Critical Analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude’s Fernanda del Carpio is described as “a woman who was lost to the world’’: [Fernanda] had been born and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen. (One Hundred Years, pp. 210-11)

This representation is not idiosyncratic, but reflects regional differences in Colombia and the various attitudes of its people. Fernanda hails from the city of Bogotá, or someplace close by it in the chilly, rainy Andean region (or highlands) of Colombia. People from this region, called cachacos, are considered formal, rigid, and haughty by Colombia’s Caribbean coastal dwellers, the costeños, who include both García Márquez and the fictional residents of Macondo. In contrast to the cachacos, costeños come from a sunny, laid-back world, where the spoken language is informal, and the population more racially mixed (due, in part, to the slave trade once common in this region). García Márquez has called his first visit to Bogotá ‘’the most terrible experience in the whole of my youth/’ and the city itself “that remote and unreal city that was the centre of gravity of the power which has been imposed on us since our earliest times’’ (García Márquez in Bell-Viilada, p. 393). His unflattering portrait of Fernanda del Carpio, who “imposes the standards of a reactionary colonial culture and the observances of the most repressive form of Catholicism” on the family, clearly reflects García Márquez’s disdain for Colombia’s highland culture and his identification with his own costeño roots (Minta, p. 159).

Undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia for life wherein no one can decide for others how they are to die, where love really can be true and happiness possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude will have at last and forever a second chance on earth. (García Márquez in McGuirk and Cardwell, p. 211)

In this light, the solitude that affects the entire Buendia line is not merely melancholic or romantic, but an expression of García Márquez’s concerns for the future of Latin America. As Stephen Minta puts it, for García Márquez solitude is

An expression of the collective isolation of Latin American people, a people for whom history has seemed a process to be endured rather than created, people divorced from a sense of history because theirs has been written by outsiders, a people condemned to a peripheral role in relation to a greater world whose limits have been defined elsewhere. (Minta, p. 31)

The Buendias’ solitude, then, is symbolic of “the inward-looking nature of their town, their culture, their continent, all locked into a permanent state of under development, unable to relate to the world outside on terms other than those of a deeply felt and crippling inferiority” (Minta, pp. 148-49).

Not only is Latin America isolated from the rest of the world, but Colombia itself is an underdeveloped country with regions geographically isolated from each other, a place in which many have remained ignorant of even the most horrifying events occurring around them. Throughout his Nobel Prize speech, entitled “The Solitude of Latin America,” García Márquez speaks of Latin America’s stormy recent past, which he sums up as a “highly unusual state of affairs,” one that includes dictatorships, wars, coups, assassinations, disappearances, genocide, imprisonments, missing children, exiles, and 20 million Latin American children dying before their second birthday (García Márquez in McGuirk and Card well, p. 209). Europeans, he says, are without the proper means of interpreting Latin Americans:

One realizes this when they insist on measuring us with the same yardstick with which they measure themselves, without recalling that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the search for one’s own identity is as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. To interpret our reality through schémas which are alien to us only has the effect of making us even more unknown, even less free, even more solitary. (García Márquez in McGuirk and Cardwell, p. 209)

Thus, the fate of the Buendia family—with its perpetual unhappiness, vulnerability, self-insulation, solitude, and eventual annihilation—represents the saddest destiny possible for the Latin American people as a whole. It is for the future of Latin America, then, that García Márquez puts forth the possibility of a second, Utopian opportunity on earth—one that will bypass the fate of his own unhappy characters.

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Sources and literary context

One Hundred Years ofSolitude is usually seen as a key text of the 1960s Latin American “Boom,” a period in which Latin America’s literary output was for the first time internationally perceived to be modern, frenzied, rich, and experimental. Coinciding with the Cuban Revolution, and motivated by both impatience and despair, writers like Carlos Fuentes (see The Death of Artemio Cruz , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times), Julio Cortázar (see Blow-Up and Other Stories) , Mario Vargas Llosa(see The Storyteller) , and José Donoso (see A House in the Country) revitalized the novel, revealing its possibilities at the same time critics were calling the novel a dead form. Novels of the Boom were notoriously self-conscious and concerned with expanding and re-evaluating traditional notions of history, narrative, truth, and reality—themes especially crucial given the ways repressive political regimes in Latin America consistently manipulated language and truth for “official” reasons.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has also been seen as the prototypical “magic realism” novel. In basic terms magic realism refers to a mode of writing that blends magical and real events without giving any special attention to the fantastic-seeming events it describes. Instead, the narrator speaks of fantastic events as if they were unsurprising, even banal, everyday occurrences. Nonetheless, García Márquez claims that every line of One Hundred Years of Solitude is based in reality. As Kathleen McNerney notes:

