Postcolonial Perspectives in Select Novels of Gabriel

Postcolonial Perspectives in Select Novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Dissertation submitted to Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli-24
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the award of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Submitted by
C. Dhanabal
Under the Guidance of
Dr. T. Jayakumar
Associate Professor of English
PG & Research Department of English
Periyar EVR College (Autonomous)
Tiruchirappalli – 620 023
August 2011
Dr. T.Jayakumar
M.A., M.Phil., B.Ed., Ph.D.,
Associate Professor of English
Department of English
Periyar EVR College (Autonomous)
Tiruchirappalli- 620 023.
Certificate
This is to certify that the thesis entitled Postcolonial Perspectives in Select
Novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez submitted by C.Dhanabal to the Bharathidasan
University, Tiruchirappalli, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English is his original work, based on the
investigation carried out independently by him during the period of study under my
guidance and supervision and it has not formed the basis for the award of any degree,
diploma, associateship, fellowship or any other similar title, in any College/University.
Signature
Declaration
I, the Research Scholar, hereby declare that the dissertation entitled
Postcolonial Perspectives in Select Novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a record
of bona fide research work done by me during the period 2006-2011 under the guidance
of Dr.T.Jayakumar, M.A., M.Phil., B.Ed., Ph.D., Associate Professor of English,
PG & Research Department of English, Periyar EVR College (Autonomous),
Tiruchirappalli – 620023 and it has not formed the basis for the award of any degree,
diploma, associateship, fellowship or any other similar title in any College/University.
Tiruchirappalli
Date:
C.DHANABAL
Contents
Chapter
Title
Page No.
Certificate
Declaration
Preface
A Note on Documentation
I
Introduction
1
II
Magic Realism: A Postcolonial
Narrative Technique
37
III
Reconstruction of the Past: A Postcolonial
Search for Identity
88
IV
Violence: A Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Nations
141
V
Conclusion
184
Works Cited
206
A Note on Documentation
In this process of writing the thesis on the basis of various sources, the following
abbreviations have been used. Their expansion is given below.
OYS
---
One Hundred Years of Solitude
OLD ---
Of Love and Other Demons
AOP
Autumn of the Patriarch
---
NWC ---
No One Writes to the Colonel
CDF
---
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
IEW
---
In Evil Hour
CS
---
Collected Stories
Preface
Postcolonial studies have emerged as a major critical discourse in the study of
literature. The world was once dominated by European empires. Till 1921, eighty four
per cent of the surface of the earth had been colonized since the sixteenth century. The
colonial powers destroyed the native tradition and culture; further, they continuously
replaced them with their own. This often led to conflicts, when countries became
independent and suddenly faced the challenge of developing a new nationwide identity
and self-confidence. As generations had lived under the power of the colonial rulers,
the Western culture was assimilated as their very own. Though, by the mid-1960s, most
colonies were, formally, independent, the experience of the subsequent decades showed
how much the ghost of colonization still loomed over the postcolonial world. A
colonial cast of mind persists, one that geopolitical power relations make it very hard to
shake off. The challenge for these countries was to find an identity of their own. They
found it difficult to get rid of the western way of life and the western way of thinking.
Now, there is a growing awareness and the colonized countries want to get rid
of the colonial traces from their colonized minds, in order to start a new history and ‘set
afoot a new man’ (Fanon). Postcolonial thinking, thus, stresses humanity-in-themaking, the humanity that will emerge, once the colonial spectre of violence and the
racial difference have been swept away. The ultimate goal of postcolonialism is that of
combating and removing the residual effects of colonialism on native cultures. It is not
simply concerned with salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move
beyond this period, towards a place of mutual respect.
The postcolonial societies struggle to wriggle out of the colonial clutches and
try to make their mark in the new world. All the same, the people of the liberated
nations do not experience cultural freedom despite the achieving of political freedom.
They are still chained and oppressed, not by the colonizer, but by their own men.
Though there is freedom, it is not freedom at all.
