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Essay Topics and Critical Commentary*
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How does Marquez utilize vocabulary and syntax to achieve the "Marquez style"? (see Magical Realism)
What is the significance of the title of the novel,One Hundred Years of Solitude ? Perhaps tie in your analysis with his repetition of the title in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.
Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.
State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.
Give your opinion on why One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Marquez as a Nobel Prize winner.
Describe how the setting complements the primary themes of the novel.
Describe the Marquez hero.
Compare and contrast one aspect of this novel, with another you have read for this class.
Instructor's Recommendation: I would like to see an essay on Marquez's unique style. The term "Magical Realism" is often applied to the style of Garcia Marquez's fiction. What does the term mean, and how does it apply to One Hundred Years of Solitude? There are elements of the supernatural grounded in the everyday life of his characters, hence the combination of the terms magic and realism. What is its purpose? Illustrate your argument with examples.
Historical Themes, Theme of Solitude
Garcia Marquez has said that "One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a
history of Latin America, it is a metaphor for Latin America" (Dreifus
1983:1974). The historical themes include conquest and colonization,
settlement and scientific discovery, civil wars, foreign economic
intervention, technological change, and finally the decay and disappearance of
a long-established way of life.
The original Spanish conquest is alluded to when, in the first chapter,
Jose Arcadio Buendia finds an old suit of armor and the remains of a galleon,
mysteriously stranded several kilometers from the sea. The early Spanish
colonization and the devastating pirate raids of the English sailor, Sir
Francis Drake, are referred to in the second chapter. Subsequently, no more is
made of this theme.
Pioneer settlement is the real beginning of the story of Macondo. It is
at first "a village of twenty houses of mud and canestalks on the bank of a
diaphanous river. . . . The world was so new, many things did not have names,
and to mention them one had to point with a finger." (71) Just so: when the
real pioneer families made their first crude homes in the forests of the
Americas, they found many things-plants, animals, minerals - they had never
seen before and for which they had no names. That was one reason Europeans
referred to the western hemisphere lands as the New World. Typical of such
villages, which were established on the banks of rivers in all the Spanish
territories, Macondo is governed by its founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, as a
kind of village chief; Ursula, his wife, cultivates a little plot of land and
the men, apparently, also hunt for food (although hunting is not specifically
mentioned until much later). The village, then, is poor but self-sufficient.
(To maintain the rigorous logic of the narrative, there should be twenty-two
houses in the first settlement, since Jose Arcadio Buendia led twenty-one
families, plus his own, in the founding. Twenty was probably chosen in this
instance because Garcia Marquez wanted a smooth, flowing rhythm in his opening
lines, which would have been disrupted by an extra syllable: veintidos instead
of veinte.)
An important omission from Garcia Marquez's metaphorical history of Latin
America is the savagely cruel wars for independence, which last from 1810 to
(in Colombia) 1819. We can assume then that these wars are already over by the
time Macondo is founded, so that this fictional act corresponds to
developments in about 1820 - 1825 in the country's real history. This
primitive stage of Macondo is also a time of innocence, a psychological theme
important in the book.
The arrival of Melquiades and his gypsy band, with their navigational
instruments, magnifying glass, and so forth, is a metaphor for the beginning
of technical and scientific awareness, which would have reached towns like
Macondo some time between 1830 and 1860. In real history, the bearers of this
new knowledge would probably not have been gypsies but itinerant professors
and self-proclaimed physicians (such a quack does show up in Macondo, a
disguised terrorist madman who tries to spur the youth to violence).
Banana company symbolic.
Although closely based on a particular real event, the story of the
banana company in Macondo represents a general phenomenon, the violent clashes
between workers and troops in the pay of foreign capitalists throughout Latin
America.
After the departure of the banana company, everything in the town seems
to decay very rapidly. In real history, this is the period of the world-wide
economic depression that began in 1929 and lasted a decade, until the
beginning of World War II.
