Sometimes to attempt to write about a book in just four pages is ridiculous, almost an affront to a work that demands a significant exegesis, not a few rather cursory paragraphs of introduction. To do so about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 book in this series of blogs so briefly is close to offensive, but it is a novel I have loved, reread and constantly thought about, and I can’t leave it alone. In Wikipedia, it is introduced as one of the supreme achievements in Hispanic if not world literature, an extraordinary example of what is often called the ‘magical realist’ style. It has been received numerous international awards, and it was central to García Márquez’s receipt of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Wikipedia it topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, based on a survey of international writers.
If you haven’t read it, and want to know something about the story, it is about the life and eventual death of a town called Macondo, isolated and almost entirely out of contact with the rest of the world (except for a group of Gypsies, who arrive once a year). It was created by a couple who have run away from their hometown (in a fictional party of South America), emerging in the dreams of one of them, José Acadio Buedia, as a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. José decides to establish his city by the river. Soon after it has been founded, it becomes clear Macondo is a place of extraordinary and magical events.
Eventually and several generations later, Macondo is exposed to the outside world, only to come under the control of the government of the newly independent Colombia. Next the railway comes to the town, bringing in new technology and foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation nearby, and it decides to build its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers. By the novel’s end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, seemingly about to go out of existence.
Well, this isn’t a book to be presented in a summary. As the saying goes, you will have to read it for yourself, if you haven’t already done so. In offering this commentary, the point is not so much the content as the themes this extraordinary book explores. In doing this, I have relied on the Wikipedia entry on One Hundred Years of Solitude as a key source.
For any reader, there are some obvious themes and metaphors. Perhaps one of the most important is the sense of inevitability and the repetitive nature of history. Right from the extraordinary beginning to the equally extraordinary end, the characters manage to be both real and yet the victims of ghosts, and themselves live on in unexpected ways. Daniel Erickson explained this well in his comments of fatalism in the story: “Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.” (in Ghosts, Metaphor, and History, Macmillan, 2009).
A second fascinating theme is the use of colours. Commentators have noticed yellow and gold are the most frequently used, probably because they are common symbols of imperialism. In particular gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction. However, particularly intriguing is the image of Macondo as a glass city. This is an image that is the basis for the original choice of the city’s location. It is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. However, not only is it the reason for Macondo’s location, but it is also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, “By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history” (in Gene Bell-Vilada’s casebook compilation of essays on the novel, OUP 2002).
Finally, the use of particular historic events and characters renders the book an outstanding work of magical realism, as Garcia Marquez compresses decades of cause and effect within the framework of his story, while drawing on Latin American history. It is possible to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as an abbreviated history of Latin America discovered by European explorers. The book can be read as an archive of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. It’s a clever concept, as “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitudeis a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain.” (this comes from Michael Wood’s 1990 analysis of the text, published by CUP). Within the compass of the story of Macondo, we are exposed to humankind’s actions, in every variety, whether creative, amusing, compelling, sad, funny and yet always fascinating.
Why is it magical realism? Well, it is a fiction, with the events, the place and the story all invented, but it is also a form of myth, putting events and their consequences in the context of the realities of South American politics, economics and history. Like the myths studied by social anthropologists, García Márquez manages to combine an account of the prosaic and everyday life of his characters with magic, with fabulous events and with almost surreal flights of fancy. It has been described as giving literary voice to Latin America: “A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration” (from The Dialectics of our America by José David Saldívar, Duke University Press, 1991).
García Márquez Is something of a magician himself. He manages to make the fictional blend in with the real, the magical and extraordinary seamlessly intertwined. Cleverly, much of the story is told in a laid-back style, so that it is impossible to separate different realities, different kinds of events and even the borderline between imagination and reality. After reading for a while, what you absorb no longer seems strange or surreal: you’ve been cleverly, almost surreptitiously, absorbed into a different world.
To quote from Wikipedia: “Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for himself or herself, the Buendías become representatives of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America, a living style in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel. This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios the Beauty, who innocently destroys the lives of four men enamoured by her unbelievable beauty, because she is living in a different reality due to what some see as autism. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.”
