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in his grandmother’s stories and
from an aunt who had a knack for
offering fantastical explanations
with the conviction of the truth.Resurrection
In One Hundred Years of Solitude
the dead continue to exert an
influence on the living and the
grave is a door to multiple realities
beyond our own. Early in the story
José Arcadio Buendía throws a
spear through the throat of Prudencio
Aguilar, a neighbor who insults
him. José Arcadio is then haunted
by the man’s spirit until he is on his
own deathbed. The two men make
plans for a bird-breeding farm in
the afterlife so that they will have
“something to do on the tedious
Sundays of death.”
The fixation on death persists
when distant relative Rebeca arrives
at the Buendía house dragging a bag
of her parents’ bones. She eats earth
and lime, the stuff of the grave, while
she awaits their proper burial.Circular time
Fractured or nonlinear time is a key
feature of the Latin American
boom’s postmodernist approach to
literature. The opening lines set
this up in a very memorable way:
“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.”
Time is cyclical in the story:
present, past, and future events are
commingled in the 100-year span of
the Buendía family. The setting,
too, is circular. All of the action
takes place within concentric
spheres: first, the modern world
that is encroaching on Macondo;
then the village itself; the Buendía’s
house; and finally the mysterious
laboratory that is established in
the heart of the house and whichremains untouched by the passing
of time. Rescued from the firing
squad, Aureliano retreats there to
fashion tiny gold fishes, which he
then melts down and makes all over
again in an attempt to live forever
in the present moment—a bitter
reflection of the futile repetitions of
the story and of human history.
When the last Buendía is drawn
to the laboratory to finally unravel
the scrolls which document and
prophesy Macondo’s 100-year
history, and which were delivered to
the first José Arcadio by the gypsy
Melquíades, he finds prehistoric
plants and luminous insects havePOSTWAR WRITING
removed “all trace of man’s passage
on earth from the room.” As he
reads he finds himself “deciphering
the instant that he was living,
deciphering it as he lived it,
prophesying himself in the act
of deciphering the last page of
the parchments, as if he were
looking into a speaking mirror.”
In this extraordinary metafictional
moment the narrator, character, and
reader arrive at the point at which
past, present, and future combine
and fall into the void beyond which
the words stop on the page.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
has sold more than 30 million copies
and is regarded as a masterpiece
of a literary boom that reverberated
across two decades. Márquez’s
postmodern vision spoke to both
Latin America and the wider world
in its depiction of a planet that is
doomed to repeat a cycle of endless
environmental catastrophe, warfare,
and infighting over and over for
generation after generation. ■A banana plantation is established
in Macondo, and the American Fruit
Company’s economic imperialism
leads to a massacre and reflects the
US’s exploitation of Latin America.Races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude
did not have a second
opportunity on earth.
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