Then, in the last chapter, when the last Aureliano finally leaves the
house that has been his prison, we seem to be in a new kind of Macondo. There
are more people around, including several who are quite unlike any we've met
before and seem unrelated to the old families of Macondo. What sort of town is
this that has an eccentric Catalan dealer in rare books frequented by a group
of eager young writers? The town also has a drugstore, which we have never
heard about before, attended by an Egyptian-eyed girl named Mercedes. It also
has some new and extravagant brothels.
Themes: Philosophical and Psychological
Solitude, solidarity, and sexuality.
Soledad in Spanish means more than our word "solitude," although it means
that too. It suggests loneliness, the sense of being apart from others.
Although ultimately each human being is alone, because there are parts of our
experience we cannot share, some people are more solitary than others. The
really solitary figures in this novel are those who deliberately cut
themselves off from other humans. They are contrasted with characters who
combat their solitude, by making strenuous efforts to reach out to others.
The founder of Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is the first great
solitary. He becomes so obsessed with his own search for truth that he
neglects his family and ultimately loses all touch with outer reality. His
wife, Ursula, is perhaps the greatest of the antisolitary figures, the person
who more than anyone else holds the family and the house together. She takes
in a foster child and later insists on rearing the bastard children of her
sons and grandsons. Her whole life is devoted to strengthening social bonds.
Pilar Ternera, the fortuneteller, is also an antisolitary. Her role is to
comfort the Buendia men and, in her younger years, to go to bed with them and
bear their children. At the end of the book and of her own very long life (she
has stopped counting birthdays after one-hundred forty-five), she is the
madame of a wonderful zoological brothel, which in this context stands for a
generous, bountiful sexuality.
There is a lot of sex in the novel, most of it celebrating the size and
potency of the Buendia men's phalluses or the lubricity of the women. Sex can
be used to combat solitude, because of its power to connect one person to
another. Even the two rapes in the novel result in close bonding: Jose Arcadio
Buendia rapes his bride Ursula to begin the family line (second chapter), and
the last Aureliano rapes Amaranta Ursula (who is not, however, very
resistant), who will bring forth the last of the line. However, for sex to
really work against solitude, it must be joyful, loving sex. The colonel,
after all, has had lots of women, but he doesn't remember any of them (except
perhaps his deceased child bride) and shows no affection toward his bastard
sons. He is never depicted as cruel sexually, simply indifferent. And thus he
is condemned to loneliness.
Characterization, Symbolism, Repetition, The Narrator, Magical Realism, Irony
The names of characters often suggest something about their
personalities, either straightforwardly or ironically. For example, Prudencio
Aguilar is neither "prudent" nor "eagle-like" (aguila means "eagle" in
Spanish).
Repetition of names and behaviors is another technique of
characterization. Certain character types, e.g., the contemplative, stubborn
man, or the impetuous, forceful man, the patient and nurturing woman, and so
on, are represented by more than one individual in the several generations of
the Buendia family. All the Jose Arcadios, for example, are assumed to have at
least some of the traits of the original Jose Arcadio Buendia (impetuous and
forceful), and all the Aurelianos have something in common with Colonel
Aureliano Buendia (tendency toward solitude and contemplation). The
repetitions are not exact, but the use of similar names is one way to suggest
more about a character than is actually said. There are also repetitions of
particular behaviors, for example, secluding oneself in a room for experiments
or study.
Some characters have characteristic signs to identify them. Examples
include Pilar Ternera's laugh, Colonel Aureliano Buendia's solitary look,
Aureliano Segundo's extravagance, Fernanda's continual muttering, and so on.
Physical descriptions are used sparingly, letting the reader fill in the
details beyond such generalities as "skinny" or "fat," "beautiful," "huge." An
exception is made for Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who seems to be drawn from an
especially clear mental image of the author's, as though copied from a
photograph.
Some of the more spectacular individuals are characterized by the effects
they have on others. The founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is obeyed
unquestioningly by his companions; his son Colonel Aureliano Buendia inspires
respect and fear; Amaranta deliberately manipulates men's lust; Remedios the
beautiful creates paroxysms of erotic passion.
