The animal and the feminine in the first 10 journalistic texts of García Márquez: the Nobel seed

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez began his journalistic career at El Universal de Cartagena with a column called “Punto y apart”. He was 21 years old and wrote his texts in the midst of official censorship, based on ideas that were born from international cables. The first 10 columns, published between Friday, May 21 and Wednesday, June 2, 1948 are, as Héctor Feliciano points out, “the favorite nursery of his language, his hyperbolic imagination and his mischievous sense of humor, guided by a broad curiosity and a diversity of topics, rare in our days of bland observers of the world” (Feliciano, 2012, p. 23). The work presented below consists of the textual analysis of the first 10 journalistic columns of Gabriel García Márquez, in order to identify microelements that allude to the animal and the feminine. These are brief texts where it is possible to identify numerous elements of the literary universe of the Nobel’s later work, which are characterized by the particular frequency with which the author includes references to the animal and female world as a resource to inject life and corporeality into his plays.