EN3262 Marquez - One Thousand Years of Solitude

Resource Material for class discussion

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Márquez's Nobel Lecture

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The national context of Colombia

1810 Colombia achieves formal independence from Spanish colonial rule

1812 First of a series of civil wars

1899-1902 The War of a Thousand Days (civil war between conservatives against liberals)

1928 Massacre by the military of workers from local plantations who went on strike

1948 Outbreak of violence following the assassination of a liberal leader.

Ecology

A nation of regions: (I) the Highlands of the Interior (with capital Bogotá at its centre), (ii) Greater Antioquía, (iii) Greater Cauca, a mountainous region between the Highlands & the south-west of the country, and (iv) the Atlantic coastal region. Highland culture is dominated by conservative and Spanish influences. The coastal region is tri-ethnic: indigenous, Afro-Colombian, Hispanic. Popular and oral culture dominates, and is more receptive to outside influences. Marquez identifies himself with the coastal region.

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Marquez on the novel

(a) The Fragrance of Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, tr. T. Nairn, London: Verso, 1983:

35: Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.

35: Yes, I think a novel is reality presented through a secret code, a kind of conundrum about the world. The reality you are dealing with in a novel is different from real life, although it is rooted in it.

36: After I’d written One Hundred Years of Solitude, a boy turned up in Barranquilla claiming to have a pig’s tail.

59: The myths, legends and beliefs of the people in her town [his grandmother] were, in a very natural way, all part of her everyday life. With her in mind, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t inventing anything at all but simply capturing and recounting a world of omens, premonitions, cures and superstitions that is authentically ours, truly Latin American.

(b) quoted in Regina Janes, `One Hundred Years of Solitude’: Modes of Reading, Boston: Twayne, 1991:

101: My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. Because in the world I was trying to evoke, that barrier didn’t exist.

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The term `Magic Realism’

The German art critic Franz Roh first coined the term in 1925, with reference to post-expressionist painting of the period 1920-25. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier used the phrase `marvelous American reality’ (`lo real maravilloso’) in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of This World (1949, tr. 1957). The Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri wrote in 1948 of `the depiction of reality in general as mysterious’ The critic Angel Flores published an essay `Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction’ in 1955, referring to the transformation of `the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal’, as in the Argentinian writer Jorg Luis Borges. In 1967 Luis Leal argued that magical realism as used by Flores was not a development out of European models….

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Viewpoints

From Roberto González Echevarría, `One Hundred Years of Solitude: the novel as myth and archive’, MLN 99, 2 (1984): 358-80.

… Now the promise of knowledge is to be found in a scientific discourse whose object is not nature, but language and myth. The truth‑bearing document the novel imitates now is the anthropological treatise. The object of such studies is to discover the origin and source of a culture's own version of its values, beliefs, and history through a culling and re‑telling of its myths. Readers of Mauss, Van Gennep, Levi‑Bruhl, Frazer, Levi‑Strauss and other anthropologists will no doubt recognize the inherent complexity of such works. In order to understand another culture, the anthropologist has to know his own to the point where he can distance himself from it. But this distancing involves a kind of self‑effacement, too….

Anthropology is the mediating element in the modern Latin American novel because of the place this discipline occupies in Western thought, and also because of the place Latin America occupies within that discipline. Anthropology is a way through which Western culture indirectly affixes its own cultural identity. This identity, which the anthropologist struggles to shed, is one that masters non‑historical cultures through knowledge, by making them the object of its study. Anthropology translates into the language of the West the cultures of the others, and in the process establishes its own form of self‑knowledge through a kind of annihilation of the self. Existential philosophy, as in Heidegger, Ortega and Sartre, is akin to this process, because it is only through an awareness of the other that Western thought can pretend to wind back to the origin of being. The native, that is to say Latin Americans or in general those who could be delicately called the inhabitants of the post‑colonial world, provide the model for this reduction and beginning. The native has timeless stories to explain his changeless society. These stories, these myths, are like those of the West in the distant past, before they became a mythology. Freud, Frazer, Jung, and Heidegger sketch a return to or a retention of those origins. Anthropology finds their analogon in the contemporary world of the native. The modern Latin American novel is written through the model of such anthropological studies. In the same way that the nineteenth‑century novel turned Latin America into the object of scientific study, the modern Latin American novel transforms Latin American history into originary myth in order to see itself as other. The theogonic Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude owes its organization to this phenomenon.

