The Solitude of Latin America

About the author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most significant authors of last century and among the two most important literary figure of Latin America with Pablo Neruda. His famous works include One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the time of Cholera, Autumn of a patriarch, Chronicle of a death foretold, A very old man with enormous wings, etc. His writings generally present a concurring theme of Solitude and his stories show an extensive usage of Magical Realism. He won Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 and gave the famous speech, ‘The Solitude of Latin America.

One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Historical Saga

The novel should be considered as an epic majorly because of two reasons

1.      1. The length of timescale which is evident in the title itself.

2.      2. The story is built on the grounds of true historical events.

To illustrate the second point, we need to see the novel in the light of true historical events. The author spent first eight years of his life at his grandparents in Aracataca which was a "steamy banana town not far from the Columbian coast." This description of Aracataca by Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminds us of Macondo. A lot of events like The Civil war, Treaty of Neerlandia (The one after which Colonel Aurelino Buendia ceased his revolutionary activities) and characters like Colonel Aureliano Buendia resemble real life events and characters. Especially the episode of United Fruit Company which had actually taken over a major portion between 1900 and 1928 and their rule was ended with the strike of 32000 workers on October 7, 1928 to be followed by a massacre on December 5, 1928. One thing to note is that in the novel, the official history about the massacre changes the legend but in reality the exact opposite takes place as Gabo in one of his interviews had said that in the actual massacre maybe 3 to 5 people died. Another interesting point is that the novel was written in Spanish where the word ‘historia’ has dual meaning, history and tale.

The Speech

Marquez starts with a factual account of by Antonia Pigafetta, a navigator with Magellan which takes us to a world which resembles fantasy. He goes on to describe the horrifying conditions of Latin America and how creativity is interwoven in it. Caught between modernity and pre-industrialization; torn by civil war, and ravaged by imperialism stands Latin America. He describes how these conditions are different and yet similar from that Europe saw a few centuries back. He goes on to express that the inability to express their situation, the lack of any true means of communication to present their actual situation is what the reason of their solitude. Gabo ends on a surprisingly optimistic note and presents to us a future where hope may be possible.

Similarities with the novel

Gabo uses facts to present an exaggerated looking picture to evoke emotions in the speech, the same way he did in the novel. The theme of Solitude is evident in the title itself while the usage of Magical Realism defines the tone of the speech as well as the distinctive lines between reality and fiction are no more distinctive but quite blurred. A very graphical description is the forte of Marquez and that involves the reader completely. The abandonment of the Latin America by Europe and North America reminds us of the abandonment of the people of Macondo by government.

Dissimilarities with the novel

The exaggeration in the speech is quite different from the way it is used in the novel. Marquez provokes people by the larger than reality picture of facts, a reality in which people don’t care about these facts. Marquez, the story teller, presents history of Latin America to us in the form of a tale while he had told us a tale in the novel, setup between historical events. The gloomy tone of the novel though continues in the story but the end in the speech gives us a hope and prays to bring about a change in the situation.

The Solitude of Latin America

Once the land of gold, Latin America has now been reduced to a continent of crime, disease and poverty. The plundering and oppression has hidden the creative talents. The life of a Latin American is haunted by myths, drudgery and disease but at the same time decorated by a creativity which goes unseen. The fact that what seems magical and outsized to us forms the crux of their day to day life and that is the reason of their solitude.The cyclic nature of time has rendered no progress in Latin America. All these factors are causes of the aloofness and loneliness of its people but Gabo specifically says that there is a lack of means of communicating the real plight of the people. People of the civilised world think from their perspective and looking from a different lens is quite impossible. This impossibility is the root cause of the solitude of the Latin Americans.

Magical Realism

Marquez felt that Caribbean showed him life in a way where supernatural elements are embedded in reality and that is the only place where he never felt like a stranger. Marquez once said that the way in which he writes stories is the same in which his grandmother used to tell him. He explains how the horrific past and present of Latin America lends itself to what seems to be magical to the outsiders but is the tragic reality of Latin American people. Magical realism is seen in the way Marquez uses to describe the distinctiveness of the cultures of the two continents by using the elements on factual reality which is so scary that it almost sounds exaggerated.