At first glance that might seem preposterous: yellow butterflies constantly flitting around [Meme’s lover] ; a line of blood that winds its way through town to find the mother of the victim; a young woman being assumed into heaven wrapped in expensive sheets; a man who disappears and another who returns from the dead. (McNerney, p. 19)

From a Latin American perspective, however, myth, folktale, legend, and other commonly discounted forms of nontraditional knowledge (especially usual in countries like Colombia, with its Indian and African roots) are viable aspects of a reality that could at the same time include the disappearances and genocide mentioned above, and a violent banana massacre subsequently denied by the goverment responsible for it. One Hundred Years of Solitude achieves a fusion of these nontraditional forms and linear history that was inspired by the oral abilities of Garcia Márquez’s grandmother. He set out, when crafting the novel, to replicate her storytelling skills.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

La Violencia: 1946-66

La Violencia was a chaotic 20-year period marked by violence and conflict in Colombia. Though never directly referred to in One Hundred Years of Solitude, la Violencia covers the period in which Garcia Márquez conceived of and wrote the novel, and colors the text throughout; some critics claim that, in addition to the previous century’s civil wars, la Violencia provides the background for over half the novel (de Valdés, p. 4). An estimated 250,000 people died during this 20-year period, which began with the 1946 government elections. In these elections the Liberals were split between moderate and dissident left-wing candidates. The Conservative candidate, backed by his party in full, won the presidency. In the next couple of years, there were sporadic clashes between members of the two parties—events that might have been relatively minor were it not for the April 9, 1948, assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in a crowded Bogotá street. The gunman—a fanatical Conservative—was quickly beaten to death by an angry mob. Liberals then began rioting in a “spontaneous orgy of violence”: sacking the Capitol and other official buildings, setting fire to the Conservative newspaper, looting stores, and trashing churches (Bell-Villada, p. 25). The army could do nothing in the face of such chaos. By that evening Bogota’s main district was in shambles and as many as 2,500 people had died in the course of a day that would come to be known as el bogotazo.

El bogotazo sparked political violence that spread rapidly throughout Colombia, especially in rural areas. The bloodiness of this violence was extreme: Virulent hatred quickly became a normal component of rural interparty strife. Assassinations and armed clashes were to be routinely climaxed by decapitations and castrations, drawings and quarterings, with pregnant women and whole families hacked to pieces. (Bell-Villada, p. 26)

Some gunmen achieved wide notoriety for their extreme levels of violence; Teófilo Rofas “Chispas,” for example, became famous for assassinating an average of two people every day. Land-theft became common practice in the countryside, where anyone with a gun could force a family off its own property. Some landowners retained armed bands to help them increase their holdings by stealing people’s property; in the areas where police still existed, officers often participated in these takeovers. In the end, at least 2 million peasants were forced from their homes and into the cities.

The government participated in the chaos. In 1949 Conservatives in Congress took to blowing whistles to drown out opposing voices; during one stormy session Conservative party members actually shot the Liberal who had the floor. In the same year the Conservative president, Mariano Ospina, responded to Liberal talk of his impeachment by dissolving Congress and declaring a state of siege. Ospina’s successor, Laureano Gómez, who took power in 1950, “unleashed against the Liberals a war of repression comparable to that of any military dictatorship” (Bell-Villada, p. 26). In retaliation, Liberals began killing Conservatives and torching their homes. Vast areas of the country fell into rebel hands. In this way, the state effectively collapsed.

In 1957 the period called the National Front began, under which both party leaders agreed to come together in unity. This meant an equal distribution of power between the Conservatives and Liberals—other parties, like the Communists, were ignored. There followed a period of relative calm, punctuated by intermittent acts of banditry and other violence that extended into the 1960s. The lasting effects of la Violencia have long been debated, with some arguing that they persist even today in the kidnappings and “common violent crime that affects most Colombian cities” (Oquist in Minta, p. 23).