Fractalismo mágico: Gabriel García Márquez, Eréndira, el hombrecito de avena y el sueño de los cuartos infinitos

Abstract

It is possible to assimilate the writing of Gabriel García Márquez to a system in which spatial, temporal, and narrative configurations are fractals, a concept defined by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in the late 1970s. In fact, fractals, and most notably their self-similar property between the whole and its parts, seem to capture the indefinable topographies of fictional time and space presented by the Colombian. This article shows that the work of García Márquez resembles an open system in which condensations and transpositions of places, moments, and characters appear and reappear in different texts, so that fragments and contingent totalities preserve a self-similar relationship. With a close reading of some chapters from novels and several short stories and opinion columns written by García Márquez, this article contends that besides magic realism, magic fractalism provides another fruitful point of entry into García Márquez’s work.

Keywords:

• Condensation
• fractal theory
• magic realism
• repetition
• scaling time
• self-similarity
• space
• narration

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ómar Vargas

Ómar Vargas is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at the University of Miami, where he has been a faculty member since 2015. Ómar completed his Ph. D. in Spanish American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research interests focus on the relationships between scientific discoveries and developments and the narrative fiction of Latin America and the Caribbean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the cases of authors such as José Lezama Lima, Jorge Luis Borges, Salvador Elizondo, and Gabriel García Márquez. Ómar’s first book, Cantidades hechizadas y silogísticas del sobresalto: la secreta ciencia de José Lezama Lima, is forthcoming with Purdue University Press. He is currently exploring the transition of the scientist to a writer in the case of Argentine author Ernesto Sábato. He has published in the journals Ciberletras, Latin American Literary Review, The Borges Center, Revista RevoluciÆn y Cultura, Nueva Revista del PacÕfico and La Habana elegante.