Conclusions

Numbers and not fiction form the tools for Marquez in the speech to bring out the real image of third world countries in front of the so called ‘civilized’ nations on a platform where everyone hears. The exchange of culture in the form of arts and literature across the two American continents leads us to believe that the efforts in the direction of social and economic exchange have been half hearted. A visionary rises in the last paragraph who does not just see the problem, but also finds the solution.

Socio-Political Conditions in Latin America

Introduction

Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is considered by many critics to be an extremely important and thoroughly representative novel of the Latin American literary boom of 1960s and 1970s. The acclaim bestowed upon the novel all across the world led to a discovery by readers and critics of “magical realism”. This extraordinary genre combines realistic portrayals of factual and realist political and social conflicts with descriptions of mystical, and more often than not, supernatural events. Known as one of its foremost practitioners, Garcia Márquez claims that everything in his fiction has a basis in reality. However, his portrayals of his homeland Colombia have made him one of the most acclaimed writers in the modern world.

The novel pictures a multi-generational story of the Buendia family, set in the fictional town of Macondo, founded by it's patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia. His work in the novel has been regarded to be highly influenced by modernism and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vangaurd) literary movement. The major themes visible in the novel can be listed out as : Solitude, Cyclicity of time, Magical Realism and Ignorance. I consciously do not intend to divulge further into the details of these thematic characterstics of the novel as it would in itself require a whole new blog entry.

As an undeniable fact, we all agree that the social and political developments in any part of the world have an immense effect on the writers of the contemporary times. Memories get penned down in the form of carefully written fiction with sprinkles of realistic events. Gabriel Garcia Márquez is no exception of such an observation. As we find out while reading his masterpiece, such socio-political developments in last few centuries have also affected Garcia Márquez to a great extent. To understand the effects of these developments on his writings, we must get to know the history that his people have gone through over the centuries, as acclaimed by him in his famous Nobel lecture. Knowledge of Latin American history and Colombia in particular, can provide great insights into understanding political battles that take place all throughout “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. García Márquez has beautifully woven Colombian political and social reality with magical realism into his magnum opus.

If we look at the following map of the Latin America of the 16th century, we can clearly see that the major parts of the region had been colonized by Spain, barring the Brazilian region which was colonized by Portuguese rulers. This colonization has had direct reference in Garcia Marquez’s novel where he, in the initial chapters, provide enough hints and example to indicate the long lost Spanish presence and possible rule over the peninsular region of Macondo and surroundings.

Several Hundred Years of Colombia

Walking through the history of the Latin American region, we look at the last 500 years in particular to have a better understanding of the effects of the socio-political conditions of Garcia Marquez’s writings. Prior to the 16th century, and before any contacts with the external world, northern Latin American region was inhabited primarily by Tairona & Chibcha native Indian tribes, who were organized as clans, deriving the local monarchy who governed pre–Hispanic "Colombia" for centuries. In 1509, Vasco Núñez de Balboa established first Spanish settlement, which was used as guard for invasion & conquest by the mid-16th century. In fact, Bogotá became the center of colonial Spanish rule in the year 1538. The following three centuries saw oppression and harassment of the natives by colonial rulers much like India and other Asian and African colonies. However, the fight for independence went on throughout the 18th century, which gave birth to the fruit of freedom in 1810 when the Spanish empire collapsed in Colombia. People soon arose to counter the political authority of Government. But the disappointment of the Colombian citizens, armies of Count Pablo Morillo restored Spanish rule to Colombia once again by 1819. This initiated the Second war of Independence in the same year, at the nation-wide behest of freedom activist Simón Bolívar. During the period of 1819 to 1831, this revolt saw the rise of La Gran Colombia, a comparatively unified Colombian region comprising of Northern Latin America, Southern Central America and previous viceroyalty of New Granada.

