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"Although Macondo begins in his
fiction to epitomise coastal Caribbean banana areas, most
Colombians now realise it's a metaphor for Colombia itself.
They see themselves, it is a mirror they hold up to themselves."
Professor
Jason Wilson
"Bananas
are very interesting, in the sense that like rubber, it
has been a crop that is not Colombian, but run by foreign
companies."
Professor Erna von der Walde, New York University
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Cien años de soledad
(One
Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel
García Márquez
''Many
years later, as he faced the firing squad, Coronel
Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice. At that
time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses,
built on the bank of a river of clear water that
ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white
and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was
so recent that many things lacked names and in order
to indicate them it was necessary to point.''
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel
García Márquez |
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
is probably the most famous novel out of South America,
written in 1967 by the Colombian who would go on to win
the Nobel prize for Literature in 1982, Gabriel García
Márquez.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of this
town (Macondo) that booms with the production of bananas
and of this family that booms and then decays with it.
García Márquez is connected with a style of writing which
the Western world has called magical realism.
"Magical realism tries to bring in everything and
keep it in the same tone. It deals with a social reality,
where the collectivity still believe in magic and superstition.
For example, where priests can fly when they drink chocolate.
As Western readers we don't believe this but the characters
don't doubt it. It deals with an area where superstition
is still prevalent and that's the main way of understanding
life and what happens."
Professor Jason Wilson, University College London
"Every year, during the
month of March, a family of ragged gypsies would
set up their tents near the village and with a great
uproar of pipes and kettle drums, they would display
new inventions. First they brought the magnet.
A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow
hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put
on a bold public demonstration of what he himself
called 'the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists
of Macedonia'.
He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots,
and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs
and braziers tumble down from their places and beams
creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying
to emerge."
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel
García Márquez |
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It's a style that refuses to comment about this; it reports
it in a blank way, in long sentences. The style is dealing
with a kind of realism, which is magical. But it's not
fantasy and it's not exaggerated.
"I
think people from Europe don't imagine, when they read
One Hundred Years of Solitude, quite how poor this
area is - what the houses look like, the shacks. The people
are essentially negro, from the past, very mixed. They
have no culture, they hardly can read. It's swampy, it's
mosquitoey, and as we know from García Márquez's stories,
unbearably hot.
I even have a theory that people don't talk in his fiction
because it's too hot. Birds drop out of the sky, dead,
because of the heat and the sun. And these are not exaggerations.
This is real. What García Márquez has done very cleverly
is, through hyperbole, made this life dignified, by exaggeration."
Professor
Jason Wilson
José
Arcadio Segundo did not speak until he'd finished
drinking his coffee. 'There must have been 3,000
of them, machine-gunned,' he murmured. 'What?' 'The
dead', he clarified. 'It must have been all of the
people who were at the station'. The woman measured
him with a pitying look. 'There haven't been any
dead here,' she said. 'Since the time of your uncle,
the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel
García Márquez |
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José Arcadio Segundo is referring to an incident when
the army opened fire on striking banana workers protesting
conditions.
"That's one of the central passages, particularly
because it's related to how memory is so important…in
the whole book, memory has such a relevance; in this particular
episode, it's forgotten by all. There is an official understanding
that it never happened."
"García Márquez has stated very strongly that the history
of the country has been written in his novel, and not
by historians. In The Funerals of Mama Grande,
the narrator always says, I'm going to tell you this before
historians come and everything will be told wrongly or
you will be forced to forget it."
Professor
Erna von der Walde, New York University
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