…. What do we learn about Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude? We learn that while its writing may be mired in myth, it cannot be turned to myth, that its newness makes it impervious to timelessness, circularity, or any such delusion. New and therefore historical, what occurs in America is marked by change, it is change. García Márquez has expressed this by tantalizing the reader with various forms of myth, while at the same time subjecting him to the rigors of history as writing, of history as Archive. He has also achieved it by making Borges the keeper of the Archive, for the figure of the Argentine ensures that no delusions about literature be entertained. In a sense, what García Márquez has done is to punch through the anthropological mediation and substitute the anthropologist for an historian, and to turn the object of attention away from myth as an expression of so‑called primitive societies to the myths of modern society: the book, writing, reading, instruments of a quest for self‑knowledge that lie beyond the solace mythic interpretations of the world usually afford. We can always use One Hundred Years of Solitude to escape temporality, but only if we wilfully misread it to blind ourselves of its warnings against it. American history can only become myth enmeshed in this very modern problematic that so enriches its most enduring fictions.

From Gerald Martin, `On “magical” and social realism in García Márquez’, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, ed. B. McGuirk & R. Cardwell, CUP, 1987, 95-116.

97: the story of the Buendía family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history.

99-100: This novel is not about `history-and-myth’, but about the myths of history and their demystification…. In [this novel] García Márquez momentarily found a means of reconciling hia rather evident philosophical pessimism … with his determinedly optimistic conception of the march of history. It is perhaps through this tension that the novel has attained its undeniable classic status.

101: This, then, is the novel which, perhaps more than any other, has been taken to confirm the historical demise of social realism in Latin American fiction and to herald the arrival of the linguistic, experimental or post-Modernist novel…. But to see things this way seems to me an over-simplification ... One Hundred Years of Solitude ... contains a greater variety of carefully encoded material relating to the positivistic orders of social psychology, political economy and the history of ideas than almost any other Latin American novel ...

102-3: Like the Surrealist movement from which it ultimately derives, magical realism might in part be seen as an unconscious–irony of ironies!–conspiracy between European or North American critics eager to get away, in their imagination, to the colourful world of Latin America, and cetain Latin American writers desperate to take refuge, in their writing, from the injustice and brutality of their continent’s unacceptable reality.

104: The official history which `Europe’ has projected is that of rationalism, capitalism, progressive development and linear chronology. However contradictory and repressive this history may seem to any European, it is, for the typical Latin American, organic and coherent by definition: whereas his own history is fragmented, discontinuous, absurd… He is a `mimic man’.

105: There seems little doubt that the morbid fear of the birth of a child cursed with a pig’s tail is a condensed metaphor for the combined ideologies of original sin and biological determinism…

106: Seen in this light, the novel seems less concerned with any `magical’ reality than with the general effect of a colonial history upon individual relationships: hence the themes of circularity, irrationality, fatalism, isolation, superstition, fanaticism, corruption and violence.

From Kumkum Sangari , `The Politics of the Possible’, Cultural Critique (Fall 1987): 157-86.

The non‑mimetic narrative modes of Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie inhabit a social and conceptual space in which the problems of ascertaining meaning assume a political dimension qualitatively different from the current post‑modern scepticism about meaning in Europe and America. Yet such non‑mimetic, non‑Western modes also seem to lay themselves open to the academized procedures of a peculiarly Western, historically singular, post‑modern epistemology that universalizes the self‑conscious dissolution of the bourgeois subject, with its now characteristic stance of self‑irony, across both space and time. The expansive forms of the modern and the post‑modern novel appear to stand in ever‑polite readiness to recycle and accommodate other cultural content, whether Latin American or Indian. The ease with which a reader may be persuaded to traverse the path between such non‑Western modes and Western post‑modernism—broadly defined here as the specific preoccupations and 'sensibility' of both contemporary fiction and of post‑structuralist critical discourse—may well lead us to believe they were indeed made for each other….

