criticism

One Hundred Years of Solitude as an Epic
By Ian Johnston

It seems clear to me that, in any conventional sense of the literary term, we are dealing here with an epic work: a long narrative fiction with a huge scope which holds up for our inspection a particular cultural moment in the history of a people. The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo, and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias. In following the historical narrative of these two elements we are confronted, as we are in any great epic, with a picture of how at a particular moment in human civilization a unique group of people has organized its life (just as we are confronted with the same issue, for example, in the other great epic we have studied, The Odyssey).

Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a particular people's historical reality, in this case the development of the Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825). The seemingly endless civil war portrayed in the novel one can see as directly based on the civil wars in Columbia from 1885 to 1902, and the character of Colonel Aureliano has many affinities with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, under whom the grandfather of the author fought. Uribe's struggles ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Neerlandia, an event in the novel. The years 1900 to 1928 saw the take over of Colombia by the united Fruit Company of Boston. The ensuing labour trouble culminated on October 7, 1928, in a mass strike of 32,000 workers. The government later sent out the troops to fight the workers, and a massacre took place in Cienaga on December 5, 1928. In addition of course, and most importantly for an understanding of the novel, is the presence in it of the author's family and of the author himself. This point, as I shall argue later, is a key point in understanding what the political point of this epic might be.

I mention this history, not because I think one needs to know the historical facts in order to appreciate the novel, but simply to point out that One Hundred Years of Solitude, like so many other great epics, like Moby Dick, The Song of Roland, and War and Peace, takes its origin in the history, real or imagined, of a particular people.

Given this epic quality of the novel, the initial question I would like to pose is this: What qualities of life does this novel celebrate? What is the nature of the social-political vision held up here for our inspection? How are we intended to judge the people and the society of Macondo? This, I would claim, is a fairly obvious question which the novel pressures any reader to ask, as a number of critics have pointed out:

One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . can justly lay claim to being, perhaps, the greatest of all Latin American novels, appropriately enough, since the story of the Buendia family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history. (Martin 97)

I do not believe any other novelist has so acutely, so truthfully seen the intimate relationship between the socio political structure of a given country and the behaviour of his characters. (Angle Rama, qu. Martin 107)

So what are meant to derive about the experience of the civilization depicted in the novel?

One possible source of information, the author, has remained stubbornly silent on this question, refusing to debate whether or not there is a political "message" in his novel. His roots with the civilization are obvious enough, for he spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a "steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast." But he has commented "Nothing interesting has happened to me since." "He also tells the story that his grandmother invented fantasies so that he wouldn't be saddened by the truth of things" (James 66). We will be coming back to this latter comment later on. When pressed on the subject of this novel, Marquez has said that he really wanted to write a book about incest.

If a number of readers have seen considerable political significance in the novel, there has been no agreement about what that political "message" might be. For the novel has attracted all sorts of conflicting political interpretation. One writer has remarked, with good justification, that there is something here for every political view: "[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" (Bell-Villada 93).

To all of these we might add those readers who decline to see any social-political themes in the novel and who like it because it's a great escapist read. And whatever I might like to claim for its wider implications, One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly a wonderful and popular read, which one can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical roots or its political implications. That may be the main reason why it has been such a phenomenally popular book outside Latin America: "The first truly international best-seller in Latin American publishing history" (Martin 98), for which the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.


http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/marquez.HTM