If a number of readers have seen considerable political significance in the novel, there has been no agreement about what that political "message" might be. For the novel has attracted all sorts of conflicting political interpretation. There is something here for every political view. The novel's appeal is to all ideologies. Leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portraits of imperialism, conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining role of the family, and the apolitical hedonists can enjoy all the sex. To all of these we might add those readers who decline to see any social-political themes in the novel and who like it because it's simply a great read. And whatever I might like to claim for its wider implications, One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly a wonderful and popular read, which one can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical roots or its political implications. This may be the main reason why it has been such a phenomenally popular book outside Latin America.
By way of explaining my answer to that question I posed about what, if anything, this novel celebrates, I would like to point to two very obvious facts of the novel and then move on to construct some interpretative possibilities from those two facts. In offering this initial interpretative possibility I'm trying to remain true to my experience of reading this novel, an experience which features a curious mixture. On the one hand I find this a wonderfully diverting comic novel, full of the most unexpected and delightful incidents and characters, and thus an extraordinarily uplifting experience. On the other hand, infused in this novel, there is a strong sense of irony, a powerful undertone of prevailing sadness and a sense of tragic futility.
One must first observe that here there is an amazingly prolific imagination at work in the characters and incidents of this novel---extraordinary people and intriguing incidents. This novel never loses its ability to surprise and delight. No matter whom we meet, we quickly learn to expect the unexpected, the colorful, and the original. From moments of beauty, like the trail of butterflies, to the satiric, like the priest levitating to chocolate, to the erotic scene of vulgar and prodigious sex, to the amazingly comedic, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the flowers in the house. The comic energy here is justly famous. The characters, for the most part, may be two-dimensional, and we may meet some of them only for a couple of pages, but there is throughout a sense of vitality and wonder at the world which makes this story hard to put down.
A good deal of this quality comes from the style, the "magic realism," which strikes at our traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. It is the surrealism of the literature world. People often compare the styles because they reveal the mysterious elements hidden in everyday reality. Magic realism expresses man's astonishment before the wonders of the real world. There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo, it is a state of mind as much as, or even more than, a real geographical place. By reading the book one can see that we learn very little about its actual physical layout. Once in this place, we must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to us.
The intermingling of the fantastic and the factual throughout the novel keeps us always on edge, always in a state of imaginative anticipation, particularly in the story of the Buendia men, whose imaginations are repeatedly going off in various directions, in schemes which are the constant source of amusement, novelty, and delight. I take it that this quality of the novel is clear to anyone who reads it. Some readers addicted to psychological naturalism may find that the fantasy interferes with their demands for a more "realistic" engagement with the imagined world of the fiction. There is an important connection between the fantasy and the reality in the novel. In fact, a particularly important point of this novel is that in many respects the civilization depicted here too often confronts the reality of life with fantasy, because it experiences life as fantasy rather than as historical fact.
Along with all this delight, however, I sense a strong underlying irony, a mixture of sadness, anger, and tragic fatality. For this is a story about the failure of the town and the family, which, for all their amazing vitality are finally and irreversibly wiped off the face of the earth. Amid all the delightful fantasy is a great deal of violence, cruelty, and despair; the central ingredient in the "solitude" each of the characters finally becomes immersed in. This establishes itself as a strong qualification to the comic delight one takes in so much during the novel. It is important not to sentimentalize the violence and the despair, as those of us who do not sense these qualities in our own communities are likely to do. In this novel, cruelty, failure, acute despair, and suddenly destructive irrational and inexplicable violence are always present. However we interpret the story, we need to take those aspects fully into account, and not minimize their impact in order to enjoy the comic inventiveness and the fantasy without any serious ironic qualifications.
Exploring this dual response further, I would like to point to one very marked feature of the novel, the working throughout of two senses of time, linear and circular. The interplay between these two senses creates some of the novel's most important effects. In the first place, we see that there is a strong sense of a linear development to the history of the town of Macondo. We follow the story from its founding, through various stages up to a flourishing modern town, then to its decline and eventual annihilation. In general, the linear history of the town falls into four sections. First, there is innocence and social harmony, in which Macondo exists like an early Eden, its inhabitants so pure that no one has yet died and they don't even have names for things, the world "was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” (p. 11) This section takes up the first five chapters of the book. The story then moves on to the military struggle in the various civil wars and revolutions (Chapters 6 to 9), then into a period of economic prosperity and spiritual decline (Chapters 10 to 15), and finally to decadence and physical destruction (Chapters 16 to 20).