.... Marvellous realism discovers a figurative discourse that produces a knowledge inseparable from its performance in language, image, and metaphor and that can be understood in its total configuration but not necessarily explained. Through it Márquez legitimizes the status of the possible as valid knowledge. He realigns the notion of history as a set of discoverable facts with the notion of history as a field of diverse human and cultural possibility. His narratives figure a dynamic relation of past to future in which the present is seen in terms of its potential and in which the varied creative abilities of his culture are embodied in the very capaciousness of the narrative itself. The act of perception is relative yet historically determined; indeed, reality is alterable only because it is both relative and determined. The recognition of such relativity is precisely the recognition that the world is open to change: it is necessary to prevent a foreclosure by a single meaning so that different meanings may become possible.

.... In One Hundred Years Jose Arcadio Secundo's persistent memory is the only record that remains of the banana company massacre; the plague of insomnia which leads to collective loss of memory is equivalent to the loss of historiography, of a usable past, indeed of historical agency. So Pilar Ternera reads the past in the cards. Memory functions as flexible, collective, material practice open to improvisation and personal reminiscence (but not dependent on it) and is different from the kind of memory which is central to the often conservative, always individuated organizing principle of poems and narratives designed to cope with cultural fragmentation, to authorize singular visions (which ironically intensify the experience of fragmentation), to preserve a 'monumental civilization' as 'heritage' through quotation, and to relive it through nostalgia….

The preoccupation with circular time and the rejection of linear time in Márquez's narratives are often read as evidence either of his fatalism or of his primitivism. However, the absence of a single linear time need not be read as the absence of a historical consciousness but rather as the operation of a different kind of historical consciousness. The play of linear time with circular time achieves its cognitive force through marvellous realism's capacity to generate and manage various kinds of alignments, tensions, and discontinuities between sequential and non‑sequential time….

.... Finally, if circular time is a metaphor for historical inevitability, then it is important to notice that it does come to an end. Pilar Ternera perceives incest as a cyclic retardation of linear time: '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'. If circularity wears out, becomes bankrupt like other historical fates, so does linearity. The conclusion of One Hundred Years at once images and ironizes a decadent European apocalypticism, described by Vyacheslav Ivanov as the 'feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series.' The conclusion is poised in a liminal space and in an in‑between time, which, having broken out of the binary opposition between circular and linear, gives a third space and a different time the chance to emerge….

.... As my argument maintains, the hybrid writer is already open to two worlds and is constructed within the national and international, political and cultural systems of colonialism and neo‑colonialism. To be hybrid is to understand the question as well as to represent the pressure of such historical placement. The hybrid, lived‑in simultaneity of Latin America, both historical and contradictory, is also the ground for political analysis and change. And yet for these same reasons, hybridity as a position is particularly vulnerable to reclassification. The 'modern' moments of such non‑mimetic fiction emerge in fact from different social formations and express or figure different sets of social relations. Though forged within the insistent specificity of a localized relation, the very differences of such fiction are read as techniques of 'novelty' and 'surprise' in the West. Novelty guarantees assimilation into the line of postmodern writers not only because the principle of innovation is also the principle of the market in general, but also because the post‑modern obsession with anti‑mimetic forms is always on the lookout for new modes of 'self' fracture, for new versions of the self‑locating, self‑disrupting text. From this decontextualizing vantage point various formal affinities can easily be abstracted from a different mode of cognition; the nonmimetic can be read as anti‑mimetic, difference can easily be made the excuse for sameness. The transformative spaces in a text—that is, those which do not readily give up their meaning—are the crucial node of its depoliticization. The enigma in Márquez's narratives can be read as a radical contextual figure or can be recuperated as yet another self‑reflexive instance of the post‑modern meaning/representation problematic. The synchronic time‑space of post‑modernism becomes a modality for collapsing other kinds of time—most notably, the politically charged time of transition. And further, since postmodernism both privileges the present and valorizes indeterminacy as a cognitive mode, it also deflates social contradiction into forms of ambiguity or deferral, instates arbitrary juxtaposition or collage as historical 'method', pre‑empts change by fragmenting the ground of praxis.

