Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński
By Joanna M. Moszczynska
This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here.
Introduction: Affective Attunements to Historical Moments
In the 1982 Nobel Prize lecture, Gabriel García Márquez reflected upon Latin American solitude, a concept that resonates with the idea of a certain (semi-)peripherality, seclusion, or even an island-like political and spiritual “solitude” in a world divided during the Cold War:[1]
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary […]. I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world. (García Márquez 1982) [2]
The reflection of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude opens a space for a broader reflection on the “vicissitudes of our affective attachments to social and historical conjunctures” (Bivens 2018: 119). It recalls what Williams referred to as “practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (Williams 1977: 132). García Márquez’s speech is affectively attuned to the present as a shared historical moment (Berlant 2011: 4; Bivens 2018: 121), as it seems impossible to speak of Latin America without speaking of its relationship to Europe, both complex and diverse regions bounded historically, culturally, and politically. Besides denouncing the political instability and structural violence in Latin America as the traumatic legacy of the European colonialism, the Colombian author comments on the here-and-now of “clear-sighted Europeans who struggle …for a more just and humane homeland” (García Márquez 2014: 212) in the present historical moment and appeals for solidarity with Latin America, rooted not in high hopes, but in concrete acts of mutual support, of togetherness, of recognizing the political legitimacy of social movements.

At the time of this speech, Europe was divided by what was known as the Iron Curtain, with the Berlin Wall as its most emblematic landmark, and Poland enduring martial law. It happens that García Márquez actually came to know the Communist Bloc almost 30 years earlier when he travelled to Poland in 1955 and documented it in a series of crónicas published first in the Caracas-based magazine Momento in 1957 and two years later in the Bogotá style magazine Cromos, and eventually gathered in the volume De viaje por los países socialistas: 90 días en la “Cortina de Hierro”.[3] His journey resulted in the text Con los ojos abiertos sobre Polonia en ebullición that accounts for his stay in Warsaw and Cracow, as well as the visit to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. On December 29, 1981, the author of Crónica de una muerte anunciada revisited Poland in his opinion piece published in the Spanish El País “Polonia: verdades que duelen” [Poland: truths that hurt] that resonated indirectly with his Stockholm speech given one year earlier and confirmed the writer’s 1955 letdown with “real socialism”.
In this paper, I would like to deal with literary socialist affects and advance the understanding of global Cold War developments through regional specificities, the co-existence of multiple projects, movements, and actors involved within an entangled history (Werner and Zimmermann 2002) of the Latin American and East European Left. A closer look at García Márquez’s crónica on communist Poland of 1955 will reveal the affective workings of particular social and socialist spaces present in the text. Thus, the idea of socialist affects will be elaborated based on the pioneering work of Raymond Williams.
Affects or feelings, how Raymond Williams would refer to them prior to the affective turn, pose a particular challenge to literature studies. How can literature, or more specifically text and narrative convey the workings of affecting and of being affected? “Is affect compatible with sequenced orderings of narrative prose, or even with the linguistic expressions of innovative poetry?” (Houen 2020: 2). The field of affect studies has been dominated by two antagonistic positions: the cognitivist and the non-cognitivist. Houen, however, develops an argument about literary affect challenging this binary about how “affect can become fused and transformed with language, cognition, bodily feeling, and the imagination” (Houen 2020: 16). My paper follows Houen’s proposal and considers affects as part of the literary construction and the affective bearings of a text’s genre, form, style, and overall aesthetic as part of literary analysis and criticism. I therefore propose to consider affect to be part of the aesthetic, social, and political dimension of the text that can be conveyed through literary devices.

Literature is a medium that has social significance as it creates those affective moments/elements of “practical consciousness” (Williams 1977: 132) granting it a certain collective value. Literary journalistic narratives have a particular capacity to produce the sense of presence and intensity due to their immediacy and appeal to life of ordinary individuals or to contemporary collective events and public personalities represented as integral parts of historical processes. It is easier to engage emotionally, to relive events that actually happened. Also, literary journalism being popular literature that would often be published in newspapers and other print media, becomes more accessible and offers more democratic ways of acquiring knowledge, also about universal existential issues such as life and death. The emotional contact established by the author/narrator with his subject opens space for understanding, which leads to immersion. Personal involvement is very common and as the journalist mediates his or her own emotions and experience, they become more tangible and authentic to the reader, permit his or her participation in the making of meaning, which in turn forms the fundament of the narrative pact particular to the genre of non-fiction.