The purpose of this research is to create awareness in the colonized minds that
the real freedom is yet to be achieved. A study of Garcia Marquez’s novels would
explain the stance that though there is freedom, it is not freedom at all. Garcia Marquez
has made his mark in the literary front with his magical realism which positions both
the ‘centre’ and the ‘other’ on equal footing. The presentation of history in his novels
serves a dual purpose. The true history of the land is brought out in place of the
distorted version presented by the colonial forces. The picture of the past serves the
colonized individuals to learn from their past mistakes. Violence is a legacy left by the
brutal colonizers. The colonizers have sown the seeds of violence in the minds of the
colonized in order to consolidate their power over the indigenous people. The nativeborn dictators and the corrupt politicians of the independent nations, knowingly or
unknowingly, follow in the footsteps of the colonizers and make sure that there is
violence in their lands for their personal and selfish gains. Unaware of the
consequences, they spread violence, which mars the growth of the colonized nations
into formidable powers. The colonized nations should wake up from their slumber,
stoke the embers of their latent history and culture, learn from their past mistakes,
realize their real potential and work towards a bright new world.
This research work, Postcolonial Perspectives in Select Novels of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, which was born out of a desire to see the effacing of the colonial
traces from the faces of the colonized nations, would not have come to fruition without
the help of many people.
First, I thank the Almighty, for showering His blessings upon me and enabling
me to complete this project successfully.
I register my heartfelt gratitude to my guide, Dr. T. Jayakumar, Associate
Professor, PG & Research Department of English, Periyar EVR College (Autonomous),
Tiruchirappalli-23, for nurturing this project at every stage with his valuable
suggestions and critical insights. His constant encouragement and sustained motivation
enabled me to complete this project in time.
I extend my thanks to Prof.Pazha.Gowthaman, Principal i/c, Periyar EVR
College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-23, and Dr. A. Padmavathy, Head, PG &
Research Department of English, Periyar EVR College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli23, for granting me permission to pursue my research in this college.
My sincere thanks are to Dr.M. Marcus Diepen Boomination, former
Principal, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-17, who has been a
source of inspiration for me to pursue this research work. I extend my thanks to
Rev. Dr. P. Manoharan, Principal (i/c), Bishop Heber College (Autonomous),
Tiruchirappalli – 620 017 for his support and encouragement during the course of this
project.
I am greatly indebted to Dr.Roopkumar Balasingh, Head, PG & Research
Department of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-17, for
sowing the seeds of research in me on this marvellous author. I must also thank him for
his valuable suggestions during my discussions with him.
My heartfelt thanks go to Mr.P. Natarajan, former Head, PG & Research
Department of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-17, for
his diligent proof-reading of this project.
I thank the librarians of Bishop Heber College, Trichy, Bharathidasan
Univerisity, Trichy and The American Library, Chennai -6, for granting me permission
to use their respective libraries. Let me add a special word of thanks to Mr. Srinivasan
Premkumar, Reference/Outreach (Promotional) Librarian, The American Library,
U.S. Consulate General, Chennai- 6 and Mr. R. Prabu, Research Scholar, Department
of Library & Information Science, Bharathidasan University, Trichy -24, for taking
pains to provide material for my research.
I thank my colleagues, Mrs. J. Baby Eliammal, Mr. S.Azariah Kirubakaran,
and Mrs. Cheryl Davis, PG & Research Department of English, Bishop Heber College
(Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-17, for their timely help.
I extend my thanks to Mr. Raja of Saratha Xerox, Trichy-17 for his technical
support in typing and printing this thesis.
I may fail in my duty, if I do not thank my wife, Mrs. Nalini Christina and my
son Master. C.D. Jackin for providing me moral support during the course of my
research work. I also thank my brothers, sister and all members of my family for
evincing a keen interest in my research.
Finally, I dedicate this work to my father (Late) Mr. S.Chelliah and my mother
(Late) Mrs. Arputhamani Chelliah, for giving me good education amidst difficulties.
C. DHANABAL
Introduction
The term ―Latin America‖ refers to the area that includes all of the Caribbean
islands and the mainland that stretches from Mexico to the southernmost tip of South
America. It includes those countries in the ‗New World‘ formerly colonized by
Portugal, Spain and Italy. It also includes the countries that are located on the South
American continent, and those countries which are in Central America. The main
language of Latin America is Spanish. Latin America has a very long history, dating
back to Columbus‘ discovery of the territory, in the late 15th century. Columbus landed
in America in 1492. With the Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, Latin American
culture is derived from the traditions of both its European newcomers and its native
inhabitants. The Spanish colonial government understood its empire as a single force
and a single protectorate. It concentrated on building its empire on the central and
southern parts of America. It exploited the human and material resources of these
areas, such as the large concentration of silver and gold. It wanted to create a culture
that was distinct and somewhat homogenous. But, variations emerged through peculiar
dialogues and clashes that took place between the Spanish societies and the native
communities that existed in the regions, before the arrival of the Spanish. The Incas, the
Aztecs and the Mayans were the large and dominant cultures before the arrival of the
Spanish. Spanish colonialism forced these cultures to struggle for survival. When the
Spanish and the Portuguese arrived, they easily overcame these native populations.