The narrative is given to us, for the most part, following this linear sense of time, so that we always know roughly where we are in this story. We know because of the nature of the various "invasions" which occur. Usually outsiders arrive bringing the latest in technology or bureaucracy: gypsies, government officials, priests, various military forces, the lawyers, the railway, the American capitalists, the European with the bicycle and the passion for airplanes, and so on. We repeatedly experience these invasions as something over which the town has no control and which have come with no previous warning. In most cases the people have no immediate sense of how to react. The reactions we witness, from Jose Arcadio's response to the gypsies, to the reaction of the citizens to the telephone and movies, are often amusingly eccentric and unpredictable, but they point to a constant in the world of Macondo, the powerlessness of the people to take charge of the invasions which arrive upon them from the outside.
Macondo, you will recall, is founded initially almost by accident. It just happens to be where the Buendia expedition decides to stop. There is no particular reason for stopping there, and no one has a clear idea of where they are, except that they are in the middle of a number of natural barriers, for all they know cut off from all contact with civilization. And so they found Macondo, the city of mirrors or mirages, an innocent and tranquil community, with no sense of history and no particular political reason for even being there. It is an expression of the imaginative desires of Jose Arcadio, who has sought to flee his past and is incapable, because of his overheated imagination of creating a political future for his community. The development of the Buendia family in a sense underscores this linear sense of time, for they form a series of figures who, in part, symbolize the particular historical period of which they are a part. The patriarch Jose Arcadio is, in some sense, a Renaissance man of many interests with pioneering ambitions and energies. His son Aureliano becomes a great military leader, a main participant in the civil wars. In turn, he is succeeded by a bourgeois farmer-entrepreneur, family man, Aureliano Segundo, and by the twin Jose Arcadio Segundo, who works for the American capitalists and becomes the radical labor organizer. As we move from generation to generation, we sense a strong linear force, usually imposed from outside, driving events in Macondo.
For all this strong linear sense of history, the response of the people in Macondo, and particularly of the Buendia family to this linear march creates a second sense of time, history as something obsessively circular. For all the apparent changes in their main occupations, their personalities constantly repeat the experience of earlier generations. There's a strong sense of fate about this obsessive repetition. Once a person has been named the major characteristics of his or her life have been determined, and the person is doomed to repeat the events of the lives of their ancestors. Even their deaths are, in a sense preordained. The Jose Arcadios suffer as victims of murder or disease, all three Aurelianos die with their eyes open and their mental powers intact. They all succumb to a self-imposed exile in a solitude which can last for decades. Out of this sense of repetition, the comic energies, which the sexual prowess and the visionary schemes constantly celebrate, are always undercut by the irony of inevitable repetition of probably useless previous actions, as one of the most important images in the book makes clear: “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for Pilar Ternera because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” (p. 402)
We take great delight in watching the generally erratic spinning of the wheel, but we are increasingly aware of the wearing of the axle and eventually see it snap. Another way of saying this perhaps is to see that the people of Macondo and the Buendias often have a vital and amusing present, but their lives sooner or later lose meaning because they are incapable of seizing control of their own history. Their past is largely unknown to them, except as nostalgia. Their present, if active, is obsessive, and their future, non-existent.
As North Americans, we are far more accustomed to thinking of our own history, personal and national, as something of an encounter with destiny. We have confidence that we can take charge of our lives, construct a project-based life, and carry it through, so that in a way the world we have acted in will be transformed from the world into which we are born. The history of our country and often of our families is full of examples of such an authentic life choice undertaken in the confidence that we have a strong sense of a meaningful direction and the means to move there. However, as many interpreters of Marquez have pointed out, such may not be the case in Latin America, in whose culture there is a haunting theme, a familiar and lasting concern of Latin Americans. They fear that they are not quite real people, that their world is not entirely a real world. It is an old and intimate feeling, an actor's weariness with a never-ending career, a feeling that what is happening cannot really be happening, that it is all too fantastic or too cruel to be true, that history cannot be the farce it appears to be, that a daily life cannot be merely this losing battle with dust or insects, that this round of diseases, drink, ceremonies, sadness, and sudden death cannot be all there is. It is necessary to stress this point, this sense that history is a cruel farce experienced as fantasy and forgotten quickly, because it may well be the case that, in writing this novel, one of Marquez's main points is to leave his readers with a strong sense of the tragic futility of such an attitude.
