Álvaro Cepeda Samudio Overview

In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of friends – writers, artists, and intellectuals – formed what would later prove to be one of the most artistically and intellectually innovative groups of the period; they have since been given... [more]

In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of friends – writers, artists, and intellectuals – formed what would later prove to be one of the most artistically and intellectually innovative groups of the period; they have since been given the name the Barranquilla Group, after the northern Colombian coastal city in which they then lived. Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was among these artists, as were writer Gabriela García Márquez and painter Alejandro Obregón. Beyond Latin America and Colombian literary scholarship, his work is little known; within these realms, however, he is recognized in his own right as one of the most important writers of the period, one whose artistic output is defined by an exploratory spirit that guided him into questions of artistic ontology and methods of representational and emotional articulation. Cepeda began his career in journalism and maintained a connection to the field throughout his life; he wrote frequently for a variety of Colombian newspapers and, after studying at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, became editor of El Heraldo, a Barranquilla daily for which his wife, Tita Cepeda, still writes. He composed two short story collections and one novel before his early death; the last work – and his only one to thus far be translated into English – is entitled "La Casa Grande" (1962), and the former two are called "Todos Estábamas a la Espera" (1954) and "Los Cuentos de Juana" (1972). Increasingly through each, Cepeda uses a variety of techniques and methods to explore the duality between the interiority of thought processes and the nature of the self and the impact of exterior phenomena on these internal states, all the while trying to reconcile cogent literary artifice with the messiness of life. In "Todos Estábamos," multiple narratives reveal the subtle discrepancies between thought and a grander reality; "La Casa Grande" fractures the account of a single event – the Santa Marta Massacre, wherein Colombian military forces killed United Fruit Company workers on strike – into ten separate narratives, often collapsing several storytelling techniques into a mischievous unity or doing away with other techniques – particularly those that serve as mediators between the life of the text and the reader, such as narration – in order to investigate the multiplicity of a singular occurrence; and in "Los Cuentos de Juana" he playfully explores the elasticity of the self by presenting the reader with a series of interrelated short stories about Juana – sometimes a young girl, sometimes an aged woman – that are, separately, contradictory and irreconcilable, with mutually exclusive discontinuities and discrepancies. In doing so, Cepeda questions and plays with the notion of a singular unified self, and whether the immensity of human nature can be coherently transferred to literature. While he belongs to a period and region that was largely dominated by the writings of García Márquez, Cepeda's artistic innovations are not particularly aligned with his. His early interest in the work of William Blake, and with Blake's unification of polarities and dichotomies, is quite evident in his fiction. His exploration of literature's plasticity and capacities display similar aesthetic concerns to those that occupied William Faulkner and James Joyce's works; his concern for trying to portray an isolated interiority calls to mind Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. He has more in common, in this way, with so-called "metafiction" of the period than with the coeval period of so-called "magical realism": he pursued the limits of literary representation primarily through formal experimentations rather as opposed to diegetic ones. His goal was not so much to fully and truly render life through his literature, but to experiment with whether, and how, life could be fully and truly represented. [show less]