However, it is difficult to understand post‑modernism without at the same time understanding the appropriative history of Western 'high' modernism. Raymond Williams points out that modernism is governed by the 'unevenness … of a class society, and this—along with its mobility and dislocations, which find a home within the "imperial metropolis"—leads to the characteristic experience of "estrangement and exposure." Nonetheless, modernism also enters into and is governed by another set of relationships. Modernism is a major act of cultural self‑definition, made at a time when colonial territories are being reparcelled and emergent nationalisms are beginning to present the early outlines of decolonization. As a cultural ensemble, modernism is assembled, in part, through the internalization of jeopardized geographical territory—which is now incorporated either as 'primitive' image/metaphor or as mobile non‑linear structure. Though intended as a critique, such incorporation often becomes a means for the renovation of bourgeois ideology, especially with the institutionalization of modernism. Ironically, the 'liberating' possibilities of an international, oppositional, and 'revolutionary' modernism for early‑twentieth‑century 'Third World' writers and artists came into being at a time when modernism was itself recuperating the cultural products of non‑Western countries largely within an aesthetic of the fragment. The modernism they borrowed was already deeply implicated in their own history, being based partly on a random appropriation and remodelling of the 'liberating' and energizing possibilities of their own indigenous 'traditions'. Not only have the critical practices which have developed around modernism been central to the development of an assimilative bourgeois consciousness, a powerful absorptive medium for transforming colliding realities into a cosmopolitan, nomadic, and pervasive 'sensibility', but the freewheeling appropriations of modernism also coincide with and are dependent upon the rigorous documentation, inventory, and reclassification of 'third World' cultural products by the museum/library archived Modernism as it exists is inconceivable without the political and economic relations of colonialism.

The modernist problems of knowing and representation continue to inform post‑modernism. Though the organizing role of individual perception—which could legitimate perspective—and the cohesive role and concept of 'art' have lost their ability to bind the aesthetic of the fragment into a 'whole' and are indeed challenged and 'unmade' by post‑modernism, there are distinct ideological and historical continuities between the two. Not only has the destabilizing of the image that modernism effected now been extended into the prose of postmodern critical theory and refined anew, but a post‑modern aesthetic continues to raid the 'inarticulate' cultural forms of the 'Third World', to 'textualize' a geographically lost terrain (for example, Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs).

Post‑modern scepticism is the complex product of a historical conjuncture and is constructed as both symptom and critique of the contemporary economic and social formation of the West. But post‑modernism does have a tendency to universalize its epistemological preoccupations—a tendency that appears even in the work of critics of radical political persuasion. On the one hand, the world contracts into the West; a Eurocentric perspective (for example, the post‑Stalinist, antiteleological, and anti‑master narrative dismay of EuroAmerican Marxism) is brought to bear upon 'Third World' cultural products; a 'specialized' scepticism is carried everywhere as cultural paraphernalia and epistemological apparatus, as a way of seeing; and the post‑modern problematic becomes the frame through which the cultural products of the rest of the world are seen. On the other hand, the West expands into the World; late capitalism muffles the globe and homogenizes (or threatens to) all cultural production–this, for some reason, is one 'master narrative' that is seldom dismantled as it needs to be if the differential economic, class, and cultural formation of 'Third World' countries is to be taken into account. The writing that emerges from this position, however critical it may be of colonial discourses, gloomily disempowers the 'nation' as an enabling idea and relocates the impulses for change as everywhere and nowhere. Because it sees the West as an engulfing 'centre', it perpetuates the notion of the 'Third World' as a residue and as a 'periphery' that must eternally palpitate the centre. This centre‑periphery perspective is based on a homology between economic and cultural domination, and like the discursive structure of self and Other, cannot but relegate the 'Third World' to the false position of a permanent yet desired challenge to (or subversion of) a suffocating Western sovereignty. From there it continues to nourish the selfdefining critiques of the West, conducted in the interest of ongoing disruptions and reformulations of the self‑ironizing bourgeois subject.

