NOTES

1. Originally published as Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 1992).  The translation is by Edith Grossman (New York: Penguin, 1993)

2. Luz Mery Giraldo B., “Peregrinaje and Levitación en Doce cuentos peregrinos,” Texto y contexto, 20 (1993): 141-154. Giraldo groups seven stories in the nucleus “Macondo va a Europa”: “Bon voyage, Mr. President,” “The Saint,” “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen,”  “Tramontana,” “Light is Like Water,”  “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” and “I Sell My Dreams.”  The nucleus “El placer inestable de la modernidad” contains “Maria dos Prazeres” and “The Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane”; and finally, in “Perversidad y desamparo,” Girado mentions “I Only Came to Use the Phone,” “Mrs. Forbes’s Summer of Happiness,” and “The Ghosts of August.”  Besides Giraldo’s article, the following articles have been published to date:  Isabel R. Vergara, “Gabriel García Márquez, Doce cuentos peregrinos,” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografía XLII. 4 (1992): 651-653; María Mercedes Carranza, “No son doce y sí han peregrinado,” Semana, 11 agosto 1992: 76-78; Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, “Una docena de levitaciones,” El Tiempo [Lecturas Dominicales] 16 agosto 1992: 7.  Lastly, Lia de Roux de Caicedo, “Los Doce cuentos peregrinos :  Relatos de lujo,” El Tiempo, [Lecturas Dominicales] 16 agosto 1992: 6.

3. Girard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)  viii-xiii.

4. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967)  17.

5. Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado (Buenos Aires: Larousse, 1994)  788.

6. Derrida, op. cit.,  22

7. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).  Originally published as Il nome della rosa (Milán: Bompiani, 1980).

8. Alfred Jules Ayer Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, New York, Vintage, 1982,  142.

9. The author appears as a character in “I Only Came to Use the Phone,” “The Saint,” “The Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” “I Sell My Dreams,” “The Ghosts of August,”  “Mrs. Forbes’s Summer of Happiness,” “Tramontana,” and “Light is Like Water”; the four others are narrated in the third person:  “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” “Maria dos Prazeres,” and “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen.”

10. In general terms, Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “private” the language of internal experiences (feelings, sense of humor)—the words in a language that refer to what is only known to the speaker, his immediate and private sensations—and discusses them as a degenerate construction of language.  Public language would be the opposite, the ordinary language of the physical world whose construction is not degenerated.  For a discussion of the term “public language” as defined by Wittgenstein, see Ayer, op.cit.,  142-157, and Alice Ambrose and Morria Lazerowitz, eds., Philosophy and Language (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972) 26-36.

11. García Márquez shows the act of creation in fiction mainly in his more contemporary novels:  Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), and The General in His Labyrinth (1989).  See my book El mundo satírico de Gabriel García Márquez (Madrid: Pliegos, 1991).  In this essay I discuss genre and the act of creation in the three novels.  See also Jorge Olivares, “Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada as Metafiction,” Contemporary Literature, 28 (1987): 483-492.

12. In “Maria dos Prazeres” intertextual echoes are perceived with “Big Mama’s Wake” when she dictates the list of her possessions to her amanuenses in medieval Catalan.

13. Ayer, op.cit., 152.