284
The misery inflicted on Macondo
represents the centuries of pain
caused by Western economic
exploitation. Even a rainstorm that
lasts for four years, 11 months, and
two days, fails to wash the town
clean. It does, however, cause an
exodus, leaving Macondo empty
aside from a handful of Buendías
living out their final days in the town.Bible stories and myths
Márquez draws on South America’s
mixed heritage of myths and Bible
tales to tell the story of a paradise
destroyed through its loss of
innocence. In Macondo “the
world was so recent that many
things lacked names.” The novel’s
exploration of the history of human
progress therefore begins with an
idiosyncratic Buendía creation myth.
The family’s founding marriage
is a union between the cousins
José Arcadio and Úrsula, and the
story of a previous Buendía incest
that produced a child with a pig’s
tail becomes an ever-present
anxiety. As it turns out, this fear
was entirely justified; the final
Aureliano is born with the feared
affliction. There are several Inca
creation myths founded on incestbetween brother and sister, and the
natural progression of family from
Adam and Eve in the Bible would
have progressed along similar lines.
Some 17th-century arrivals in South
America believed that the Garden
of Eden was sited in eastern Bolivia.
The first Conquistadors thought
they had discovered a people
descended from the son of Noah,
a survivor of the Great Flood, or
possibly from the lost tribes of Israel.
Deluge myths were widespread
among indigenous South American
people. These bubble to the surface
in the great rain toward the end of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.Science and magic
Magic is not sprinkled lightly
across this novel; it is woven into
the fabric of its lilting, poetic text.
At first, the villagers are mystified
by modern phenomena such as
false teeth and photographs. But
even when the modernization of
Macondo is well underway, the
forces of magic carry just as much
weight as reason and science.
Remedios the Beauty, a woman too
beautiful to be looked upon, rises to
heaven in a cloud of bedsheets. After
the first José Arcadio descends intoONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
madness, he becomes literally
bonded to the chestnut tree in
his garden, and when he is taken
indoors the smell of mushrooms
and wood-flower fungus follows him.
As Úrsula ages and her sight fades,
“the lucidity of her old age allows
her to see,” and she develops her
other senses: using odors to
remember sights, she tracks a
child’s movements by sprinkling
a little rosewater on his head; and
she distinguishes color by texture.
García Márquez said that he
discovered the key to handling
the narrative voice in his novelGabriel García Márquez Born in Columbia in 1928, Gabriel
José García Márquez was raised
by his grandparents in Aractaca,
a town resembling the fictional
Macondo of One Hundred Years of
Solitude. This upbringing shaped
his anti-imperialist beliefs. During
The Violence, a 10-year period of
political repression in Colombia,
García Márquez became a reporter
in Barranquillo.
Although Garcia Márquez’s
journalism flourished, his liberal
views meant that he had to leave
Colombia and work as a foreign
correspondent in Europe.
After reporting on the Cubanrevolution in 1959, he worked in
Bogotá and New York for Prensa
Latina, the Cuban news agency.
His second full novel, One
Hundred Years of Solitude was
written in Mexico City and
earned the author worldwide
acclaim. Márquez authored 22
books and was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
He died in Mexico City in 2014.Other key works1985 Love in the Time of Cholera
2004 Memoirs of My Melancholy
WhoresThe last that remained of a
past whose annihilation had
not taken place because it was
still in a process of annihilation.
One Hundred Years
of SolitudeUS_280-285_Solitude.indd 284 08/10/2015 13:10