Such scepticism does not take into account either the fact that the post‑modern preoccupation with the crisis of meaning is not everyone's crisis (even in the West) or that there are different modes of de‑essentialization which are socially and politically grounded and mediated by separate perspectives, goals, and strategies for change in other countries. Post‑modern scepticism dismantles the 'unifying' intellectual traditions of the West—whether liberal humanism or Marxism—but in the process denies to all the truth of or the desire for totalizing narratives. There is no necessary or obvious connection, as is often assumed, between the decentring of unitary discourses (or, the projects of the Enlightenment and modernity) and an 'international' radicalism. To believe that a critique of the centred subject and of representation is equal to a critique of colonialism and its accoutrements is in fact to disregard the different historical formation of subjects and ways of seeing that have actually obtained from colonization; and this often leads to a naive identification of all non‑linear forms with those of the decentred post‑modern subject. Further, the crisis of legitimation (of meaning and knowledge systems) becomes a strangely vigorous 'master narrative' in its own right, since it sets out to rework or 'process' the knowledge systems of the world in its own image; the post‑modern 'crisis' becomes authoritative because it is inscribed within continuing power relations and because, as an energetic mode of 'acquisitive cognition', it is deeply implicated in the structure of institutions. Indeed, it threatens to become just as imperious as bourgeois humanism, which was an ideological manoeuvre based on a series of affirmations, whereas post‑modernism appears to be a manoeuvre based on a series of negations and self‑negations through which the West reconstrues its identity as 'a play of projections, doublings, idealizations, and rejections of a complex, shifting otherness.'

Aníbal González, `Translation and Genealogy: One Hundred Years of Solitude’, in Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk & Richard Cardwell, CUP, 1987, 65-79.

68: … the topic of translation forms a thread that runs through the novel and contributes to its coherence: it is obvious that the novel’s plot moves inexorably towards that instant when Melquíades’s manuscripts are at last translated and the foreordained nature of Macondo’s history is revealed …. What makes translation so important? What is its relationship with genealogy and the incest prohibition?

To try to answer some of these questions, it is necessary first to address ourselves to the context of the theory of translation, and specifically to three theoretical pronouncements…. In his well-known introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens titled `The Task of the Translator’ (1923), Benjamin develops … some seminal ideas about translation….

69: Translation, as Benjamin puts it, `ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form’ … he proposes that translation in fact foretells or announces the existence of a `pure language’, a kind of communicative essence freed from the contingent variations imposed upon it by the various tongues and by the author’s intentions … a transcendental and messianic idea of translation …. Yet benjamin is also aware in his essay that translation’s promise of the ultimate reconciliation of languages and the discovery of `pure laguage’ is simply that–a promise–and that, in practie, translation’s linguistic transfer `can never be total…’

70: Thus the `sacred text’ … turns out to be, at the same time, translatable and untranslatable…. Benjamin’s meditation on translation gives poignant expression to the double bind in which the act of translation is inscribed. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out in glossing this same essay by Benjamin translation in general … is caught in the paradox of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility.

71: In his essay on `The Homeric Versions’ (1932), Borges … reminds us … that the notion of translation is intimately linked to the nature of literature …. Borges stresses translation’s power somehow to `purify’ our understanding of a text by letting us see which elements of the original text are superfluous and which are part of its basic, underlying structure …. For Borges, as for Derrida, translation implies a creative breach of linguistic `propriety’ which leads to a questioning of the literary text’s integrity and authority…

72: The plot of García Márquez’s novel not only deals explicitly with the Buendías task of translating Melquíades’s manuscripts, it also reinscribes that task, `translates’ it … into the language of kinship….

73-4: The text is in code, that is to say, in still another language, and the full translation of the manuscripts depends on Aureliano being able to figure out the relationship, the `kinship’ … between Spanish and Melquíades’s secret code. This is where, finally, the apparently parallel lines of genealogy and translation in the novel converge ….

75-6: we should recall here Derrida’s observation about translation’s contradictory, aporetic nature, its being at the same time possible and impossible …. Aureliano … is caught in a textual version of Zeno’s paradox …. In much the same way, Aureliano’s incestuous union with Amaranta Ursula has chained him irrevocably to his domned genealogy …. Translation, like incest, leads back to self-reflexiveness…

77: Aureliano Babilonia’s tragic discovery that he, too, is a translation, far from being an assertion of Latin America’s perpetual `dependence’ on some foreign original or `sacred’ text, is García Márquez’s way of calling attention instead to all literature’s origins in translation, in the transport–through violence or exchange–of meaning from other texts and other languages into the literary text.