Occasionally, a character can be identified by a characteristic type of
speech. Jose Arcadio Buendia (the founder) is given to harsh, short,
judgmental declarations: "The world is round, like an orange!" Ursula speaks
sternly, also in short sentences. Fernanda del Carpio goes on at great length,
in a vocabulary reminiscent of the sixteenth century (Spain's "Century of
Gold" in literature), especially in her magnificent, one-sentence, three-page
monologue. Jose Arcadio Segundo speaks very simply and directly.
Unfortunately, some of these subtleties (particularly the antiquated
vocabulary of Fernanda) are almost impossible to convey in translation,
although Gregory Rabassa has made a noble effort.
Even this brief treatment, which leaves out numerous subplots involving
dozens of characters, gives some idea of the enormous complexity and scope of
the novel. As discussed in chapter II, on Garcia Marquez's life and career, it
took the author twenty years of constant writing and reading to perfect the
devices that enable him to tie all these elements together. It is an
intricately plotted book, all the episodes echoing and reinforcing one another
so that, at the end, it is the entire book rather than just the conclusion
that hits the reader with full force. It is for its complexity and its
exceptional coherence that the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called it
a "total novel."
Garcia Marquez's writing is very rich in allusions. A character's name,
an object, or an event may bring to the reader's mind connections with other
events in the novel or the world, or with philosophical or psychological
issues, or with all of these simultaneously. When an image or an event alludes
to or represents something else, we say it is a symbol of that other thing.
Symbolism, for purposes of this discussion, is the use of an image or an
event to represent a larger theme of the novel. It should be noted that
symbolism is not necessarily conscious or deliberate on the part of an author,
but this does not make it any less real. In many cases, Garcia Marquez's
selection of a particular image may be completely intuitive, that is,
spontaneous or unplanned. For example, Remedios the beautiful ascends to
heaven when she goes out to hang up sheets. This anecdote appears to be a
version of a story Garcia Marquez heard as a boy about a girl in his hometown
(see chapter II of this Note). Still, it will remind readers of the popular
legend (not to be found in the Bible, but believed by many Christians) of
Mary's bodily ascension, and suggests a gentle joke at the expense of the
extremely devout. The anecdote, along with the description of Remedios's
character, also symbolizes absolute purity of spirit, and thus heightens the
effect of the vulgarity and lust of the men around her and the hollowness of
her sister-in-law Fernanda's piety.
It is easy to go overboard in discovering symbols where they were not
intended. Nevertheless, the same authorial mind that developed the themes also
fashioned the images; discussing symbolism is a way of discovering the
connections between the two. More of these connections will be pointed out in
the chapter-by-chapter analysis in chapter IV of this Note. Perceiving them
will help the student understand the themes and the artistic coherence of the
book.
Flashbacks and flashforwards.
One pair of devices Garcia Marquez uses extremely skillfully is
flashbacks and flashforwards. Flashbacks are references to events prior to the
novel's present time. These are fairly common in literature; often a novelist
will interrupt the story to tell you about the hero's earlier life, for
example.
Flashforwards, anticipations of events that will occur later on in the
novel, are less common. A writer may give the reader a hint of some looming
threat or other event, sometimes called foreshadowing, but will rarely
describe the details of the coming event, because that might rob the story of
its suspense. In One Hundred Year's of Solitude, however, vivid images of
things that have not yet happened are used in ways that keep you reading.
Furthermore, to create the particular impression of time that he wants to
convey, the author may even use a flashback and flashforward in the same
passage.
The best, and most famous, example is in the first two sentences of the
novel:
Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would
remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Macondo was then a village of twenty houses of mud and canestalks constructed
on the bank of a river of diaphanous waters which rushed through a bed of
stones, polished, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs. (71;11)
We are thus situated in the midst of a time that stretches endlessly
backward, to the founding of the village and beyond, even to a time of
"prehistoric eggs," and that stretches forward to some time "many years later"
when a very dramatic event will occur. Thus, from the very beginning, the
author has prepared us to move constantly back and forth through time.