Williams’ structures of feeling/structures of experience promote an understanding of the workings of affects in the context of the literature as a cultural and social process. Thus, by introducing the idea of socialist affects, my aim is to relate literary expression, its “specific feelings, specific rhythms, specific kinds of sociality” (Williams 1977: 133), to the social, political, and economic historical conjuncture within which it is produced, here: the Cold War and the entangled history of the intellectual Left. Those affects are socialist because they are bound by a process of the production of meanings and ideas influenced by a particular system of convictions and beliefs: socialism. The actual consciousness of the narrative voices cannot be, however, simply reduced to ideology understood as product of doctrinaires or false consciousness opposed to scientific knowledge.[4]

As affects circulate between and among subjects and objects, which have the potential to affect and to be affected, the circulation can be elevated to a transregional level and complemented with Latin American texts of García Márquez’s fellow writer and reporter, Ryszard Kapuściński, who in the late 1960s and 1970s undertook journeys to various Latin American countries as a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, PAP, as well as a consultant for the Polish monthly magazine Kontynenty. In addition to the official dispatches, Kapuściński recorded his impressions and observations about Latin America, and transformed them into literary reportages and essays published in three books: Why Karl von Spreti Died (1970), Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975),and The Soccer War (1978).[5]
Kapuściński and García Márquez knew each other, yet they did not leave any textual evidence of their encounters.[6] It is therefore even more compelling to examine their socialist narratives – García Márquez’s on Eastern Europe and Kapuściński’s on Latin America – that reveal certain resonances as they raise social and political issues of conviviality. Conviviality is understood here as the intricate and multiform way of living together with difference (Heil 2022) pertinent to the socio-historical conjuncture of the Cold War. Such idea of living together is inscribed in socialism properly understood as: “the liberation of working people from exploitation” (Chomsky 1986: 49). The ideal socialist means therefore: “[…] to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom” (Chomsky 1986: 49). Costa’s framing of an analytical perspective of conviviality (Costa 2019) proves a useful tool to take a look at the Cold War journalism of García Márquez and Kapuściński which documents the living experience of struggling people, negotiates representations in difference and inequality marked by foreignness of its documentarists and is explicitly attuned to socialist objectives and ideals.
The texts presented here can be classified as literary journalism and, more specifically, as travel sketches (crónicas) since they engage with border crossing and spaces of contact, or contact zones (Pratt 2008), between the subjective narrative Self of the reporter and the encountered Other. Those peripheral Cold War encounters are doubtlessly distinct from those narrated in the travel and exploration accounts connected to the European conquest and colonization of Latin America; however, they present quite a similar problematic of the construction of the Other and of the understanding of the Self. Oscillating between estrangement and domestication they are placed within the historical context of the socialist and anti-imperialist struggle accompanied by such events as Stalin’s death, the Thaw, the Cuban Revolution, and the Third-Worldism Movement. Those Cold War events in the 1950s and 1960s shaped the writers’ political position and consequently influenced the development of the genre: “[I]mportant historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people’s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in” (Pratt 2008: 4).
It may be said that the Cold War literary journalism of García Márquez and Kapuściński deals with forms of living together with difference amid a diplomatic, ideological, and military conflict. The difference applies here to both the clashing principles and dogmas of the capitalism and socialism, as well as to the divergences existing in the perception and practice of socialism within the Eastern Bloc and in the Eastern Bloc and Latin America. Both authors engage with the idea of difference/sameness as they search to penetrate and comprehend the space of the Other, to discern the situations of contemporary life, and captivate a shared historical moment.
As a genre and a discipline (Bak and Martinez 2018), literary journalism has been developing internationally throughout the 20th century. As John Bak observes: “Accepting literary journalism as a legitimate global form is not enough; we also need to exercise intercultural sensitivity to accompany our interdisciplinary awareness” (Bak 2011: 2). The objective is therefore to approach the texts with intercultural sensitivity, but also with transregional and transnational awareness of the aesthetic developments and epistemological premises in the field of literary journalism. Therefore, conviviality does not apply exclusively to the representation of (g)local situations. It can further be extended to the literary journalistic practice as a humanist critique of diverse totalitarianisms. In the particular case of the socialist literary journalism that manifests its compromise with anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles, a convivial approach further involves recognizing the authors’ commitment to the socialist project within a paradigm of the desire for the socialism that arguably never became concretized.