The colonists destroyed the native architecture, replaced the native religions
with Catholicism, and strengthened the class system for their personal ends. As the
natives died from diseases brought to them by the European immigrants, they were
2
replaced by a new generation that resulted from an intermixing of the male immigrants
and the female natives.
For nearly two hundred years, the Spanish were the dominant force in the
region. Havana remained an important Spanish American centre and trade city, while
Lima and Mexico City evolved as cultural hubs. In these New World cities, there was a
thriving artistic and literary community. The work produced by this community,
however, was notably imitative of the work of the Golden Age in Spanish letters.
Modern Latin American writers do not have any affinity with the literature of the
colonials, but they use their historical documents in their writings. The Spaniards are
known for their act of recording. There are innumerable documents which detail the
vicious process of colonization and the terrible anxiety and guilt associated with it. The
documents of the historians, priests, governors and leaders of the evolving empire,
portray the emergence of a new Latin American identity. Even among them, some
remained as conduits through whom the history of the Inca, Maya and Aztec, reached
the modern readers. Notable among them are La Casas, Oviedo, Gomara and Castillo.
The themes with which these writers grappled, the politics that shaped their existence
and the terrible conditions they witnessed, are the elements that have come to shape the
character of Latin American fiction, in the last several hundred years. It is impossible to
read Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Alejo Carpentier without reference to
the writings of the above writers.
During the colonization, there were certain factors that severely retarded the
development of the novel in the Latin American countries. Notable among them, was
the church‘s view, that the novel form would spoil the morals of the individuals. Books,
such as Amadis, were not allowed to be imported in the year 1531. However, in 1580,
all sorts of fiction entered the region, including Cervantes‘ Don Quixote. But still the
3
law in Spanish-speaking regions, successfully prevented the production of anything that
might be called a novel until 1816. The first novel of Spanish America appeared within
the politically liberal orientation of nascent romanticism.
Latin American literature emerges out of the strange contradictions between
nationalism and the empire that characterize the experience of the region. The
movement towards independence in Latin America, as in all other formerly colonized
states, entailed a quest for a distinct cultural and national identity. But, this Latin
American identity cannot be easily defined. It is peculiarly defined by the tension
among the colonial force of Spanish dominance, the spirit of discovery and the quest to
found a new society with values and a new understanding of the landscape and
individuality, and the presence of non-European cultures in the region. While the
literatures of the Latin American countries share some similarities, they have their
distinct qualities. The history of modern Latin American writing has a tendency to
homogenize and lump all countries into a single and manageable unit; but, at the same
time, it maintains the distinct nationalism of each country; the histories of these
countries intersect at certain points, but they remain quite distinct from one another.
Though the Latin American writers come from different nationalistic backgrounds, they
share a common goal. Their aim is to create a literature from the bloodied soil of Latin
America.
Latin American literature aligns itself with the history of the region. The whole
of Latin American Literature can be divided into four periods: the colonial period, the
independence period, the national consolidation period, and the contemporary period.
During the colonial period, the literature reflected its Spanish and Portuguese roots and
consisted primarily of didactic prose and the chronicles of events. The independence
movement of the early 1800s saw a move towards patriotic themes, in mostly poetic
4
form. The consolidation period that followed brought about Romanticism--and later,
modernism--with essays being the favourite mode of expression. Finally, Latin
American literature evolved into the novel and drama forms in the early 20th century.
The earliest Latin American literary works in Spanish are claimed equally by
Spain and its overseas colonies. The business of war and of Christianizing and
organizing the newly discovered continent was not favourable to the development of
lyric poetry and prose fiction. The Spanish-American literature of the 16th century
excels mainly in didactic prose works and in the chronicles of events. The spirit of the
Spanish Renaissance, as well as much religious fervour, is apparent in the writings of
the early colonial period. Men of the church, predominated in all cultural endeavours.
