Márquez’s Cien años de soledad
adjustment period of a nation becoming independent of the colonial power. Cien años de soledad can be read as a fictionalised history of Latin America’s struggle to emerge from colonialism. In Colombia in 1928, workers in banana plantations went on strike, with hundreds of men, women and children gathering in the town square attempting to get the government to address issues such as lack of contracts and no restrictions on work hours. But, instead of engaging, the Colombian army set up machine guns on rooftops, blockaded streets and opened fire, killing hundreds of people. In the novel, this is represented through seventeen of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s sons being hunted down and executed. On a more superficial letting, the vibrancy of prose that can be infused through the fantastical elements is able to echo the cornucopia of colours and sounds across the incredibly bio-diverse and rich landscape that is South America. However, the duality within the narrative also permits colonized countries to make sense of multiple realities, and its writers to tell stories taking into account the narrative of both the colonizer and the colonized. On this, Marquez said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that 'the interpretation of our reality with external schemes only contributes to making us increasingly unknown, less free and more solitary'. Before discussing the magical realism within his novel, it enriches our understanding of the text to have an awareness of the author’s life. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in the small river town of Aracataca, Colombia. Although Macondo, the town in the novel, is fictional, we are able to observe features of Marquez’s life and the town where he grew up appearing in both the narrativ e and the setting of the novel. He began his career as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works, which informs our understanding of his interest in fact, reality and the truth of events, and the importance of the medium and viewpoint through which this ‘reality’ is represented. He was affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, and his biographer Gerald Martin has said Cien años de soledad is ‘the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure’ . Many view him as almost a father or founding figure of the genre, in the way that his novel caused international recognition of, engagement with and respect for magical realism to skyrocket. Finally, to synthesise the theoretical discussion of this essay, I will analyse some of Márquez’s uses of magical realist writing in Cien años de soledad . He writes that a man ‘made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it’ . This line illustrates magical realism ’s intense interest in metaphor. Furthermore, it is concerned with the relationship and boundary between the physical and metaphysical world, the idea of something abstract such as ‘affection’ becoming tangible, tactile, organic, and capable of physically ‘rotting away’. Another example of this synaesthetic imagery, tapping into the universality and immersive nature of sensory description, is when of Márquez’s characters commands that another ‘Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Toda y is Monday too.’ Again, we see this confrontation of realist, mundane subject matter, such as ‘air’ or ‘sun’ or ‘Monday’, and yet they are altered somehow from their normal state in that the ‘air’ becomes something visible, and the ‘sun’ becomes audible and ‘buzzing’, apt in its connotations of activity in energy, of which the sun is one of the most powerful known sources. We also see an example of Márquez’s playful relationship with time in the novel, as he suggests that yesterday, the day before and today are all, somehow, Monday. This interest in dealing with things as everyday as the weather and the passage of time and investing an uncanny magic into them can also be seen in the description of a rain that lasts for four years, eleven
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