When the firing-squad scene does occur, several chapters later, it is
something of an anticlimax. The colonel is not shot, after all: his brother
saves him, and the firing squad happily switches sides and follows the
colonel. But that's all right, because by that time Garcia Marquez has hooked
our interest with a number of other devices, including other flashforwards
and, especially, our growing sympathy for the members of the Buendia clan. By
this time, in other words, we keep reading because we care about these people.
Sometimes a coming event (or nonevent) is announced by a character, as
when Amaranta declares that her foster sister Rebeca will never marry Pietro
Crespi, and later when she prepares for her own impending death by weaving a
shroud and Ursula announces she will die when it stops raining. And sometimes
it is mentioned in the anonymous voice of the narrator, as when the
destruction of Macondo is foretold at the beginning of the fifteenth chapter:
"The events that would deliver the mortal blow to Macondo began to be apparent
when the son of Meme Buendia was brought to the house." (365;272)
Repetition of events and processes.
Another important technique is repetition. Similar events keep occurring,
generation after generation. The technique is not hidden, but rather is made
very obvious to the reader. First, there is the literal repetition of names,
especially the two men's names, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, with minor
variations from one generation to the next, but also of the women's names
Ursula, Amaranta, and Remedios (the third of whom is known by the nickname,
Meme). Certain character traits are supposed to go with the names. Thus, all
the Jose Arcadios are supposedly exuberant and headstrong, all the Aurelianos
contemplative and solitary-at least, this is Ursula Iguaran's theory, though
in one generation (Jose Arcadio Segundo and his twin brother, Aureliano
Segundo) the personalities seem to have been reversed.
There are also repetitions of processes; growth and decay, frenzied
attempts to unlock the secrets of the universe (an obsession of the founder,
Jose Arcadio Buendia, and of most of his male descendants down through the
last Aureliano), desperate sexual passions (chiefly but not exclusively a male
trait in the family), attempts at restoration and renewal of the house (mostly
by the women, but also at one point by Aureliano Segundo, during the five
years' rain). And there are repetitions of events, such as the long rains and
attacks of forgetfulness (in the form of a plague in the early days of
Macondo, as a result of government propaganda after the banana workers'
massacre). To make sure these points are not missed, the characters,
especially Ursula and, near the very end, Pilar Ternera, comment on the
repetitions. At one point, Ursula has a brief conversation with her
great-grandson Jose Arcadio Segundo and "realized she was giving the same
reply she had received from Colonel Aureliano Buendia in his condemned-man's
cell [many years and many pages earlier], and once more shuddered with the
proof that time did not pass . . . but kept spinning in circles." (409;310)
It is Pilar Ternera, now well over one-hundred forty-five years old, who
perceives the real role of repetition in the Buendia family history and, not
incidentally, in the structure of this novel: she had learned, the narrator
says, " that the history of the family was a meshing of gears of unalterable
repetitions, a turning wheel that would have kept spinning into eternity, if
it had not been for the progressive and irremediable wearing down of the
axle." (470;364)
Repetitions break down the system.
This then is one way of visualizing the structure of the novel: not a
circle, because the repetition of events does not bring us back to the place
we started, but a spiral, in which every repetition "wears away the axle,"
until the whole system, including both the constant attempts to renew Macondo
and the reproduction of the Buendia clan, breaks down.
Mention of Pilar's insight raises another important technical issue: the
narrative voice. Who is this narrator? He or she knows the whole history of
the Buendias better than any of them know it. But the narrator is not quite
omniscient. For example, the opening sentence (quoted earlier) and Pilar's
insight into the "axle" of time are two of the very few places where the
narrator claims to be able to read a character's thoughts. Generally, we get
to know characters from close observation of what they say and do, and we have
to infer what they may be thinking. The narrator's knowledge also fails us in
the one great unresolved mystery: Jose Arcadio, elder son of the founder, is
murdered in his bed, but no one ever knows by whom. The narrator is also
ignorant of who guns down all of the colonel's illegitimate sons and, in fact,
seems as surprised as we are when the last survivor from among these sons
appears in Macondo and is also shot down.
