Exploration, Colonization, and One Hundred Years of Solitude ”

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“History, Erasure, and Magic Realism:

Exploration, Colonization, and One Hundred Years of Solitude ” by Jeff rey Gray, Seton Hall University

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad), published in 1967, remains the most important novel in Latin American history. It has been translated into more than thirty languages and has won four international prizes; it is also the work most responsible for winning Gabriel García Márquez the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Th e exuberant style and technique that made it the exemplar of “magic realism”—a genre still predominant today in the contemporary novels of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Isabel Allende—was as impressive as its epic historical narrative, which traces the decline of the Buendía family through several generations, from the founding of the town of Macondo to the whirlwind that fi nally erases the town and its remaining two inhabitants from the face of the earth. Th ough Márquez’s novel gained international recognition for its innovations and historical sweep, the story especially resonates with Latin Amer-ican readers. Indeed, One Hundred Years at times seems a parable of and for Latin America. Th e novel represented a stylistic and concep-tual revolution, but also an engagement—if not always direct—with the history of Latin America, notably its history of neocolonialism at the hands of the United States. Th e quality and degree of that engagement has been a problem, however, for activist critics who have

found fault with the novel (as also with Márquez’s later works) for its purported lack of political commitment. Th ere is a complex tension between the imaginative element of the novel and its apparent repre-sentations of material history.

Th e title of One Hundred Years of Solitude suggests a history and a chronology. One hundred years is a coherent, round number, the domain of an apocalyptic narrative that begins in a prehistoric utopia and ends when the text is fi nally deciphered. Th e moment of deciphering, the moment of understanding, marks the closure of the story as well as the end of the universe of Macondo and everyone in it. Between these two points, the reader follows a succession of fasci-nating characters and events. Yet, since there are no dates, and since the novel is not set in a specifi c period or real geographical place, the ahistorical “magic realist” aspect can be said to undercut its repre-sentation of material history, so that, for example, the banana strike and subsequent massacre (which did really occur, in Santa Marta, in 1928, though neither place nor date are mentioned in One Hundred Years) is presented in the same way as purely magical events, such as the ascension into heaven of Remedios the Beauty, trailing the family bedsheets. Fictive events and historical fact are both presented as fantasy or hallucination.

Much of the discussion about One Hundred Years revolves around this tug-of-war between magic realism and the representation of actual history. Márquez once remarked that his “most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic” (“Interview” 52). Critics who claim that the novel is not politically engaged enough often assume, fi rst, that material history is something accessible prior to representa-tion, and that magic realism is merely a literary technique. But what if magic realism is, rather, a way of perceiving, or a particular mode of being in the world? Alejo Carpentier, in the introduction to his novel Th e Kingdom of Th is World, has argued that historical events themselves in Latin America partake of magic realism, or what he alternatively called lo real maravilloso. Th e problem, then, is not that magic realism undermines the sense of history, but that history is so bizarre in its bare facts as to seem fantastic.

When, for example, the banana company in One Hundred Years pronounces that “Th e workers did not exist” (324), this is not fantasy but historical fact. Th e Colombian court actually ruled, in 1928,

having heard the arguments of the United Fruit Company’s lawyers, that because labor on plantations was temporary and seasonal, the company had no workers, and therefore nothing could have happened to them. True machinations of companies and governments may thus exhibit fantastic dimensions.

Neocolonialism—a term used to describe corporate exploitation of nations in the postcolonial world—is critiqued in literary works such as Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Banana Trilogy, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio’s La Casa Grande, and Pablo Neruda’s Canto General. It shares one key feature with the classic colonialism of the Spanish in the New World or the Japanese in Southeast Asia: it constructs the memory and history of the colonized, eclipsing or erasing indigenous ways of knowing history. Th e picture of neocolonial history in One Hundred Years is complicated (some might say, defeated) chiefl y by two factors:

fi rst, the fact that the novel’s paradigm is Borgesian and postmodern;

and, second, that the novel presents time as simultaneous, the future implicated in past and vice-versa, and ultimately that all events are literally already written, as we discover at the end of the novel.

Let us consider fi rst the extent to which One Hundred Years does or does not evoke actual Latin American history. Oscar Collazos writes, “Th e historical period of the wars is perfectly credible, and the history of Colombia, in its large anecdotal outlines, confi rms that García Márquez did nothing less than draw from it the facts of his fi ction. Introduced into the immense world of fi ction, these facts acquire a clear and tragic signifi cance” (139–140; my translation). Th e events most referred to in the novel are the fi ghts between Colombian political parties, the civil wars of the nineteenth century, “la violencia”

of the twentieth century, and the incursions of the United Fruit Company (called the “banana company” in the novel), leading to the banana strike of 1928 and its bloody suppression. Th e early colonial period of Colombia is scarcely mentioned (but for the reference to Sir Francis Drake’s attack on Riohacha in 1568 at the beginning and the end of the novel), while the neocolonial period constitutes the most important part of the novel. Márquez himself has commented that the passages on the banana company are intentional references to the strike against the United Fruit Company, which paralyzed the banana zone on Colombia’s Atlantic coast (La Novela 23–24). When the strike broke out, General Carlos Cortés Vargas authorized the army to intervene. Th e strikers were machine-gunned in the Ciénaga

railroad station; the deaths were estimated in the hundreds. (Th is becomes thousands in One Hundred Years.)

