Ian Johnston

“ Along with all this delight, however, as I mentioned above, 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 irrevocably 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. And this establishes itself as a strong qualification to the comic delight one takes in so much of the novel. ”

“ There is no particular reason for stopping there, and no one has a very 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 idyllic community, with no sense of history or no particular political reason for being there. ”

“ For if one of the great imaginative purposes of the best comedies, like the Odyssey, is, in the words of William Faulkner's Nobel laureate speech, 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. ”

“ This point about experiencing one's history as fantasy has been stressed also by Marxist 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--"the unreality and unauthenticity 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" (Martin 104) . ”

“ And this inability points to what both the men and women seem to lack here, an ability to orient themselves with the wider developing world in which they live and to take some control of their own historical destiny. They are, as residents of Macondo, victims of an illusion in the city of mirages, and the personal constructions they erect in the course of living all fail and plunge them into a cruel and lasting solitude.
In that sense, the "magic realism" of the novel is a good deal more than a stylistic device to lure North American readers tired of naturalism. ”

“ No matter whom we meet, we quickly learn to expect the unexpected, the colourful, the original—from moments of evocative beauty, like the trail of butterflies, to the satiric, like the priest levitating to chocolate, to erotic scene of bawdy and prodigious sex, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the flowers in the house or man who runs through the house balancing beer bottles on his penis. ”

“ Hence the solitude, central theme (together with the quest) of Latin American history: it is their abandonment in an empty continent, a vast cultural vacuum, marooned thousands of miles away from their true home. Conceived by Spain in the sixteenth century ... the characters awaken in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment ... but are entirely unable to bring themselves into focus in a world they have not made. Influences from outside (the gypsies) are sporadic, piecemeal, throughout the notional hundred years of the novel, which is the span from the Independence era to the early 1960's. ”

“ Time as Circular History But 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 almost obsessively circular. For all the apparent changes in their main occupations, their personalities constantly repeat the experience of earlier generations. ”

“ 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. And they all succumb to a self-imposed exile in a solitude which can last for decades. ”

“ The difficulties of his life he finally deals with by opting out of history and settling for the uncertain territory, not of history, but of nostalgic solitude, a "magic" reality in which he might as well be tied up to a tree, because he is wholly alien to anything real in the world. ”

“ And this may, indeed, be one of the main points Marquez is "celebrating" (if that is the right word) in this epic novel of his people.
So What Is the Novel Saying About Latin America? 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as Melquiades, a writer, helped to overcome the plague of insomnia and collective amnesia when that disease infected Macondo from the Indians, so 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. ”

“ At any rate, the self-referential 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, 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. ”

“ In following the historical narrative of these two elements we are confronted, as we are in any great epic, with a picture of how at a particular moment in human civilization a particular group of people has organized its life (just as we are confronted with the same issue, for example, in the other great epic we have studied, The Odyssey) .
Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a particular people's historical reality, in this case the development of the Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825) . ”

“ And in most cases the people have no immediate sense of how to react. The reactions we do 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 from outside. ”

“ The women, for the most part, are firmly anchored in daily reality, as obsessed as the men, but with the routines of daily living. Ursula fights all her life against the incest taboo, and Fernanda devotes her life to imposing the rigorous order of high Spanish Catholicism on an unruly home. They have no interest in speculative imaginative ventures. The centre of their lives is the home or erotic attachments. Simply put, one might observe that in this novel the men suffer from an enduring lack of the reality principle ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fantasy is a central part of the way these people, especially the men, experience their own history, and because such fantasy is no match against outside invaders or the effects of time on such projects, they all fail. ”

“ This pattern is repeated over and over in the novel, especially with the men. They strive for active fulfillment as young men but become frustrated and end up withdrawing. Incapable of dealing with actual conditions effectively, they opt finally for a frustrated solitude:
Loneliness in Macondo and among the Buendias is not an accidental condition, something that could be alleviated by better communications or more friends, and it is not the metaphysical loneliness of existentialists, a stage shared by all men. ”

“ The result is an extraordinarily tangled family tree that leaves the final two able to commit incest without really knowing that they are so closely related. In that sense, the final generation of Buendias indicate that they are so out of touch with their own immediate past that they don't know where they stand in relation to each other, and thus have nothing to oppose to the passionately irrational erotic desires that make them an easy prey for the destructive forces of nature (the ants) that wait always on the edges of the community and the home. ”

“ Some readers addicted to psychological naturalism may well find the fantasy interferes with their demands for a more "realistic" engagement with the imagined world of the fiction. As I shall mention before the end of this lecture, however, I think there is an important connection between the fantasy and the reality in the novel ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 linear story. And 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 ubiquitous lawyers, the railway, the American capitalists, the European with the bicycle and the passion for airplanes, and so on. ”

“ Genuine desire is not rewarded by legitimate issue; as a rule, children are born either to undesired wives, or to women who have been used vicariously to discharge an unconfessed desire for a family relation. ”

“ Full of amazing energies and intelligence, which generate ambitious projects or passionate sexuality, they are unable to realize any long-term success, and are prone to fits of extreme anger against their earlier projects or else their lives are overtaken by the irrational violence which keeps intruding in their lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There's a strong sense of fate about this obsessive repetition. Once a person has been named then 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. ”

“ The women, too, tend to fall into types. The common sense energy and determination of the Ursulas, particularly of the stern, unmusical matriarchal will of the founding woman, play off against the enduring erotic figures outside the family: Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes. Those called Remedios remain immature and either die young or disappear. ”