Despite lacking a more "plastic" component, literature itself evokes all kinds of sensations, experiences, and also colors. In fact, many authors have relied on their symbolism as a way to provoke a feeling or give their work its own personality. One of the best examples resides in Gabriel García Márquez and the color yellow that it wore in the shape of roses or that it evoked in some butterflies that once flooded a certain town in Colombia.
Literature and color
Gabriel García Márquez and the yellow color of the roses that he liked so much. © UnTipoSerio
A year before the death of Gabriel García Márquez, in 2013, a woman nicknamed "La Polaca" wandered for several days the Nobel residence in the Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias. The pizzerias, shopkeepers and vendors already knew her from seeing her hanging around Gabo's door or waiting for him in front of the house, at the Santa Clara hotel. But always, yes, they saw her with a bouquet of yellow roses.
The followers of Gabriel García Márquez they know of the writer's predilection for the color yellow. During his funeral in 2014 thousands of butterflies made with yellow paper floated through the Palace of Fine Arts, Gabo's table never lacked roses of this color and at public events he was always seen with a yellow flower overlaid on his jacket.
«As long as there are yellow flowers, nothing bad can happen to me. To be safe I need to have yellow flowers (preferably yellow roses) or be surrounded by women"He once said in an interview.
For Gabo, yellow was the color of fortune and good luck, the flag of his homeland and the guayacán, a tree from the depths of Colombia where once a child listened attentively to the stories of his grandmother. The color of the tropics radiated by works such as Love in the Times of Cholera or, especially, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the work that best represents Gabriel García Márquez's passion for the color yellow. One of the examples can be found in the chapter in which the carpenter takes measurements for the coffin of Arcadio Buendía:
'They saw through the window that a shower of tiny yellow flowers was falling. They fell all night on the town in a silent storm, and covered the roofs and jammed the doors, and suffocated the animals that slept in the open. So many flowers fell from the sky, that the streets woke up covered with a compact quilt, and they had to clear them with shovels and rakes so that the burial could pass ”.
Nor do we forget Mauricio Babilonia, the young man who worked at the Macondo banana company:
«When Mauricio Babilonia began to chase her, like a specter that only she identified in the crowd, she understood that the yellow butterflies had something to do with him. Mauricio Babilonia was always in the audience at concerts, at the cinema, at high mass, and she didn't need to see him to find out, because the butterflies told her to ”.
Someone assures that yellow butterflies They exist in Colombia, the second country with the largest number of different species of this insect in the world.
They also say that they flutter by the sea; there by the Ciénaga Grande, where there is no horizon.
The symbology of color it is more than present in literature (Lorca and the green color of the dress of one of Bernarda Alba's daughters as a symbol of rebellion, the black with which Joyce condemned the Irish Church or the educational system of her country). However, in the case of Gabriel García Márquez and the color yellow This symbiosis takes on an even more mysterious role, perhaps because magical realism continues to make us believe that the unimaginable can be part of everyday life in some parts of the world.
What other examples of color symbology do you know in the literature?