Rereadings
Celebration, laughter and trail of butterflies
Farida Shaikh takes a peek into a world of magic and reality
One Hundred Years of Solitude is 'perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes' --- Pablo Neruda… It is an epic work that examines the cultural history of a people. It is about a community, its founding, development and death. This novel is about a Latin American country--- Colombia, its independence from Spain (1810-1825) and the civil wars that followed (1825-1902). Colombia was under the control of the united Fruit Company of Boston (1900-1928) during this period labour trouble culminated in a mass strike of 32,000 workers. At Cienaga the author and his family witnessed the massacre of men by government troops. The Thousand Days War (1899-1902) : Guerra de los Mil Días, was a civil armed conflict in Republic of Colombia, between the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and its radical factions. The ruling conservatives were accused of maintaining power through fraudulent elections. The economic crisis of falling coffee price in the world market affected the opposition Liberal Party, which had lost power. This novel has connections with this particular people's historical reality, the country's independence from Spain, the civil wars, and the central character of Colonel Aureliano Buendia has many affinities with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, under whom the author's grandfather had fought. Uribe's struggles ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Neerlandia, an event in this novel and in his later novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. The novel chronicles 100 years in Macondo, a fictional Colombian village, the involvement of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, in the conflict between Colombia's Liberal and The Conservative parties. On the political significance of the novel, many opinions and views have been noted and there is no agreement about what is the political "message" of the writer. According to writer-critic Bell-Villada, "The novel's appeal is to all ideologies: leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portraits of imperialism; conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed; and the apolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling" The twisted and meandering world of politics is a gloomy one. There is little difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives; both parties kill and exploit the people. Although Marquez has a definite anti-capitalist bent, his purpose in portraying the politics of the region is not to be polemical. He comments on how the nature of Latin American politics is towards absurdity, denial, and never-ending repetitions of tragedy. Other than the social-political themes, readers like the novel 'because it's a great escapist read.' One can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical roots or its political implications. There are powerful images of paradoxical bodily disgust, ambivalent celebration and laughter, ironic distance and reconstruction of human shapes, the colourful, like the trail of butterflies, the evocative beauty, the satiric, erotic scenes of bawdy and prodigious sex, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the flowers in the house or the man who runs through the house balancing beer bottles on his penis, all of which exemplify the characteristics of magical realism. Other writers of similar style are Ben Okri, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Time moves in circles and cycles, and people are not always progressing. For the characters in the novel, time alternatively moves quickly and stagnates for years. Children grow up quickly, but when they are adults (particularly the males), time abandons them, leaving them to sit with their own nostalgia and bitterness for years on end. Time abandons Colonel Aureliano Buendia after the civil wars, and Jose Arcadio Segundo, both of them locked in Melquiades' laboratory, refusing to join the living, moving world. For the main female character Ursula, time appears to be moving in a circle. New children turn out to be like their ancestors, only horribly exaggerated in some flaw or strength. Time is indeed moving in a circle in this book, but instead of expanding outward it is collapsing in on the Buendia family as their eventual demise draws closer. The theme of women's sexuality is described by women who have unconventional relationships. Rebecca, Petra Cotes, Amaranta Ursula are happier and more sympathetic than the women who cling to society's standards of behaviour. Aureliano Segundo's coupling with Petra Cotes dramatically increases the proliferation of his animals, which is a signal that free love can be healthy for society at large. The words 'solitude' and 'solitary' appear on almost every page of this novel. Incest is a secondary theme of solitude. It plays an enormous role in the novel, from the very beginning with Ursula's warning that children born of incestuous relationships may be born with the tails of pigs. And indeed, at the very end of the novel, a Buendia is born with the tail of a pig. For most families, incest is not a great threat. The fact that it is something the Buendias have to keep dodging marks them out as a family unable to escape the family homestead, unable to look outside them. They are too solitary. Essentially, incest is the practice of keeping family members within the family; so it marks the Buendias as too disengaged from the world around them. Critic Regina James has accurately noted that no matter what types of dating are used, the book does not fit neatly into one hundred years. Marquez purposefully uses hyperbole regarding dates and times. For the one hundred years of the title to stand as a cycle, a numerical symbol in the tradition of the Bible, the "one hundred years" of the title stands for the ever-repeating cycle of time. This theme is particularly important for the chapters dealing with the banana plantation. In the span of only a few years, Macondo is transformed from a sleepy backwater to a frighteningly modern town via the influences of technology, economic exploitation and foreign invasion. But the arrival of new machines and farming techniques do not make Macondo a better place to live in, in fact things only get worse. The point of this is that modern technology is meaningless without a concurrent improvement in ethics, and "progress" turns brutal without a plan to lessen economic inequality. The theme of solitude runs through much of García Márquez's works. As Pelayo notes, "Love in the Time of Cholera, like all of Gabriel García Márquez's work, explores the solitude of the individual and of human kind...portrayed through the solitude of love and of being in love". In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously." In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Solitude of Latin America", he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary." The essence of the Nobel Lecture concluded on a note of hope and dream of all mankind. 'On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognise thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.'
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