There are two likely candidates for narrator. One is Melquiades, the
gypsy magician and wise man, who (we find out at the very end) had already
written the whole history of Macondo before it happened. In that case, the
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude that we are reading in Spanish (or
English) is the very same as the manuscripts of Melquiades, written in
Sanskrit.
There are two problems with this theory. First, the epigraph to the
manuscripts, "The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being
eaten by ants," is not the epigraph of the book we have been reading. Second,
and more damaging to the theory, the narrator does not sound like Melquiades,
but is much more naive and unsophisticated. The narrator who has been watching
Melquiades, but does not think or speak like the old gypsy.
The other likely candidate is the town itself, a kind of collective voice
of its people. Garcia Marquez has used such a narrator before, in the short
story, "Montiel's Widow," and perhaps that is what he is doing here. But if
the town no longer exists, because it is destroyed at the end of the book,
then how can it tell its own history?
This is a puzzle we do not need to resolve. The narrator's voice is that
of a very observant, apparently objective reporter, much as Garcia Marquez
himself was for many years. Of course, the objectivity is more apparent than
real: this narrator is clearly on the side of the workers against the banana
company, and just as clearly for good wholesome sex and against sexual
repression. But by maintaining the tone of objectivity, the reporter/narrator
is able to describe the most bizarre events without comment, knowing only what
he (or she) has seen and not claiming, at least until the very end, to know
what it all means.
The advantage of the unreliable narrator.
In the end, whatever sense the novel makes is up to the reader to figure
out. Fortunately, we are provided with so many clues to the novel's themes
that we should have no trouble coming to our own conclusions. Thus, this
pseudo-objective, reportorial narrative voice serves the author well: it
enables him to present all the relevant information while inviting us to make
the obvious, and the less obvious, connections. We the readers then can have
the extremely satisfying feeling we have "got" it. And if we read it a second
time, we get it at another level, because we see more connections - and
rereading it, we, in effect, give the Buendias their "second opportunity on
earth."
In this way, Garcia Marquez has played his biggest trick, not so much on
us his readers as on the novel as a literary genre. He has taken us into his
confidence, so that both he and we at the end see just how the novel was
constructed-not how he struggled to write it, but how he finally designed it
to make it work as a whole.
It is this reporting of fantastic, bizarre events in a perfectly
straight, seemingly objective tone that is what has been called "magic
realism" or "the marvelous real," the technique, or attitude, most popularly
identified with Garcia Marquez's writings. The two terms are similar in
meaning, but they have a little different history.
Magic realism, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature
(1985:606), is a term coined by the German writer Franz Roh in 1925, to
describe works of art that are realistic in style but represent imaginary or
fantastic scenes. More recently, it has been applied to the works of several
writers of fiction, Garcia Marquez prominent among them, as well as Gunter
Grass (Germany), John Fowles (England), Italo Calvino (Italy), and several
others. "Magic realist novels and stories have,typically, a strong narrative
drive, in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the
inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story, or mythology
combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of
refraction and recurrence." (Oxford Companion, 606-607)
"The marvelous real" is a translation of Cuban novelist Alejo
Carpentier's phrase, lo real maravilloso, Carpentier was referring to a
similar phenomenon-realistic portrayal of fantastic events - but with a
peculiarly Latin American twist: for Carpentier, what seemed fantastic was, in
Latin America, absolutely, literally real. In other words, there are in Latin
America historical events and geological and other wonders that are so amazing
they cannot be exaggerated-actually they must be told completely straight,
objectively, to make them seem believable. This is an argument that Garcia
Marquez himself has made many times, notably in his Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, and there is definitely something to it. The splendor and volume of
the waters crashing down Iguazu Falls in Paraguay (a glimpse of which is seen
in the movie, The Mission), for example, is beyond our capacity to exaggerate,
as are the great obsessions of conquistadores, warriors, and rebels of the
region, or the cruelties of its dictators.