Mexico and Lima, the capitals of the vice-royalties of New Spain and Peru,
respectively, became the centres of all intellectual activity in the 17th century. City
life, a splendid replica of that of Spain, became a routine of erudition, ceremony, and
artificiality. The creoles often outstripped the Spaniards in the acceptance of the
baroque styles then those current in Europe. In literature, the acceptance of the current
styles was evidenced in the popularity of the works of the Spanish dramatist Pedro
Calderon de la Barcay Henao and, the Spanish poet, Luis de Gongora y Argote, and in
the local literary production. The most notable 17th century poet was the Mexican Nun
Juana Ines de la Cruz, who wrote verse plays, both religious and secular. She also
wrote poems in defense of women and autobiographical prose, on her various learned
interests. A mixture of satire with realistic traits, which was then current in Spanish
literature, appeared also overseas, both in poetry and in the novel.
In Spain, the Habsburg dynasty was replaced by the Bourbon dynasty in 1700.
This event opened the colonies, with or without official sanction, to French influences,
evidenced in a wide acceptance of French classicism and, during the later part of the
5
century, in the spread of the libertarian doctrines of the Enlightenment. Jose Joaquin
Fernandez de Lizardi, known as ‗the Mexico thinker‘, was fundamentally a
pamphleteer and essayist who travelled with a portable printing press, turning out
material in support of the war of independence. His first novel, The Itching Parrot, led
to a current of romantic novels in the region. Although the picaresque genre in Spain
was used by the church to preach morality, Lizardi‘s picaresque novel was brutally
anticlerical. The Peruvian dramatist Peralta Barnuevo adapted French plays. Other
writers, such as the Ecuadorian Francisco Eugenio and the Colombian Antonio Narino
aided the diffusion of French revolutionary ideas toward the end of the 18th century.
During this epoch, new literary centers also arose. Quito in Ecuador, Bogota in
Colombia, and Caracas in Venezuela, in the north, and soon afterward Buenos Aires,
in the south, began to vie with the old viceregal capitals in learning, publications, and
literary gatherings. Contacts with the non-Spanish world became more frequent, and
the intellectual monopoly of the mother country was challenged.
The period of struggle for independence brought a flood of warlike patriotic
writings, largely in poetry. The first Spanish-American novel was Periquillo
Sarmiento, by the Mexican author Jose Joaquin Fernandez. In it, the adventures of a
roguish protagonist afford panoramic views of colonial life, which contain veiled
criticisms of society. Literature and politics were closely intermingled during this
period, as writers assumed the pose of Roman republican tribunes. The Ecuadorian
poet and political leader Jose Joaquin Olmedo praised the South American
revolutionary leader, soldier, and statesman Simon Bolivar in his poem ―Victoria de
Junin‖. The Venezuelan poet Andres Bello extolled tropical agriculture in his famous
Silvas Americanas, which is similar to the bucolic poetry of the Roman poet Virgil.
The Cuban poet Jose Maria de Heredia y Campuzano foreshadowed the coming of
6
romanticism in poems such as ―Al Niagara‖, written while he was an exile in the U.S.
About the same time, in the south, an anonymous popular poetry of a political nature
began to rise among the gauchos of the La Plata region.
During the period of consolidation, the new Latin American republics tended to
look still more toward France than Spain, but with a new nativistic emphasis. The
Eighteenth-century classical forms gave way to romanticism, dominant through much
of the 19th century. Argentina was exposed to French-European romanticism by
Esteban Echeverria. French influence also spread via Mexico, while the Hispanic
realistic tradition continued through the costumbrista writings. Political and economic
consolidation and struggle during this period involved many Spanish-American
writers. Notable was the so-called Argentine romanticist-rebel-exile generation of the
opponents of the regime of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. This group, influential
also in Chile and Uruguay, included Jose Marmol , author of a cloak-and-dagger
romance, Amalia. Jose Marmol learned his craft from Sir Walter Scott and Alexander
Dumas. The educator (later president of Argentina), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
whose biographical-social study Facundo indicated that the basic problem of Latin
America was the gap between its primitive state and its European influences. The
novel progressed notably in this period. The Chilean Alberto Blest Gana made the
transition from romanticism to realism, depicting the Chilean society with Balzacian
techniques, in his Martín Rivas. The novel is illustrative of his desire to become the
Balzac of Chile, although, at its base, it is still a Romantic work, rather than a realistic
one. In fact, it has been termed the best example of Romantic realism in Latin America
and it exhibits the typical polarity that is so evident in the novels of his period: city
against country, reality against appearances, and good against evil characters. In
Ecuador, Juan Leon Mera idealized the Indian in a jungle setting, in the novel
7
Cumanda. In Cumanda, Mera lays the foundation for the modern novel of protest
against the inhuman treatment of the Indians, about whom he had solid documentary
knowledge. The same type of novel, overlaid with European sentimentalism and full of
fateful coincidences and melodramatic surprises, including the usual impossible
marriage of siblings, appeared in Peru under the title, Birds Without a Nest: A Story of
Indian Life and Priestly Opposition in Peru. The author, Clorinda Matto de Turner has
written a preface within the tradition of the moralistic essay, declaring that her purpose
was to exhibit the unjust treatment meted out to the Peruvian Indian. It is a prime
example of the nineteenth century Romantic novel in that it is far more concerned with
theme than with technique. In Mexico the outstanding romantic realist was Ignacio
Altamirano. He attempted to raise the quality of the Latin American novel by urging
his fellow authors to read widely, in order to gain a more universal literary vision.