Continue reading here.
Notes
[1] The ground for the present comparatively- and affect-oriented working paper have been laid in my article about García Márquez’s journey to the Eastern Bloc that appeared in November 2022 in Textos Híbridos. The article focused on the production of space and the affinities with the New Journalism genre (Moszczynska 2022).
[2] “La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. […] [C]reo que los europeos de espíritu clarificador, los que luchan también aquí por una patria grande más humana y más justa, podrían ayudarnos mejor si revisaran a fondo su manera de vernos. La solidaridad con nuestros sueños no nos hará sentir menos solos, mientras no se concrete con actos de respaldo legítimo a los pueblos que asuman la ilusión de tener una vida propia en el reparto del mundo” (García Márquez 2014: 211–212).
[3] The book had been reissued many times between 1978 and 1986, both as legal and unauthorized editions. In 2015, it was republished by Penguin Random House under the title De viaje por Europa del Este.
[4] According to Willams, the concept of ideology had been also commonly used both by Marxists and non-Marxists in a more neutral sense of a system of beliefs of a particular class or group (Williams 1977: 69).
[5] However, his first publication related to Latin America was the translation and the preface of Che Guevara’s The Bolivian Diary published in Poland as early as 1969.
[6] Kapuściński prefaced the 2000 Polish edition of García Márquez’s volume of press feuilletons and crónicas Notas de Prensa 1980–1984 (1992). The preface, however, does not mention any personal relation between the two writers. In 2002, the Colombian review Cambio published a text by Kapuściński, “La grandeza de un reportero”, dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez.
References
Bak, John S. (2011): “Introduction”, in: Reynolds, Bill and Bak, John S. (eds.), Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1–20.
Bak, John S. and Martinez, Monica (2018): “Jornalismo literário como disciplina”, in: Brazilian Journalism Research, 14, 3, 644–651.
Berlant, Lauren Gail (2011): Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press.
Bivens, Hunter (2018): “Brecht’s Cruel Optimism or, What Are Socialist Affects?”, in: Wessendorf, Markus (ed.), The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 43, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Limited, 118–137.
Costa, Sérgio (2019): “The Neglected Nexus between Conviviality and Inequality”, Mecila Working Paper Series, No. 17, São Paulo: The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America.
Chomsky, Noam (1986): “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”, in: Our Generation, 17, 2, 47–52.
García Márquez, Gabriel (1982): The Solitude of Latin America. Nobel Lecture, at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/ (Last accessed 08.05.2024).
García Márquez, Gabriel (2014 [1982]): “La soledad de América Latina”, in: Cuadernos Americanos, 2, 209–214.
Heil, Tilmann (2022): “Convivialidad al borde”, in: Mecila (ed.) (2022), Convivialidad-desigualdad: explorando los nexos entre lo que nos une y lo que nos separa, Buenos Aires, São Paulo: CLACSO; Mecila, 63–107.
Houen, Alex (ed.) (2020): Affect and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise (2008): Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond (1977): Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
About the Author:
Joanna M. Moszczynska is a postdoctoral researcher funded through the DFG Walter Benjamin Programme at the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies at the University of Regensburg. Between March and September 2022, she was a Mecila Junior Fellow in São Paulo. In 2020, she completed her PhD on Holocaust literature in Brazil at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie University of Berlin. Her dissertation A memória da Destruição na escrita judaico-brasileira depois de 1985 was published in 2022 (Lausanne: Peter Lang). Her most recent publications include the articles: “Deslocamentos tempo-corporais e a memória dos eventos coletivamente traumáticos no romance lusófono contemporâneo” (in: J. Wrobel and J. Scholz, O corpo-cronômetro. As temporalidades do corpo na literatura brasileira, Berlin: Frank & Timme 2023) as well as “Mapeando los espacios afectivos de Europa del Este en la escritura de viajes de García Márquez” (Textos Híbridos 9, 2, 2022). She is a co-editor of the volume Elective Affinities: Rethinking Entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter 2024).
Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series Conviviality and Inequality
Rúrion Melo, When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy, 27.05.2025.
Ajay Gandhi, The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, 22.04.2025.
Citation: Joanna M. Moszczynska, Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 24.06.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59746
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (June 24, 2025). Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved July 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/146rw