Above all, A Hundred Years of Solitude is a stunning example of myth. Anthropologists have long been interested in myths, and especially Claude Levi-Strass, who has asserted “myth is language”. Using the approach of structural theory, he has argued “Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.” (Structural Anthropology, page 210). He has proposed that meaning is not isolated within the specific fundamental parts of the myth, but rather within the composition of these parts. Although myth and language are of similar categories, language functions differently in myth. Language in myth exhibits more complex functions than in any other linguistic expression. From these suggestions, he draws the conclusion that myth can be broken down into constituent units, and these units are different from the constituents of language, words, structure and narrative all interwoven.
Finally, unlike the constituents of language, the constituents of a myth, which he labels “mythemes,” function as “bundles of relations. A myth is categorized sequentially and by similarities. Through analysing the commonalities between the “mythemes”, understanding can be wrought from its categories. Thus, a structural approach towards myths is to address all of these constituents. Furthermore, a structural approach should account for all versions of a myth, as all versions are relevant to the function of the myth as a whole. This leads to what Lévi-Strauss calls a spiral growth of the myth that is continuous while the structure itself is not. The growth of the myth only ends when the “intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted.” The complex story of Macondo and its inhabitants is a representation of South America, its people and its character.
In other ways, García Márquez addresses some more prosaic themes. One is his criticism of the Latin American elite through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them, as Elsa Brendy points out (in her lecture on “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” at Hofstra University in March 20200. Other commentators have observed how elites in Latin America do not pass down history that remembers them in a negative manner. In the same way the Buendía family honour their unique background by using the same names for their children over and over again. “José Arcadio” appears four times in the family tree, “Aureliano” appears 22 times! The action takes place a Big House, or hacienda, the centre of a large land holding in which elite families lived and managed their lands and labourers. Colombian ‘Big Houses’ were known for being a grand one-story dwellings with many bedrooms, parlours, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda.
If some of the story is magical, and some prosaic, the key figures are similarly complex. José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and was the founder of Macondo. He had left his hometown in Colombia, along with his wife Úrsula Iguarán after being haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man he’d killed in a duel), a corpse which constantly bleeds from its wounds and he tries to wash it. José Arcadio Buendía is an introspective and inquisitive man, as well as the possessor of immense strength and energy, obsessed by scientific pursuits. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community.
Another key figure is Úrsula Iguarán, the matriarch of the Buendía family who is both wife and cousin to José Arcadio Buendía. She sits as the centre of One Hundred Years of Solitide, living to be well over 100 years old and overseeing the Buendía household through six of their seven generations. Like her husband, she is a person very determined. At the same time she fears her family will continue with incestuous practices, that her inbred relatives will tend to have animalistic features. In keeping with the magical elements of the novel, she is reduced to a plaything for the family’s sixth generation, Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano in her last years, slowly shrinking to the size of a newborn baby before she finally dies.
To describe the complex, fantastical and compelling character of One Hundred Years of Solitude can’t explain why it has such a hold on its readers. García Márquez’s book isn’t short, but it absorbs many readers from beginning to end. It’s continuing influence and dominating place among Spanish-language books is unarguable. Over 30 million copies have been sold, (second only to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which has had a four-century head start). It is the only other book to receive the honour of a Real Academia Española edition. Perhaps its enduring fame is because, through magic realism, Garcia Márquez found a way to describe modern human reality in its fluidity and strangeness, life as a fever dream of history and family from which we are never more than half awake.
As Robert Kiely observed in his review in the New York Times back in 1970, “If this is a book with magical elements, there is nothing here about elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains, nor midgets and fairies. Many books of this kind seek to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment. It is obviously not shared by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has created in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:
‘The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
This is the language of a poet”
The final character to have the name Aureliano is also the town and the family’s lone survivor, and the novel’s culminating figure of solitude. His final act is to make sense of the prophesies that surrounded him: “He began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.” Here is a reader and a character reading the same lines at the same time. This identification between reader and character invests the novel’s abiding sense of solitude with a subtle if literal sense of fellow feeling, which makes the apocalyptic final sentence the more bearable:
“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that [Macondo] would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment Aureliano . . . would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