The modernization of Gran Colombia faced numerous obstacles, viz. inaccessibility to many remote regions of the country due to geographical hindrances, high cost of transport facilities etc. This led to establishment of discrete communities with political and economic autonomy, much like Garcia Márquez’s description of the town of Macondo. In the early 19th century, Colombian rulers explored and colonized Colombian interiors and forced racial differentiation of these regions. White regions were considered to be moral & progressive, while Black & Indian regions were associated with disorder and backwardness. Modernization, hence technology, became associated with race. A similar trend could be seen in the novel where other parts of the country had access to scientific developments, and Macondo got left out due to its solitude.

The political situation in Colombia is a bi-party system with Conservatives and Liberals battling out for the supreme post in the government. The Conservative have been the more “villainous” is their approach towards the power, misusing it to squeeze out all the juice out of the productive land of Colombia. On the other hand, Liberals had always been progressive in their approach and have worked for the people’s development whenever in power. One of the major political events of the 20th century in Colombia happened in the 1930s when liberal leader Alfonso López Pumarejo called for La Revolución en Marcha in March 1934. The important highlights of the period had been the reforms in the labour laws to benefit working class and native peasants, which had been ignored by Conservatives all through their reigning period. In 1946, the rule changed to Conservatives, and as a consequence political dysfunction began worsening the political scenario to create undemocratic authoritarian rule. Assassination of influential liberal leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 began the darkest decade in Colombian history – La Violencia. By 1957, the Conservative government fell to military rebellion. Liberals & Conservatives then finalized an agreement to constitute a compromise government. The 1948 to 1957 period saw an increase in guerrilla insurgencies in the interiors of the country. As a fact, it is sad to know that guerrilla warfare caused over 200,000 assassinations in Colombia. I must put a historical bookmark at this point to remind ourselves that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. By the eighth decade of the 20th century, guerrilla factions were slowly replaced by coordinated network of drug cartels & struggling farmers. In 1990, Colombian government approved a new constitution, with an immediate aim to further democratize the political system.

Analysis

My analysis of the novel with reference to the above mentioned topic is summarized in the following bulleted list, in the hope that it makes the reading much easier.

• Latin America’s centuries of undiscovered existence has been symbolized by Macondo’s solitude from the rest of the world.
• The town of Macondo, drawn as a Utopian village in Garcia Marquez’s novel is a direct reference to the fully developed civilization in the region prior to Spanish colonization.
• Much like all Utopian worlds, the existence of Macondo does not last forever. Its downfall clearly started with the arrival of outside world in the form of Don Apolinar Moscote, who is a metaphor for the conservative Colombian government.
• His mandate over Macondo is symbolism for the conservative Oligarchic government’s irrational control over people. For example, he forced Buendía family to paint their house blue instead of white, with little or no reason whatsoever, and threatened them when they protested.
• The dislike of Buendía family against Don Apolinar Moscote is the resultant of Garcia Márquez’s open ideology against the Colombian Government.
• Social Injustice & Capitalist backed political system reached Macondo through Don Apolinar Moscote. He is declared the “benevolent governor” of Macondo. However, he is only an ornamental authority under the conservative leaders in capital city of Bogota with actual powers.
• The country of Colombia in contemporary times has been a result of absence of efficient political regiments and no definitive national identity among the citizens. The primary reasons being centuries of Spanish colonialism, repression and exploitation by government and civil violence.
• A strong desire for substantial progressive changes in countries of Latin America is equally evident in Macondo as well.
• Interesting connections could be seen all through the novel, between Macondo and Colombian political conditions. Macondo also got infected by corruption in democratic processes. For example, Don Apolinar Moscote ordered the sergeant to break the seal of ballot box, change the count of votes and reseal it.
• The life of Colonel Aureliano Buendía is in some sense symbolic representation of political violence of Colombian history. He led the civil war against the government in the novel, and showed post-war effects in his habit of locking himself up in Melquíades’ laboratory.
• Another important connection between the two is the similarity of the start and end of the Civil War in the novel. The war started with corruption of democratic processes and ended with peace treaties between the government and rebels.
• Also, Don Apolinar Moscote’s behaviour during the war was much similar to the actual conservative government. For example, he confiscated every type of weapon from the people of Macondo, even all the kitchen utensils!
• The changes following the arrival of the International Banana Company are also a clear reflection of the reality of Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
• In the early 20th century, United Fruit Company became the most lucrative international corporation in Colombia. Banana Company in Macondo followed similar practices of United Fruit Company, making it the ‘only wholesale buyer of bananas in region’.
• Also, Macondo's banana company clearly abused the people of Macondo and the surrounding region. Macondo’s company followed United Fruit Company’s practice of paying salary in Scrips, which could only be used at their local company stores.
• As a result, the frustrated workers of banana company in Macondo soon began to rebel with violence. They called upon the strike, with striking similarities to the actual strike of the Colombian citizens against the United Fruit Company’s policies. García Márquez’s strike much resembles the strike that took place in Ciénaga in 1928. Their actions too, were an absolute replication of the actual strike. The striking workers burnt the banana fields and company stores to ashes, destroyed the train tracks that were used for transporting banana bunches to cities, disrupted all the communication channels between Macondo & large cities.
• The soldiers were put to cut and ship banana bunches as described by Garcia Márquez during the strike.
• In the climactic section, García Márquez’s narrative style translates from fiction to ‘careful reconstruction of history’. For example, Army’s actions in Ciénaga inspired the climactic moment of the novel.

