here is how the entire novel opens:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point…. (1)
You will note that there is a fairly evident narrator throughout this passage, establishing who is telling the story, but also you will note that the narrator itself isn’t a part of the narrative. While the novel begins as though about to be told from the point of view of the Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Márquez instead jumps away from that character’s head to discuss at length the past history of the village of Macondo. Between that flurry of description, we get this interesting sentence: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, an in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” What exactly does that mean as a description? We understand, however strange this is, that the village, at this point in time, is young, but why should Márquez declare this, in a way that gets us to re-read that sentence over and over, confused? Wouldn’t it be easier simply to show how it is that things lacked names? To even show a scene where at least two characters point and indicate through the narrative itself?
Because writing is hard, even for a princess. Artist: NAAFreelanceArtist
In writing workshops, I think we’d consider these as examples of info-dumping. We are given so much information about a character before we really meet them, and many of these details do not coincide with narrative intensity or flow. Were an amateur to present this kind of writing to a workshop and say, “This is the start of my second chapter,” they may be chided for throwing so much at the reader so immediately. Other advice may include: show don’t tell, start with a question of conflict, avoid explaining these characters and rather observe them in action.
Márquez, however, can get away it, for several reasons. First, I want to note the distance the narrator of each novel has between the narrative action and themselves. In Love in the Time of Cholera, though characters are indeed described, the quoted passage doesn’t actually entertain the narrator as being involved in the story. Details about these characters’ lives and their histories are plainly spelled out. Meanwhile, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez hints at and then moves away from a particular character’s perspective in order to talk about Macondo. Doing so allows a certain amount of freedom which further allows him to answer several questions: what kind of town is Macondo, how old is it, when was it built, etc.
By moving away from a character as the narrator, what Márquez achieves is room to breathe. We might call this perspective the third-person omnipresent—characters exist, but we do not stay in one; rather, we do a lot of head-hopping between them, as shown in Love.
This necessarily generates exposition because, by moving away from the limited POV of a character itself, the story must continue somehow. Details, without the limitation of perspective, must not just be given; to transition from each character or non-character, they must be made explicit. Note the speed at which a full character history of Florentino Ariza is told. Márquez wastes no time in jumping from his work to the beginnings of his infatuation with Fermina Daza—speaking in terms of quantity, every sentence in that selected passage is followed by a new event, such that there’s a one-to-one ratio between them. Now, note what’s being done with the passage from One Hundred Years. There’s a certain speed to it, not because of narrative urgency, but because each sentence explicates in exact detail what needs to be told in order to 1) create the world and 2) move through it.
Márquez’s writing is magical for this movement. If you read him for the first time and were struck by the density of his prose, you may even be more struck by the fact that very rarely does he stop to “show” a moment. Each sentence, instead, acts as a conduit for information, and in doing so, despite his density, he’s able to get the reader past these lengthy paragraphs, provided they have the patience to stick to the lyrical tones underneath.
It seems to me that the main purpose of this manner of writing is to get the reader to “go with the flow,” as it were. Márquez, even in translation, is a master at narrative voice, and by having a voice that is so smooth, lyrical, and melodious, he seduces the reader and gets them to forget that, essentially, in many sections of his stories he is simply detailing a history of events from an impersonal view. And through this forgetting, we come to enjoy those histories themselves, not as examples of lengthy exposition, but as tales that keep on giving.
The hesitancy with which many writers come to the idea of exposition can be attributed to many things, which Márquez handily subverts. New writers are afraid of boring the reader. They are afraid of not being considered “clever” with their information, of not having a mastery about language and subterfuge. In a quest to seem subtle and also “mature,” new writers are encouraged to write as though the reader can and should be given very little. Raw information must be disseminated infrequently. Action, pure action as opposed to narration, must drive the story forward.
I believe we see this as a pattern in many modern books, which have more dialogue than narration, shorter paragraphs than longer ones, and which enjoy a quick first-person that allows an easy jump from one event to the next. This is, I acknowledge, a broad stroke, but it seems to be a pattern that many writers are drawn to.