Although an Indian himself, and desirous of making the novel more realistic, he
tended to produce romantically stereotyped characters, Indian or otherwise, and failed
to plead the Indian‘s case strongly. His Clementia and Christmas in the Mountains, are
worthy novels, but his ability to tell a good adventure story is best displayed in El
Zarco: the Bandit. There are two couples in El Zarco, one positive and the other
negative, the one illustrating what is good for Mexico and the other illustrating what
threatens to destroy it. Naturalistic novelists, like the Argentine, Eugenio Cambaceres,
author of Sin rumbo, reflected the influence of the experimental novels of the French
writer Emile Zola.
Modernism, a movement of literary renewal, appeared during the 1880s. It was
favoured by the political and economic consolidation of the Latin American republics
and the resultant peace and prosperity among the larger nations. It emphasized the
purely artistic, rather than the utilitarian, functions of literature. It was characterized by
8
refined sensibilities, even hyper-aestheticism, and in contrast to criollismo’s desire to
come to grips with Latin American reality, its aim was to rise above it, in a manner of
escape. The modernists shared a cosmopolitan culture influenced by recent European
trends, including French Parnassian and symbolist poetry; and in their writings they
blended the old and the new, the foreign and the native forms and themes. Modernism
spread from Latin America to Spain, culminated in about 1910, and left its mark on
prose fiction, in a greater concern on the part of the writer for sound artistic
accomplishment and in an increase in the use of imagery in prose style, issuing,
ultimately, in some novels that must be read almost as poetry, on account of the
intensity of their language. Concurrently, many writers bypassed modernism,
continuing to produce realistic or naturalistic novels on regional social problems.
Regional fiction was produced by the Argentine, Ricardo Guiraldes, in Don
Segundo Sombra, the culmination of the gaucho novel; the Colombian, Jose Eustasio
Rivera, in La Voragine , a novel of the jungle; and the Venezuelan, Romulo Gallegos,
in Dona Barbara, a novel of the plains. The Guatemalan diplomat Miguel Angel
Asturias, who was awarded the 1966 Lenin Peace Prize and the 1967 Nobel Prize in
literature, excelled as a political satirist in El Senor Presidente. Jorge Luis Borges, the
first avant garde poet, became the most distinguished writer of modern Argentina,
specializing in esoteric metaphysical tales. His works are also widely read in
translation. In collaboration, he and Adolfo Bioy Casares, stimulated interest in the
sophisticated detective story and in the fantasy literature. International acclaim came to
Julio Cortazar for his experimental novel Rayuela. Cortazar‘s works have been praised
as brilliant and original. The new Mexican novel departed from mere crude realism, as
a result of the influence of the British writers Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, the
Irish writer James Joyce, and, especially, the American writers John Dos Passos and
9
William Faulkner. Within a regional framework, Jose Revueltas wrote Human
Mourning, and Agustin Yanez wrote The Edge of the Storm, adding new psychological
and magical dimensions. Carlos Fuentes in Where the Air is Clear alternates, in
manner, between the purely fantastic-psychological and the nativistic.