Conclusions

As a conclusion to this blog post, I think that it would be trivial to state that it is inevitable for Garcia Marquez to be strongly affected by political events of 19th & 20th century of Colombia. Garcia Marquez portrayed his views on politics and society through Buendía family. I personally appreciated the amazing amalgamation of factual reality with magical realism, a literary technique that I termed as disconnected familiarity – disconnecting the readers from familiar historical events. Also, his writing had a great deal of resemblance with James Joyce, in context of his writings about his birth-land. Both of them extensively described their homeland, Ireland for Joyce and Colombia for Garcia Marquez.

References

• One Hundred Years at Forty By Randy Boyagoda - The Walrus magazine
• Simons, Geoffrey Leslie – Colombia: A Brutal History. Saqi. (2004). ISBN 0863567584
• Appelbaum, N. – Muddied Waters: Race, Region & Local History in Colombia. Duke University Press. 1846–1948
• Martz, John D. – Colombia : A Contemporary Political Survey The University of North Carolina Press, 1962
• Henry, Abram L. – Struggling Against the Injustice: The Historical Context and Social Justice in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, University of Minnesota Morris
• Taylor, Anna Marie – ‘Cien Años de Soledad: History and the Novel.’ Science & Society XXXIX.3 (1975)
• Erickson, D. – Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years off Solitude. Macmillan (2009)
• Bell-Villada, Gene H. – Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2002
• Images – Google Image Search.

The Solitude of Latin America

Introduction:

Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982 was an explanation of Latin America’s isolation from the rest of the world. It successfully explained the ideas and the need of magical realism that Garcia Marquez has so beautifully deployed in his novels. Reading the lecture, it dawns upon one that magical realism was not a luxury at the disposal of the writers of Latin America; rather it was the most pressing need if they wanted to write about their land.

Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982:

In 1982, Gabriel García Márquez was given the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel Committee said that the prize was given because of “his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Columbia in a small town named Aracataca. This town is the inspiration of the fictional town Macondo, where many of his stories are set, including ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. This indicates that his stories are very intricately linked with the real Latin America. Thus, in talking about the reality of Latin America, he talked about his novels and his style of writing.

Outsized Reality of Latin America:

Gabriel García Márquez began his acceptance speech by mentioning the records of the explorer Antonio Pigafetta, who was one of the first Europeans to reach South America along with Magellan. García Márquez refers to the record as “a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy”. This is because of the nature of the lands of Latin America. For instance, Columbia has been identified as a megadiverse country by Conservation International, which is one of the largest non-profit conservation organizations in the U.S.A. The animals of this region are so unique that they seem very strange and somewhat magical to people from elsewhere.

García Márquez also mentions the stories that have become part of the culture of Latin America, but seem exaggerated to us. There are stories about the eleven thousand mules each loaded with a hundred pounds of gold, all of which disappeared mysteriously. Similar stories, when heard by other people, conjure a feeling that one associates with Narnia or the Middle Earth. Tolkien did not explain the existence of magic in Middle Earth; García Márquez did not explain the existence of magic in Macondo.

“The unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend”.

Latin America has always had a history that is inextricable from legend. There have been men who ruled the land in such a manner that the illogical became a part of the lives of the people. There was General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the dictator of El Salvador who had seized power during a palace coup, and had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered. He had the streetlamps draped with red paper to fight scarlet fever. He once said that “It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever.” There was General Antonio López de Santana who held a magnificent funeral for his right leg which he had lost during a war. With the rulers like these, the extraordinary became part of the lives of the local people.

Plight of the People:

Even after the end of European colonialism in Latin America, the living condition of the people in these countries has remained deplorable. There have been many wars and innumerable military coups. Millions of children have died due to poor health facilities. Many countries of the region have been witness to ponderous exiles. One million people fled Chile. El Salvador has produced colossal number of refugees. Columbia is the fourth largest economy in Latin America, but it has widespread extreme poverty in both urban and rural areas. This situation is similar to that of India. So, for us this is normal. But if we see this situation in a different light, we will realize that this can be only explained befittingly as an act of magic. The reality no longer remains realistic; and accordingly, the magical no longer remains fantastic. Hence, it becomes mandatory to use magical realism to describe such a place. So did Gabriel García Márquez; so did Salman Rushdie.

The Solitude of Latin America:

“…we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

This statement by García Márquez explains why the people of Latin America have been isolated from the developed world. He says that the conventional means, i.e. the disposition of the Latin American people, has become so antithetical to that of the developed world that their lives seem very unrealistic. There is very little hope of improvement left in the lives of these people. Accordingly, they don’t feel the need to explain something like a girl ascending to heaven. Clearly, García Márquez had no choice but to accept the attitude of the local people and write accordingly. This solitude is reflected in the novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ in the form of self-inflicted solitude of all its major characters.

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

By saying this García Márquez refers to the fact that the developed world tries to realize the reality of Latin America through lenses of its own culture. Ergo, to represent this outsized reality, it was imperative to deploy a new method of description, one that presented this reality as magic.

Magical Realism in Latin America & One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Another aspect to consider is the cultural influences in the perception of reality. Latin America, like India, has the coexistence of modern and indigenous belief systems due to colonization. Because of this cultural influence, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty seemed normal to the people of Macondo, but things like ice or a train seemed fantastic. So, the use of magical realism in the novel can also been fathomed as an attempt to elucidate the culture of Latin America. The novel has instances where the extraordinary is described as ordinary. Aureliano Segundo’s conversations with the dead Melquaides, Father Nicanor’s levitation, Ursula’s super long life, Colonenl Aureliano Buendiá knowledge of events even before they occurred are few of the many magical things that were not explained. Similarly, there were very logical events that were presented as magic, like the manipulation of facts by Banana Company lawyers, or the first appearance of train and of ice in Macondo. In Macondo, and in the novel, magic and reality blend together into magical realism.

Conclusion:

The acceptance speech given by Gabriel García Márquez makes it easier to understand the use of magical realism, the most important aspect of the novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. It is now established that magical realism was not just one of the many literary tools that writers choose from, rather it was indispensible in writing about Latin America. The speech also explains the titles of the novel and of the speech itself.