But the novel covers not only the major crises, but the whole process and method of the banana company: the fi rst arrival of the North Americans, the tests conducted, the compound built, the compa-ny’s techniques of subjugation, its power, and its brutality. At fi rst, the villagers don’t know what to make of the gringos’ observing and measuring. Why are they moving the river? Rather late, they discover that the gold of these conquistadors is bananas. In one episode, because of a careless remark by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the banana company hunts down and kills all seventeen of his sons. Th e colonel’s subsequent attempts to foment resistance to the invaders are unsuccessful.

After the massacre in Macondo, one person lives to tell the story.

José Arcadio Segundo, having escaped by concealing himself among a trainload of corpses, holes up in the laboratory of Melquíades and doesn’t come out for six months. He alone knows the truth, but no one believes him. Instead,

Th e offi cial version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was fi nally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfi ed workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped. (333)

But the rains do not stop: “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days” (339). Th e North Americans, of unlimited power and wile, had unleashed the weather itself. When families ask the where-abouts of their missing sons and fathers, they are told, “ ‘You must have been dreaming. . . . Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. Th is is a happy town.’ In that way they were fi nally able to wipe out the union leaders” (333).

José Arcadio Segundo’s knowledge of what really happened is passed down, so that, eventually, Aureliano, son of Renata Remedios, great-great-grandson of Pilar Ternera, is the last repository of the truth. But

[e]very time that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate

the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed. (419)

Aureliano fi nds himself “off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained” (419). Trying to establish his lineage, he consults a priest about the name José Arcadio Segundo. Th e priest replies,

“Many years ago there used to be a street here with that name and in those days people had the custom of naming their children after streets.”

Aureliano trembled with rage.

“So!” he said. “You don’t believe it either.”

“Believe what?”

“Th at Colonel Aureliano Buendía fought thirty-two civil wars and lost them all,” Aureliano answered. “Th at the army hemmed in and machine-gunned three thousand workers and that their bodies were carried off to be thrown into the sea on a train with two hundred cars.”

Th e priest measured him with a pitying look.

“Oh, my son,” he sighed. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” (440)

Th e colonial and economic hegemony of the banana company is so absolute that it seems to come from the same imaginative sources as the ascension into heaven of Remedios the Beauty, the potions of Melquíades, the proliferation of Aureliano Segundo’s livestock, or the rain that lasts for fi ve years. Such a confl ation of reality and imagination is a problem for readers who read novels not as aesthetic fantasies, but as depictions of the material struggles of actual people in actual places. But in fact Márquez is showing the shape that power takes among the powerless—that is, constructed power presented as unconstructed, culture presented as “nature.” Such a depiction of power invokes the Borgesian realm familiar from stories such as “Th e Lottery in Babylon.” Toward the end of that story, Borges’ narrator describes the indistinguishability of the company and the universe:

Th e company, with divine modesty, avoids all publicity. Its agents, as is natural, are secret. . . . Th at silent functioning, comparable to God’s, gives rise to all kinds of conjectures. One abominably suggests that the Company has not existed for centuries and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional.

Another judges it eternal and teaches that it will last until the last night, when the last god annihilates the world. Another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but that it only has infl uence in tiny things: in a bird’s call, in the shadings of rust and of dust, in the half dreams of dawn. Another, in the words of masked heresiarchs, that it has never existed and will not exist.

Another, no less vile, reasons that it is indiff erent to affi rm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing else than an infi nite game of chance. (35)

Th is perception, at the heart of many postmodern novels and fi lms that claim our understanding of reality is determined by powerful, all-pervading conspiracies (Th e Matrix, Th e Truman Show, Sixth Sense, White Noise, among others), gives readers and audiences a sense of the fantastic and bizarre realities experienced by the colonized.

Th e presence of neocolonialism’s history in One Hundred Years is made problematic, secondly, by the fact that—in spite of the Buendia family’s genealogical narrative—past, present, and future are simulta-neous in the novel, which presents a history that is, as the fi rst sentence suggests, both remembered and foreseen: “Many years later, facing the fi ring squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Th e presumed presence of the fi ring squad, while foreshadowing the apocalyptic closing of the novel, soon gives place to the narrative of events that precede that moment, i.e., the foundation of Macondo and even earlier. Th e remote past and the remote future invade the present.