We might observe that what takes place in the pages of Marquez's "magic realism" is in many places not so far from the cruel fantasies of killing and forgetfulness. This point about experiencing one's history as fantasy has been stressed also by critics, who insist that, since the rules which govern a society are those of the ruling class, those places which have no control over their own destiny live without such rational guidelines. Thus, they argue, Marquez's novel is not saying that life is a dream but rather that Latin American life is a dream. It is the unreality and un-authenticity imposed by almost five hundred years of colonialism, and that when a dream becomes a permanent living nightmare it is probably time to wake up.
The endless repetitions of useless actions are characteristic of a capitalist society without social or economic vitality. In this sense the colonel's endless battles are the same as his repetitive creation of little gold fish, they both resent a paradigm of action for the sake of action (or production for the sake of production, with no worthwhile return). Macondo never functions as an authentic participant in the political and economic processes of the nation. It is always marginal at best. Even after establishing his government position in Macondo, Moscote is nothing more than an "ornamental" authority, as he is described in the text. National politics are more a matter of disruption or confusion than an integral part of Macondo's life. After painting and repainting their homes the colors of both the Liberals and the Conservatives, Macondo's citizens eventually have houses of an undefined color, a sign of the failure, in effect, of both traditional parties.
In the conclusion of the novel the town and the family are fated to die because they do not have what is required to continue. Their solitude, commitment to withdrawal, fantasy, and subjective desires has doomed them. The ending, however, is more complex than this because, in a sense, Macondo does survive in this book. It is particularly significant that one of those who takes the advice of the Catalan bookseller to leave the town before its destruction is the author himself, Gabriel Marquez, descendant of the Marquez who fought alongside Colonel Buendia. Hence, what does survive is a testimony to the life that has been lived there, a story which will remain as a guide to the construction of a better civilization.
If one of the main problems of the Buendias and Macondo was an inability to generate a realistic sense of themselves out of their own history, then this book may help to make sure such a narrative does not happen again. Just as Melquiades, a writer, helped to overcome the plague of insomnia and collective amnesia when that disease infected Macondo from the Indians. This book, produced by a writer and magician may restore historical memory, the strike and the war will be remembered, as will be the futile fantasies of a civilization which could not incorporate those into its political and historical realities.
It may be significant that, although we learn little about Gabriel Marquez in the novel, we do know that he escapes Macondo with the complete “works of Rabelais” (p 409). The mention here of one of the supremely comic geniuses of world literature may be an important reminder of what the main function of this novel is: to celebrate the “tragi-comic” history of Macondo in a way that people can learn from it. If one of the great imaginative purposes of the best comedies, like The Odyssey, is, to celebrate the ability of human beings not only to survive but also to prevail, then the comic purposes of One Hundred Years of Solitude may well be to make sure that the full educational influences of comedy are delivered to the people. When we discussed The Odyssey, we talked about how such a process of transformation is one of the major points of the epic, so that Odysseus is not the same person he was when he first departed from Troy. He has become aware of a new and transforming set of values. Such a development, one might argue, is something the Buendias cannot undergo, and their fate may well be linked to this failure of their comic imaginations. At any rate, the “self-referencing” quality of the ending of the novel, when it, in effect, writes its own conclusion and points to a world beyond Macondo from which the author, Marquez, is telling the story. It offers a final insight that whatever life is to be lived in Latin America it is not to be the magic but ultimately self-defeating experience of the Buendias and Macondo. The novel is revolutionary, nd an amazing piece of literary work.
World Literature Paper: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Zach Levine
IB English
Period 5
June 16th, 2003
