Living Together: Democracy and Ecology in Gabriel García Márquez

• In Event: Eco-Criticism and Ruptured Natures

Abstract

The discourse of “security”, be it national or personal, persuades citizens that walls must be erected and gates policed for their safety. Wherever inequality exists, the privatization and stratification of space is sold (paradoxically) as the key to peaceful coexistence. What is fast coming into view, however, is that the consequences of such a politics are not limited to the content of human society, but also have profound implications for how we live on the earth (Harvard University’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker provides a thorough account of this). In the face of environmental catastrophe, the philosopher, Timothy Morton, rejects Nature as an unhelpful, mirage-like construction that works against ecology by insisting on the duality that would have the natural world be thought of as something separate from human civilization. Instead of nature, Morton proposes the ecological thought as “the thinking of interconnectedness”; a practice of re-imagining the relationship of humans to other life as a relation of equality. Morton asks, “What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like … ?”. Using Morton’s concept of the strange stranger to analyze the use of irony in García Márquez’ short story “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (with its sly subtitle “un cuento para niños”), this paper proposes that the ecological sensibility in García Márquez is a direct consequence of his commitment to examining the ways in which inequality has been produced historically in Latin America.

Author

• Emma C Freeman, Tecnológico de Monterrey