Since 1900, the Latin American novel in Spanish was characterized by three
specific features: the realist-modernist duality, super-regionalism and the striving
towards universalization. The realist-modernist trend continued upto 1910, the year of
the bourgeois- democratic revolution in Mexico. This event reverberated in the
consciousness of Latin American writers. Their ability to perceive and depict the
violent reality, which the modernists tried to black out, made the need for realist writing
imperative. However, literary realism in the Latin American, context meant the
portrayal of the peculiar problems and conflicts of the region, which accounts for the
incorporation of the qualifying term 'regionalism'. The writers groped for an
understanding of the American situation, searching for the causes of economic
backwardness and the misery of their people. This led to the over-emphasizing of the
antagonism between civilization and barbarism, in their works. Nature versus
civilization became the focal point in fiction writing. Social problems continued to find
an echo but nature was depicted as an all-powerful force in their writings. The period
from the first world war to 1950, left an indelible imprint on the people of Latin
America. Fascism was directly experienced in the Spanish Civil War, and the fall of the
Spanish Republic in 1936, was an intensely felt personal loss for the Latin American
writers. At the economic plane, the development of industry, however marginal,
resulted in the growth of urban centres and the emergence of indigenous elites. But
hopes of national resurgence were belied as the U S intervention and exploitation of the
natural resources of Latin America advanced in a systematic manner. The situation was
10
complicated by political violence and the curtailment of democratic rights. A false
image of development of Hispanic America was projected contrary to its actual
underdevelopment. Such naked conditions prevalent in society were bound to have
their reflection in the works of art and literature. The shift from a regionalist or
localized view of problems and conflicts to a view of reality in a wider perspective, i.e.,
in the framework of the correlation of forces at the international plane, became
inevitable. Writers were neither impressed nor convinced by the euphoria of 'progress'
sought to be created in the continent. They were now able to discern the danger posed
by the conditions of chaos and instability that engulfed their region. The threat of
neocolonialism became abundantly real and clear to them, particularly in view of the
penetration of the U S economic and cultural influence in the life of the peoples of
Latin America. The problem of Man versus Nature, which had hitherto dominated the
literature of the continent, naturally receded into the background, making way for the
portrayal of man caught in the mire of moral and socio-economic conflict.
In general, the Latin American novelists in Spanish have achieved international
recognition with their new sophisticated techniques, styles, perspectives and themes,
transcending the old regionalism. The stylistic label ―magic realism‖, is applicable to
many of the stronger narrators, those who seem to convey a sense of the mystery
hidden behind reality. A group of writers suddenly rose to prominence during the
1960‘s. This period is often refereed to as the ‗boom‘ of Latin American literature,
signalling the birth of the ‗New Latin American Novel‘. The Cuban novelist Alejo
Carpentier gave a new mythological dimension to the novel of the jungle in The Lost
Steps. His Reasons of State deals with the subject of dictatorship. He creates a
powerful effect in the novel by the use of the interior monologue to characterize the
dictator. The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, found many perspectives in the apparently
11
closed world of a military school, in The Time of the Hero. Most of his works are
about the military establishment, prostitution or a combination of the two. His The
Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, are bitter analyses of the Peruvian
society. The Brazilian, Joao Guimaraes Rosa‘s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, is
written in Joycean language, rich in neologisms and regional speech. The Chilean-born
Jose Donoso, who is often compared with Llosa, is best-known internationally for his
masterpiece The Obscene Bird of Night. Donoso‘s novels represent an advance in the
novelist‘s art in his country and, at the same time, they continue the country‘s tradition
of examining a segment of the society, by the use of carefully controlled language. The
work of Julio Cortazar presents a major example of the movement of the Latin
American novel into the universal sphere. His novel, Hopscotch, moves away from the
sterile atmosphere of the Argentine novels of his generation and presents a far more
authentic existentialist hero in Horacio Oliveira. Oliveira is a person in motion,
creating a new persona, however defective, as he moves. One of the important
contributions of Cortazar to the new novel, is his insistence that the reader participate
in the creative act with him. In the work of these writers, the Latin American novel in
Spanish, not only came of age, but also appeared to impress a widening international
public, as a most vigorous development of universal interest. In Colombia, Jorge
Isaac‘s Maria and Jose Eustacia Rivera‘s La Vordgine were the two novels which
dominated the centre stage of national literature for a long time. María, a lyric tale of
doomed love on an old plantation, is a Hispanic masterpiece among romantic novels.
