One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967), by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel that narrates the multi-generational story of the Buendía Family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths).
The widely acclaimed story, considered to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and succeeded so well that it has been translated into thirty-seven languages and sold more than 20 million copies. that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.
As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths throughout the story of the Buendía Family, whose spirit of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events — such as the nineteenth-century arguments for and against the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life; the arrival of the railway to a mountainous country; the Thousand Days War (Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899–1902); the corporate hegemony of the United Fruit Company (“American Fruit Company” in the story); the cinema; the automobile; and the military massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy.
Gran Colombia’s Independence in 1819 revealed many obstacles to nationhood; the geography was a formidable obstacle to modernization, such as paved roads, thus, the high cost of transport facilitated the establishment of economically and politically discrete autonomous communities like Macondo. Colombian society had wrestled with Modernity and modernism since the eighteenth century, and the social and philosophic dynamism of the modernizing capitalist revolution presented the Colombian ruling classes with a choice: either progress into the modern industrial world or perish in backwater barbarism. To incorporate the country to the world, Colombians looked to the European and U.S. models of government, politics, and economy.
As nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions. This created a racialized discourse of regional differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they marked as “white”. Meanwhile, those places defined as “black” and “Indian” were associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger; technology and modernization became associated with race.
The nation of Colombia began violently — from Bolivarian wars for independence from empire to the contemporary Marxist–Leninist guerrillas of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The initial, Bolivarian, violence was for liberation (1810–21) from the Spanish Empire. After independence, there arose well-defined socio-economic regions, divided north-south, by parallel spurs of the Andes mountains, which contributed to continued civil and political instability, even after having expelled the Spanish Crown.> Moreover, Colombia's geographically and culturally dispersed populations and natural resources much hindered the government's modernization of the country and the nation. Two years later, on 9 April 1948, the assassination of the popular and influential Liberal candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán began the decade period (1948–58) of Colombia’s history known as la Violencia (the Violence), between the right-wing and the left-wing of the national political spectrum.
By the mid-1960s, the country had suffered some two hundred thousand assassinations; from 1946 to 1966, la Violencia had occurred in five stages: (i) resumption of political violence, before and after the presidential election of 1946; (ii) popular urban insurrection responding to the Gaitán assassination; (iii) guerrilla warfare — first against the Conservative government of Ospina Pérez; (iv) incomplete pacification and negotiation from army General Rojas Pinilla, who deposed Laureano Gómez; and (v) disjointed fighting under the Liberal–Conservative coalition of the “National Front,” from 1958 to 1975.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the political violence characteristic of Colombian national history is paralleled in the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, wars against the treasonous Conservatives facilitating the politico-economic power of foreign imperialists in the national affairs of Colombia. The banana plantation owners (i.e. the United Fruit Company) possess a private police force with which the business corporation attacks Colombian citizens at will.
Technically, using of particular historical event and character narratively renders One Hundred Years of Solitude an exemplar work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses centuries of cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story. "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.
The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Higgins writes that, "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 this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquíades, the keeper of the historical archive in the novel, represents both the whimsical and the literary. Buendía leaves Riohacha, Colombia with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, after murdering Prudencio Aguilar in a duel.
Úrsula Iguarán
Úrsula Iguarán is one of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio Buendía.
The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characteres are fabricated. However the message that Marquez intends to deliver explains a true history. Marquez utilizes his fantastic story as an expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. Marquez’s novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements"
García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical. Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel, however, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality.
On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that One Hundred Years of Solitude, while basically chronological and "linear" enough in its broad outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the affair.
Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, Garcia Marquez is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character identities, and using different narrative techniques such as third-person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are unveiled. This is all presented through Garcia Marquez’s unique form of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most interesting point.The superlatives from reviewers and readers alike display the resounding praise with which the novel has received. Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes", while John Leonard in The New York Times wrote that "with a single bound, Gabrial Garcia Marquez leaps onto the stage with Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov."
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Márquez addressed the significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just literary expression:
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a big impact on the literature world, and although this novel is the author's best selling and most translated around the world, there have been no movies produced about it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has never agreed to sell the rights for producing such film, even though his novel has inspired many to write and has more than enough themes to work on in the film industry.
Category:1967 novels Category:Family saga novels Category:Incest in fiction Category:Novels by Gabriel García Márquez Category:Colombian magic realism novels
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