One Hundred Years of
Solitude reads like a history which takes place in a dream. The novel
follows five generations of the Buendía family, from the patriarch, José
Arcadio’s founding of the city of Macondo, to its destruction many years later.
This was my first experience of the ‘magical realism’ genre, and I had been
expecting something along the lines of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, although perhaps without the emphasis on horror. In
some ways, this comparison is accurate – the ‘magic’ that occurs in the novel
is not a force in the world of the story which is governed by an internal
logic, as we might find in a fantasy novel, it is somewhere between fairy-tale
and surrealism: at times the story’s supernatural elements come as ghosts or as
prophetic utterances, at others, they seem more like metaphors which actually
take place, like when one family member, who lives in another part of town,
dies, and has a line of blood trickle from their nose and across the town,
finding its way to the family home. Unlike Kafka though, Márquez does not
present us with any close psychological investigation – we are one step removed
from the characters, and while we are sometimes told what they think, we do not
generally experience events through them.
Another possible point of reference for reading this novel
was Wuthering Heights – both are
cross-generational tales about families with far fewer names than people (the
Buedía’s include four José Arcadios, five Aurelianos, an Aureliano José, an
Arcadio and several combinations of Úrsula, Amaranta and Remedios, not to
mention seventeen illegitimate Aurielianos), but while Wuthering Heights is very much about how one generation can affect
the next, the Buendías seem to move across the years on the impulses of an
inescapable fate, rather than motivated directly by the actions of their
forebears. Some traits, however, do recur across the generations – fanatical
drives towards unattainable goals and a compulsion to unmake and remake the
same things over and over again.
While the title gives us a very precise ‘one hundred years’,
time keeping within then novel is much less precise. While events fall in
roughly chronological order, we might follow one character along one thread of
their narrative, only to be told down the line that ‘this was about the time…’
that something key in another character’s plotline occurred a few pages
earlier. Some events seem to act as anchor points, referred too long after (or
sometimes long before) they actually happen, as memories or pieces of narrative
prolepsis; the novel opens with the sentence ‘many years later, as he faced the
firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice’ – both events which become anchor
points later on. This can be a little confusing, but the large cast of
similarly-named characters is much more of a hindrance in this regard than the
temporal vagueness. The anchor points, and the use of recurring motifs help to
prevent the novel from feeling unfocused, but it does sometimes seem to lack a
clear narrative drive; while there are peaks and troughs, there is no familiar
overarching pattern of rising action, climax, falling action. What we get
instead is a sense of the epic, even when the novel’s concerns are primarily
domestic. We follow entire generations of this family from birth to the grave
against the backdrop of a city’s journey from obscurity to prosperity to
abandonment, and all the while, history marches forwards with its relentless
drive towards modernity.
While they often seem isolated from the rest of the world,
the citizens of Macondo are not wholly unaffected by history. Its drawn out,
brutal civil wars between barely distinguishable liberals and conservatives,
its occupation by an American banana company and subsequent labour troubles,
rhyme with the history of several nations in the region. At times, the novel
seems to move very quickly through these broad sweeps of history, but some of
the most effective writing comes when Márquez slows almost to a standstill.
The multi-generational approach means that this novel covers
a much broader sweep of human life than many other works of fiction. Not only
do we see childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age represented for us, we
see it represented repeatedly across many important characters. Cycles of
growth and decline provide much of the structure for One Hundred Years of Solitude, but after a while it is the sense of
decline and decay which sticks in the mind. The old frequently outnumber the
young in the Buendía household, with a number of characters living far beyond
their expected years. Sometimes, like Úrsula or Santa Sofía, work quietly away
in the background, holding the household together; some hold on to ancient
grudges and regrets, some fall into obsessive routines, some decline into
madness. Even those who have died occasionally reappear. The house itself, one
of the first built in Macondo, probably ranks alongside the House of Usher and
Satis House as one of the great symbolic homes in literature. When the family
and the town prosper, new rooms are added, when the family sees a change in
matriarch, new furniture is brought in, and when the old begin to outnumber the
young, cracks appear until eventually entire wings of the house are abandoned
to the ants.
The novel often feels meandering and unreal, but that often
seems to be the point. The characters are engaging, if not always fully
rounded, and the last couple of pages bring the rest of the book into some sort
of focus. I suspect this won’t be my last foray into magical realism.
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