We may also consider a common tool used in beginning writing workshops, that of the Story Graph.
The typical construction starts with Exposition. Then, we see a Rising Action sloping towards the Climax, the peak of the line. From there, the story “descends” to the Falling Action, before ending with the Resolution. In this construction, we see that Exposition is given its position in and only in the first part of the graph; whether or not this was intended, the effect is that exposition is seen as only appropriate at the beginning of the novel, just before, really, anything related to plot or conflict appears. Once we get away from exposition, we can get started with the story, and the sooner the better.
There is merit in veracity and velocity, of course. And exposition of any sort slows the narrative down since, by its definition, we’ve moved away from the raw material of the plot. But if we are too hesitant to actually use exposition, we risk not giving enough information about the story to get the reader to care. And moreover, we risk not having a concrete, full world that comes alive rich and true to its own merit.
Someone like Gabriel García Márquez demonstrates that it’s possible to have a bunch of exposition not just in the beginning of the story, but making up the tonal strategy of the story. He does this through the power of his language and the hypnotic effect of his plotting. Even as information is simply handed to us in an easy way, we are gripped by the power of his mind, by his ability to play with time and to transition easily from character viewpoint to character viewpoint. Again, I reiterate—through this power, we forget that we are, essentially, reading exposition.
I want to now close with a passage from Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like A Writer. This is a quote from her essay entitled, quite simply, “Words”:
Needless to say, many great novelists combine “dramatic” showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing… [such as leading] up to the moment at which the story rightly begins. (24-25)
Márquez, I think, does this expertly. Though his stories all begin with exposition, they don’t necessarily stop there. They lead easily into the narrative and the plot happening around the exposition. Between those rich paragraphs and beyond them, Márquez gives us a full picture of the love affair between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, how they came together and then drifted apart; even in the lengthiest passages, Márquez provides for us many of the themes about the impossibility of time and the madness of invention that the Aureliano family will inevitably come to confront over and over again. Exposition doesn’t get in the way of any of this. Rather, it permits this, and what follows is that colossus of Latin American literature, taking us into the deep and vast world of his imagination.
Admittedly I don’t pay attention to any kind of predetermined plot structure, whether it’s a 3-act structure, 5-act, or whatever else. I’ll just write a story that comprises the ramifications of the natural actions of the characters, which usually means a lot of plot threads conclude anticlimactically or even never conclude at all, while other times the climax happens earlier than expected and the aftermath is pretty much a new story. I’m not the best at exposition but I agree that it can be used anywhere in a story.
Pretty interesting blog post overall. Glad I read it.
Wonderful essay.
I agree that exposition is a tool of writing which many writers either abuse, or if they're trying to hard, hardly use at all. Which is a shame, because it may be one of my favorite aspects of a story. Exposition (well-written exposition, that is) can be efficient - an author can introduce a lot of scene-setting and characterization in a few sentences that would have taken pages to accomplish by "showing". I can imagine the excerpts of Márquez, if done by showing action, would have taken far more words and possibly been less interesting to the reader than what he actually wrote.
Of course, part of my love of exposition is from nature writing. Works by writers such as Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, and of course Thoreau are almost entire expository; in this way, obstacles of conventional storytelling are removed so that all that is left is the reader and nature. There is still showing in these works, but it is done through the careful and expert guidance of the narrator whose commentary can reveal more than reader might have "seen" otherwise.
Anyways, I better stop there before I write my own essay in the comments.
5427193
I'm definitely more of the same. Especially when it comes to short stories, I tend to have a loose approach to writing them.
For the few novel-length works I've written, I tend to avoid strong structures since I feel they get in the way, but I have taken to writing pseudo-outlines when trying to form an idea.
Glad you enjoyed the essay!
5427223
Sometimes I wonder, too, if the fear of exposition is, in large part, because readers don't know or haven't ready any stories that actually use it very well. Marquez is definitely one of them, but plenty of Romantic authors, like Thoreau and Emerson, have done it considerably well. I'd also say that many genres of fiction require extensive exposition, such as historical fiction.
Glad you found the essay thought-provoking!