Some of the magical events in One Hundred Years of Solitude are total
inventions that serve to suggest the credulity of the townspeople (who may or
may not be the same as the narrator). For example, old Father Nicanor Reyna,
who levitates twelve centimeters above the ground after drinking hot
chocolate. Others are exaggerations of quite plausible and familiar
occurrences, or a literalizing of familiar myths.
For example, the founders' great-granddaughter Remedios the beautiful
ascends to heaven one day when she goes out to hang up the sheets. We have
already noted, in chapter II, that much as this is literally impossible, such
a story was told about a girl in Garcia Marquez's hometown. Another apparent
exaggeration is that Colonel Aureliano Buendia has fathered seventeen sons by
as many women during the war, and that all these young men come and stay in
the Buendia house for a time. The author remembers that his maternal
grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez, did indeed have a great number of
illegitimate children, possibly as many as seventeen, who were fathered during
the war, and were always well-received when they visited the house.
"Magic realism," then, is a way of making us really see reality by
jarring us loose from our preconceptions.
Enumerating the fantastic.
One of Garcia Marquez's favorite devices for making the fantastic sound
realistic is his habit, perhaps picked up in years of newspaper reporting, of
giving precise figures for things. Thus, the heavy rains that fall on
Macondo-a perfectly normal, but impressive, event in northeastern Colombia-are
said to last precisely four years, eleven months, and two days. To a child
watching it rain, it might seem to last that long. Three thousand workers are
massacred by troops during the banana strike. Colonel Aureliano Buendia
fights, and loses, precisely thirty-two wars, and so on.
When we read of such amazing events told in such an objective and naive
voice, we realize it is up to us, the readers, to interpret their meaning.
Whoever is narrating is simply too literal-minded and simple to have
trustworthy opinions.
The realistic description of impossible events is also an example, at the
level of language, of Garcia Marquez's irony. Irony is the use of words,
images, and so on, to convey the opposite of their intended meaning. Garcia
Marquez employs irony on several levels. Sometimes a single word, such as a
character's name, suggests something opposite to the character's personality:
for example, Prudencio Aguilar, who is not the least bit "prudent" (see
chapter V of this Note).
Sometimes a character's style of speech is ironic. For example, in the
chapter on the banana workers' strike, the court uses very stiff, pompous
language to state something that is ridiculous: that the banana workers do not
exist, because they are technically not "employees" of the firm - an evasion
of the government's responsibility that has tragic consequences. Another
example is Fernanda's long-winded proclamations of her religious devotion.
These are obviously expressions, not of Christian love, but of extreme
self-centeredness and rigidity. The apparently patriotic declarations of
Liberals and Conservatives alike also have nothing to do with loyalty to the
country, but are really about the narrow ambitions of the politicians.
More subtly, what the narrator or the characters say may sometimes
contradict what the reader knows to be true. There are many examples in the
solemn announcements of Jose Arcadio Buendia, including his finding that ice
"is the great invention of our time." Much later, the apparent progress
brought by the banana company to Macondo turns out not to be progress at all,
but a prelude to devastation.
Still more subtly, Garcia Marquez has reserved a final ironic twist for
us: in the last chapter, he suggests that the whole book is not what it
appears to be, but may be, like the town and the family, a creation of the
gypsy Melquiades, or perhaps (when he has a character say "Literature is the
greatest toy for fooling people") simply a hallucination.
The effect of irony is generally comic, but as we can see from these few
examples, Garcia Marquez also frequently uses it to underscore a tragedy. Even
the novel's last sentence, which appears to be giving the moral of the story,
is ironic. Why should "the bloodlines condemned to one hundred years of
solitude" not have "a second opportunity on earth"? and how does any family
get such a terrible condemnation? The real lessons of this book, if we are
bent on finding moral lessons, have to do with the nature of power, of love,
of solitude, but also of capitalist development and of literature itself.
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