Márquez’s breakdown of linear time—the substitution of a vision of simultaneity and timelessness for conventional, linear storytelling—

undermines One Hundred Years as a reliable account of Colombian history or an indictment of the forces that subjugated parts of Latin America during the twentieth century. If the story is already written, then the illusion of linearity cannot be sustained. In this view, though we see only a slice of history at any given time, the whole history is already there—which is the view we are left with at the end of One

Hundred Years, when we learn that the gypsy Melquíades has written out the whole story of the family in detail, one hundred years prior to the events themselves. In this light, all events in the novel are simul-taneous, given, and foreordained.

Th is idea confounds historical representation, just as the repeti-tion of names confounds linear genealogy, as Úrsula in One Hundred Years realizes. As the names and patterns repeat, they confuse “present time with remote periods” (353). When José Arcadio Segundo gives up his position in the banana company to organize a strike, Úrsula says, “ ‘Just like Aureliano, as if the world were repeating itself ’ ” (360).

Úrsula fi nally refuses to continue naming children by the two recur-ring names of José Aureliano and José Arcadio. She “shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing” but just turning in a circle.

(361) Repetition, she knows, destroys linear time. Th e twins—José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo—whose identities slip back and forth between bodies, confusing those around them as well as themselves, embody this danger. Th e incorrigible repetitions of the family are known best to Pilar Ternera, for whom there are no surprises in the Buendía men: “the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spinning into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (334).

Rhetorical repetition in One Hundred Years reinforces this temporal repetition, breaking down linear time, just as meter, rhyme, and refrain do in poetry and song. Some of the repetitions in One Hundred Years are structural, spaced at intervals throughout the book. Th e fi rst sentence of the book, for example, which begins “Many years later, facing the fi ring squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember . . .” is repeated with variations twenty times throughout the book; six of those times are explicit variations on the sense of the fi rst sentence, while the other fourteen relate to other characters in similar situa-tions, as for example, “Years later on his deathbed, Aureliano Segundo would remember . . .” (197). Th e echoes indicate new cycles that are not progressive but, by repetition, static. Beginning with “Arcadio Buendía,” evoking sunrise in Eden, the repetition of names is a way of preventing progress, of freezing time, in contrast to the modern and

“progressive” depredations of the banana company.

Ironically, the company, its operations complete, creates nonlinear time with its fi ve-year-long rainfall. During the rains, “unbroken time

passes, relentless time, because it was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when one could do nothing but contemplate the rain” (346–7). When fi nally the rain ceases, the people and aff airs of the town would seem to normalize, but it is not so. Th eir energy, along with their memory, has been permanently sapped. “Th e indolence of the people was in contrast to the voracity of oblivion, which little by little was undermining memories in a pitiless way”

(371). When the gypsies return, they are shocked to fi nd the people utterly defeated.

Such ideas of nonlinear, simultaneous, or cyclical time provide part of the basis for the accusations leveled against Márquez that his work is unengaged and quietistic: if all is fated, if nothing can be done, then what is the point of even calling attention to evil, much less contesting it? Shouldn’t one be true, as Aureliano Segundo says, to the memory of the victims of injustice at the hands of the banana companies? In response to the charge of quietism, one should note that the narrator of One Hundred Years (Melquíades, as it turns out) is not resigned to what has happened (and certainly the male Buendía characters strenuously resist evil—when they’re not embodying it). Th e tone of the book—inextricable from its joy and ebullience—is sadness. One Hundred Years is an elegy for several vanished generations, for a region weakened by its own politics but destroyed fi nally by neocolonialism.

One of the implicit lessons of One Hundred Years is that literacy and dissemination of knowledge will save history from those who would erase it. Th e problem is that those who would erase history use the same techniques as those who would preserve it, but they have more power at their disposal—more money and more printing presses, but also more government offi cials and more armed forces.

Márquez begins his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Th e Solitude of Latin America,” by citing the early sixteenth-century writer Antonio Pigafetta, whose narrative of Magellan’s voyage around the world he describes as “a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy” (Robles 196). Márquez follows this with an account of the long series of massacres, invasions, dictatorships, and disappearances suff ered by Latin America, remarking that “We [Latin Americans] have had to ask but little of the imagination, for our crucial problem has been the lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. . . .” Reality in Latin America has long outpaced the imagination, according to Márquez, and any tall tales among the

Chronicles of the Indies (hogs with navels on their haunches, men with heads below their shoulders, and so on) can scarcely match the improbable events that actually occurred.

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Bell-Villada, Gene H. “Banana Strike and Military Massacre: One Hundred Years of Solitude and What Happened in 1928.” Gabriel García Márquez:

Bell-Villada, Gene H. “Banana Strike and Military Massacre: One Hundred Years of Solitude and What Happened in 1928.” Gabriel García Márquez: