One Hundred Years of Solitude

I mean epics in the same sense that one would say ‘The Ramayana’ or ‘The Mahabharatha’ are epics. Not a mere ‘classic’ a term, which one would use for, say Dickens or maybe Joyce on a more contemporary scale. A classic would be a book, which for various reasons makes a literary statement as in the case of Joyce or a social statement like in the case of Dickens. An epic on the other hand makes a social and a literary statement at a much deeper level. It holds up a particular cultural moment in the history of a people under scrutiny. It in some essential way captures the way that this people have organized their life at that moment in history. The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of town, Macondo, and more specifically of the most important family in that town, the Buendias.

The fact that OHYOS is an epic is a definite interplay of both the theme of the book and the narrative style in which it is written. To isolate and discuss single details from OHYOS is to do the book an injustice. Marquez creates so many relations and connections that to discuss the book with somebody who has not read it rather meaningless.

Marquez has written the history of Latin America as the history of one family. Like most epics the connections to the historical reality of a particular people, in this case Latin American people, is hard to miss. The seemingly endless civil war is based on the civil wars in Columbia in which Marquez’s grandfather fought. The war ended with the treaty of Neerlandia an event in the book. The Banana Company is a metaphor for ‘The United Fruit Company’ of Boston, which did in fact take over most of Colombia, and the massacre did in fact take place killing 30000 people. Marquez has also used folk tales told to him by his grandmother, such as that of people rising to heaven, as sources of inspiration for OHYOS.

The most distinctive feature of OHYOS is probably its so-called magic realism. Magic realism is a term used to describe the style of writing of ordinary everyday events as magical and supernatural. Marquez uses a mixture of reality and fantasy that are so mixed up it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other. What is different about OHYOS however is the absolute integration of magic realism into the plot. Rather than being just a cosmetic addition to the book magic realism is absolutely fundamental to the book. This was unavoidable due to the very nature of the language in which it is written. As Marquez points out in the book, when the early settlers reached Macondo (a metaphor for all of Latin America), the world was so new that most things did not have names and had to be referred to by pointing at them. This was precisely the situation in which the European colonialists found themselves on arriving in Latin America, and therefore when Marquez tries to write a book about Latin America in a language adapted for a country two continents away, most things appear to be unreal and supernatural though they would be very ordinary everyday objects for a Latin American.

The most typical example of magic realism in the book was that of Remedios the Beauty the heaven rising to heaven. The calmness, with which the other characters accept this while at the same time being astonished by magnets or ice, adds an air of humour to the narrative.

In fact this sense of humour is present through out the book. In spite of the seriousness of the theme of OHYOS the beauty of the book lies in what a great read it could be even if one pays no attention to the context in which it is written. The eccentricities of the characters are a source of continuous amusement and Marquez constantly keeps surprising the reader with the behavior of his characters, which seems to get weirder and weirder as the narrative progresses.

Marquez uses a number of methods to create this feeling of unreality. He constantly uses flashbacks and flash forwards, which leave the reader with a very vague idea of whether Marquez is talking about the present the past or the future. The first sentence of the book itself goes as

“Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…”

Marquez also creates a strong interplay between a linear sense of time and a circular, repetitive sense of time. Throughout the book each generation of the Buendia family resembles a different stage in the history of South America. Starting from an explorer who first sets up Macondo to a rebel military leader to a debauched businessman with a prospering business. At the same time however Marquez continuously creates a sense of repetition, of the circular nature of time. It is made obvious even to the most insensitive readers by the constant repetition of the character names, dialogues and the characters themselves being astonished by this repetition. As one of the characters in the book puts it, time is like the rotation of a wheel on an axle which keeps rotating and tracing out the same path were it not for the constant wearing down of the axle, till eventually the axle itself breaks.

The central them of OHYOS is however as a metaphor for Latin America. Though OHYOS has a number of possible conflicting interpretations as a political statement, what dominates is the sense of loneliness of the characters. Each male character in the book begins by trying to either decipher the writings of Melquiades (the Aurelianos) or on some other crazy scheme (the Arcadios). Each character tries to impose some control on the external world outside Macondo and the way in which it affects life in Macondo till eventually all his efforts are frustrated. It is this failure, which forces each male character to a conscious choice of isolating himself from the world, to lock themselves up in Melquiades room and continue to try and decipher his writings. The women on the other hand seem to understand in some way that this ‘solitude’ is unavoidable. Some like Ursula try to nurture social relationships to fight this solitude, while others like Amaranta seem to accept this condemnation to solitude. This is what gives rise to the ‘solitude’ in the title.

This solitude is a reflection of the bewilderment of a people who are colonized in the 16th century and on freeing themselves in the 19th century still find themselves in the 16th century, a reflection of the feelings of a people neglected by the rest of the world once it is done with colonizing and exploiting them. It is this sense of loneliness that pervades the book.

However, in spite of the rather serious nature of the book what is surprising is the undercurrent of humour running throughout the book. The eccentricities of the various characters such as running around the house with beer bottles balanced on their penises or having eating competitions with fat women with appellations such as ‘The Elephant’ never lose their ability to surprise the reader. It is this ability of OHYOS, which makes it a great read, even to someone who is not aware of the context in which it is written. It is not necessary to spend too much time trying to find the necessary historical correlations to appreciate OHYOS. Yes, if anyone does go through the trouble of doing so they might appreciate the beauty of the book more, but it is not necessary for merely enjoying the book. It is because of this that OHYOS reached such a large worldwide audience the after being translated into English in spite of the fact that most people could not really connect to the Latin American history, which forms the basis of the book.

The one source of information who could clear up all these questions, the author himself, has maintained a strict silence about OHYOS. In my opinion however Marquez has definitely succeeded in giving, as Marquez put it in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, ”… races condemned to One Hundred Years of Solitude a second opportunity on this earth…”