The One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Xena Donovan
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien aos de soledad, .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-smallfont-size:85%.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-smallfont-size:100%Latin American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲos e soleˈa]) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel Garca Mrquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buenda family, whose patriarch, Jos Arcadio Buenda, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.[1][2][3][4]
The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,[5] which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.
Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies.[6][7][8][9] The novel, considered Garca Mrquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon[10] and in world literature.[1][3]
In 1965, Gabriel Garca Mrquez was driving to Acapulco for a vacation with his family when he thought of the beginning for a new book; he then turned his car around, asked his wife to manage the family's finances for the coming months, and drove back home to Colombia. For the next eighteen months, Garca Mrquez spent his time writing what would eventually become One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though inspired by Colombian history and his experiences as a journalist, Garca Mrquez was greatly influenced by his maternal grandparents: Nicols Ricardo Mrquez and Doa Tranquilina Iguarn Cotes. A decorated veteran of the Thousand Days' War, Ricardo Mrquez's accounts of the rebellion against the conservative Colombian government led his grandson to a socialist outlook. Meanwhile, Doa Iguarn Cotes' superstitious beliefs became the foundation of One Hundred Years of Solitude's style. The couple's house in Aracataca where Garca Mrquez spent his childhood inspired him to make his book's setting of Macondo.[11]
Garca Mrquez was one of the four Latin American novelists first included in the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; the other three were the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortzar, and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) earned Garca Mrquez international fame as a novelist of the magical realism movement within Latin American literature.[12]
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buenda Family in the town of Macondo. The founders of Macondo, Jos Arcadio Buenda and rsula Iguarn, leave their hometown in Riohacha, Colombia, after Jos Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting Jos Arcadio was impotent.[13] One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, Jos Arcadio dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic.[8]
Jos Arcadio Buenda believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents the world according to his perceptions.[8] Soon after its founding, Macondo became a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buenda family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly self-inflicted) misfortunes. For years the town has been solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople scientific discoveries such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. The leader of the gypsies, a man named Melquades, maintains a close friendship with Jos Arcadio, who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the gypsies. Ultimately, he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.
Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent Colombia. A rigged election between the Conservative and Liberal parties is held in town, inspiring Aureliano Buenda to join a civil war against the Conservative government. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives. Disillusioned, he returns to Macondo and spends the rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his workshop.
The railroad comes to Macondo, bringing in new technology and many foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation outside the town, and builds its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers, an incident based on the Banana Massacre of 1928. Jos Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, finds no evidence of the massacre, and the surviving townspeople deny or refuse to believe it happened.
By the novel's end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, with the only remaining Buendas being Amaranta rsula and her nephew Aureliano, whose parentage is hidden by his grandmother Fernanda, and he and Amaranta rsula unknowingly begin an incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the tail of a pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch rsula. Amaranta rsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants, leaving Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an encryption Melquades had left behind in a manuscript generations ago. The secret message informs the recipient of every fortune and misfortune that the Buenda family's generations lived through. As Aureliano reads the manuscript, he feels a windstorm starting around him, and he reads in the document that the Buenda family is doomed to be wiped from the face of the Earth because of it. In the last sentence of the book, the narrator describes Aureliano reading this last line just as the entire town of Macondo is scoured from existence.[14]
A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history", writes Daniel Erickson. "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendas always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions."[15]
The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create."[15]
Garca Mrquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used and symbolize imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.[16]
The glass city is an image that comes to Jos Arcadio Buenda in a dream. It is the reason for Macondo's location, but also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history."[8] Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is therefore fated for destruction.[15]
There is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It has been said that the novel is one of a number of texts that "Latin American culture has created to understand itself."[17] In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquades, the keeper of the archive, represents both the whimsical and the literary.[17] Finally, "the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain."[14]
The use of particular historic events and characters renders One Hundred Years of Solitude an exemplary work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses decades of cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story.[18]
Jos Arcadio Buenda is the patriarch of the Buenda family and the founder of Macondo.[19] Buenda leaves his hometown in Riohacha Municipality, Colombia, along with his wife rsula Iguarn after being haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man Buenda killed in a duel), who constantly bleeds from his wound and tries to wash it.[19] One night while camping at the side of a river, Buenda dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish the town in this location. Jos Arcadio Buenda is an introspective and inquisitive man of massive strength and energy who spends more time on his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community. He eventually goes insane and is tied to a chestnut tree until his death.
64591212e2