One Hundred Years of Solitude (Criticism)

Criticism

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College. In the following essay, she explores the layers of meaning in the novel, noting the ways in which García Márquez intertwines myth, history, and literary theory to create a work that is at once readable and complex.

Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece, Cien años de soledad was published in Buenos Aires in 1967. The English translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude, prepared for Harper and Row by Gregory Rabassa, appeared in 1970. Several noted Latin American writers applauded the book even before its publication, and post-publication response was universally positive. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages and continues to enjoy both popular and critical acclaim.

García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1928. For the first eight years of his life, he lived with his grandparents. He credits his grandmother for his ability to tell stories, and for giving him the narrative voice he needed to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that is at once easily accessible to the reader and, at the same time, very difficult to analyze. The book has an effective plot that propels the reader forward. Simultaneously, the book functions on no less than five or six different levels. Any reading concentrating on one level may not do justice to the others. Consequently, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that demands careful and multiple readings.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, calls One Hundred Years of Solitude a " 'total' novel, in the tradition of those insanely ambitious creations which aspire to compete with reality on an equal basis, confronting it with an image and qualitatively matching it in vitality, vastness and complexity." Other critics have commented on the multi-layered nature of the book, noting that García Márquez intertwines myth, history, ideology, social commentary, and literary theory to produce this "total" novel. Although the book needs to be considered as a whole creation, it may also be helpful to examine a few of these layers individually in order to deepen appreciation for the whole.

One of the most common ways of viewing the novel is through myth. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez weaves references to classical and Biblical myths. Myths are important stories that develop in a culture to help the culture understand itself and its relationship to the world. For example, nearly every culture has a myth concerning the origin of the world and of the culture. In addition, myths often contain elements of the supernatural to help explain the natural world. One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the creation story of Macondo. Certainly, there are echoes of the Biblical Garden of Eden in the opening lines: "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." In addition, the years of rain that fall on Macondo and the washing away of the village recall myths of the great flood, when all civilization was swept away.

Scholars who study myth have identified characters who fulfill certain functions in myths across cultures. These character-types are often called "archetypes" because they seem to present a pattern. For example, the patriarch is a male character who often leads his family to a new home and who is responsible for the welfare of his people. José Arcadio Buendía is a representative of this type. Other archetypal characters in the novel include the matriarch, represented by Úrsula, and the virgin, represented by Remedios the Beauty. Petra Cotes and Pilar Ternera, with their blatant sexuality and fertility as well as their connection to fortune telling, serve as archetypal witches.

Further, many myths have patterns that repeat themselves over and over. Likewise, the novel presents pattern after pattern, from the language García Márquez uses to the repetitive nature of the batdes fought by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, to the naming of the characters. Indeed, the repetitions form the structure of the book.

Finally, many myths take as their starting point violence and/or the breaking of an important taboo. Certainly, the novel does both. The town of Macondo is founded and the history of the Buendías launched as the result of violence and incest. When José Arcadio and Úrsula Iguarán marry, she refuses to allow the marriage to be consummated because they are cousins. She fears that she will give birth to a child with the tail of a pig. Prudencio Aguilar makes jokes about José Arcadio's manhood and as a result, José Arcadio kills Prudencio, an act that finally forces José Arcadio and UIrsula to leave their town and found Macondo.

García Márquez also incorporates personal, local, national, and continental history into his novel. The village of Macondo is clearly modeled on the village of his childhood, Aracataca. Indeed, the name of the banana plantation just outside of Aracataca was Macondo. In addition, many of the episodes of the novel are based on events from García Márquez's life with his grandparents. For example, the opening episode of José Arcadio taking his sons to see ice is certainly modeled on a similar incident in young García Márquez's life, when his grandfather took him to see ice for the first time.

Other critics have noted the ways in which the founding of Macondo mirrors Colombian settlement by Europeans. Just as the early residents of Macondo are cut off from the rest of the world, the early colonists were also extremely isolated. In addition, the institutions of civilization, such as the government and the church, moved slowly, but inexorably, into Colombia, just as they do into Macondo. Apolinar Moscote and Father Nicanor Reyna are recognizable representatives of these institutions; their appearance in Macondo signals a shift from the Edenic, Arcadian days of the founding.

The middle part of the novel traces the course of a long civil war, fought between the Liberals and Conservatives. Colonel Aureliano Buendía is one of the leaders of the Liberal cause. The civil war in the novel follows closely the long years of civil war in Colombia when the Liberals and Conservatives battled for control of the country. Many critics have pointed out the parallels between the fictional Aureliano Buendía and the historical General Rafael Uribe Uribe, the military leader of the Colombian Liberals.

Finally, García Márquez incorporates into his novel the American intervention into Latin America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United Fruit Company, an American concern, began operating large scale banana plantations throughout Latin America. In 1928, a strike by workers over living conditions and contract violations led to a massive massacre. Newspapers differ in their accounts and it is difficult to arrive at a final figure for the number killed. Further, the governmental bureaucracy, intent on maintaining the flow of American dollars into Colombia, covered up the massacre. The fictional account of the slaying of the strikers in One Hundred Years of Solitude reads remarkably like the accounts of the historical 1928 Cienaga strike.

Finally, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel written within a particular literary context. Three important literary terms are often used in discussion of the novel: magic (or magical) realism; intertextuality; and metafiction. Knowing something about each of these devices is important for an understanding of the literary task García Márquez set for himself in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Magic realism is a term first used to describe the surreal images of painters in the 1920s and 1930s. Defining the term in literature has caused some controversy among literary scholars. However, according to Regina James in her One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading, "In current Anglo-American usage, magic realism is a narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality." Certainly, One Hundred Years of Solitude offers many examples of magic realism according to this definition, although not all critics would agree with the definition. Part of the effect of magic realism is created by the completely neutral tone of the narrator. He reports such things as gypsies on flying carpets, the insomnia plague, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, and the levitation of Father Nicanor with no indication that these occurrences are the least bit out of the ordinary, just as the inhabitants of Macondo respond to the events. On the other hand, the residents of Macondo respond to items such as magnets and ice with great wonder, as if these were the stuff of fantasy. García Márquez himself argues that the reality of South America is more fantastic than anything "magical" in his writing. Further, as he writes in his Nobel acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America,"

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imaginations, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. That is the crux of our solitude.

Another important term for the study of One Hundred Years of Solitude is intertextuality. Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher, created this term to describe the way that every text refers to and changes previous texts. Most obviously, a text can do this through allusion, by directly referring to a previous text through names of characters, incidents in the plot, or language, for example. As Regina Janes points out in her book, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading, the novel "adopts the narrative frame of the Bible and the plot devices of Oedipus Tyrannos and parodies both." That is, One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the structure of the Bible: it begins with an idyllic creation in a garden-like setting, where all the people are innocent. The movement of the plot is away from the moment of creation and toward the moment of Apocalypse, when all of Macondo is swept away. Second, in Oedipus the King, the entire tragedy is foretold by the oracle at Delphi, which tells Oedipus's parents that their son will murder his father and marry his mother. While the characters in the play take actions to prevent this, each action they take merely ensures that it will happen. Likewise, the fate of the Buendía family is sealed with the incestuous marriage between José Arcadio and Úrsula. What Úrsula fears most occurs in the closing pages of the book: the last Buendía child is bom with the tail of a pig, the result of the marriage of Aureliano Babilonia (who does not know his parentage) to his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula.

Finally, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an excellent example of metafiction, a work of fiction that takes as its subject the creation and reading of texts. From the moment that Melquíades presents José Arcadio with the manuscript, members of the Buendía family attempt to decipher it. These attempts parallel the attempts of the reader to decipher the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Further, during the insomnia epidemic, José Arcadio's labels illustrate the metafictional quality of the novel: "Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters." As readers, we participate in the creation of a fictional reality; in this sentence, García Márquez reminds us that the "reality" of the Buendías is no more than "momentarily captured" words. The "reality" of the Buendías ends when the reader closes the book.

Even more explicitly metafictional is the conclusion. In the last three pages, Aureliano finally deciphers the manuscript left by Melquíades, and suddenly understands that he is reading the history of his family. As he reads, he catches up to the present and then reads himself into the future at the moment Macondo is destroyed. At the same instant, readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude realize that Melquíades' manuscript is the novel they are reading themselves. The wind that wipes out the "city of mirrors (or mirages)" is the turning of the final page. At that moment, the reader participates in the destruction of Macondo.

As should be obvious, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that changes with reading; a second or third reading will be very different from the first. The multiple paths a reader takes through the novel, reading it as myth, as history, as metafiction, provide a rich and complicated stew, one that can be savored again and again.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• More information about García Márquez can be found on an internet site run by "The Great Quail" at http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/gabo/.
• Based on his studies of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, García Márquez's 1975 work El otoño del patriarca (translated in 1977 as The Autumn of the Patriarch) further develops the themes of power and solitude. The novel is technically dazzling and is often described as a prose poem.
• Revealing an affection for Daniel Defoe's 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year, García Márquez embellished on the facts of his parents' marriage in his 1985 novel El amor en los tiempos del cólera (translated in 1988 as Love in the Time of Cholera).
• • The 1968 collection of García Márquez stories called No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories contains themes or ideas later developed in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Miguel Angel Asturias, a 1967 Nobel prize winner from Guatemala, wrote a trilogy on United Fruit Company. He focused on the exploitation of Indians on banana plantations. In English, the titles of the three novels are The Cyclone (1950), The Green Pope (1954), and the Eyes of the Interred (1960).
• Terra Nostra, a 1975 novel by Carlos Fuentes — Mexican novelist, critic, and friend of García Márquez — has been compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude. The comparison comes at several intersections: one is the use of the New World chronicles and the two novels' language concerning the Spanish Conquest; another point is the use of the archive or historian. Fuentes uses the greatest Spanish writer, Don Quijote author Miguel de Cervantes, instead of a gypsy.
• No venture into Latin American literature can begin without the collection of poems Canto General (General Song, 1950), by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda of Chile. Within that collection is the poem "La United Fruit Co."
• The person of Melquíades is often interpreted as the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Master storyteller of the magic realism genre and director of the Argentine national library, Borges, like Melquíades, was a purveyor of knowledge. There are similarities between several of his stories and the character of Aureliano (IV). For example, as in the story "The Aleph" from The Aleph and Other Stories (1970), Aureliano's glimpse of history is instantaneous.
• The term magic realism was applied to the new literature of Latin America by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in the late 1940s. His masterpiece is The Lost Steps (1953) where he defines Latin American reality as a blending of primeval myth, Indian story, and the imposition of Spanish civilization. It is this cultural blending that makes possible the fantastic yet believable elements of magic realism.
• Another magic realist is the Chilean Isabel Allende, who is best known for her 1982 novel The House of Spirits. The niece of assassinated Chilean President Salvador Allende, the author is more up front with her examination of South American political realities as well as the role of women in that reality.
• A Peruvian magic realist is Mario Vargas Llosa, who tells the story of a prophet who incites the people of Brazil to revolt in The War of the End of the World (1981). Led by the prophet, the people found the city of Canudos, where history and civilization is turned upside down — there is no money, tax, or property. It is pure revolution.
• Set in Mexico, Like Water for Chocolate (1989) is Mexican writer Laura Esquivel's contribution to magic realism. The story concerns a daughter who is destined to stay at home to care for her mother. Her lover marries her sister so as to be near — and this leads to passionate tragedy.