Jorge Isaac and other romantics were generally more concerned with nature, and the
heroine of Isaac‘s novel appears to be almost a projection of the landscape of
Colombia‘s valley, Cauca Valley. The tale is typical of its day, involving an encounter
of soul mates who are separated and then reunited at the conclusion, only to learn that
12
fate has made their marriage impossible. In this case, the couple is brother and sister
by adoption and her death prevents their marriage. Garcia Marquez‘s One Hundred
Years of Solitude and other novels, radically changed the standards by which the Latin
American critics and readers measure their national heritage. His novels suddenly leap
over the nationally defined boundaries of Latin American literature, to become
international phenomena. With his new narrative techniques, he deregionalizes,
denationalizes and internationalizes Latin American literature. His ability to produce
major works that have achieved both critical and popular success, has tended to efface
national literary boundaries and to catapult Latin American literature to the cutting
edge of literary innovation. Thus, Garcia Marquez, who hails from Colombia, has
taken the novel of Latin America to new heights, transcending the local world through
magical and timeless unity. The history of Colombia is fraught with violent and bloody
incidents, and Garcia Marquez has been a witness to many of such events, which get
reflected in his novels.
Before the Spanish colonization of the Americas by the right of conquest, the
northern region of South America, that is contemporary Colombia, had no culture akin
to that of the (Peruvian) Incas, the (Central American) Mayas, or the (Mexican) Aztecs.
That region was populated by the Tairona and the Chibcha Indian tribes, who were
organized as clans, from which derived the local monarchy, who governed pre–
Hispanic ―Colombia‖. In 1509, Vasco Nunez de Balboa established the first
settlement, as an advanced guard of the Spanish invasion and conquest. After Gonzalo
Jimenez de Quesada‘s conquest of the Chibchas in 1538, Bogota became the centre of
colonial Spanish rule. In 1810, upon the collapse of the Spanish Empire in Colombia,
provincial juntas soon arose to challenge the political authority of the national
government in Bogota; yet six years later, in 1816, the royalist armies of Count Pablo
13
Murillo restored Spanish rule to Colombia. It was because of the internal bickering, that
allowed the fledgling Colombia to fall to the sword of General Murillo; this period is
immortalized in Colombia‘s history, with the colourful name of ‗The Booby
Fatherland‘. Three years later, in 1819, when Simon Bolivar began a second war of
independence from the Spanish Empire, he proclaimed the supranational state of
Greater Colombia whose capital city was Bogota and which comprised northern South
America and Southern Central America (contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Panama) and the previous Viceroyalty of New Granada.
Gran Colombia‘s Independence in 1819, revealed many obstacles to
nationhood; the geography was a formidable obstacle to modernization, such as paved
roads; thus, the high cost of transport facilitated the establishment of economically and
politically discrete autonomous communities. The Colombian society had wrestled with
modernity and modernism since the eighteenth century, and the social and philosophic
dynamism of the modernizing capitalist revolution, presented the Colombian ruling
classes with a choice; either progress into the modern industrial world or perish in
backwater barbarism. To incorporate the country into the world, the Colombians looked
to the European and the U.S. models of government, politics, and economy.
As the nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their
interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography, composed
of distinct localities and regions. This created a racialized discourse of regional
differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they
marked as ―white‖. Meanwhile, those places defined as ―black‖ and ―Indian‖, were
associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger; technology and modernization
became associated with race.
14
The nation of Colombia began violently — from the Bolivarian wars for
independence from the empire to the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas of the FARC:
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The initial, Bolivarian violence was for
liberation from the Spanish Empire. After the independence, there arose well-defined
socio-economic regions, divided north-south, by parallel spurs of the Andes mountains,
which contributed to continued civil and political instability, even after having expelled
the Spanish Crown. Moreover, Colombia's geographically and culturally dispersed
populations and natural resources much hindered the government's modernization of
the country and the nation. The two political parties which got concretized after the
independence, were the Liberals and the Conservatives. Although initially forming
themselves around the nucleus of two distinct and different ideologies, long years of
bloody conflict have eroded the distinctions between the parties. The Conservatives and
the Liberals are more like warring factions or clans than any parties with firmly
established or radically opposing ideologies. It has often been said of Colombia‘s
parties, that you do not join them, you are born into them; and indeed they act more as
territorial and familial units than as peacefully functioning parties with distinct political
platforms. In addition, the country is split into two main regional groups—the
Costenos of the coastal Carribbean, and the Cachacos of the central highland. Both
groups use those terms as pejorative of the other, and both occasionally view the other
with disdain. The Costenos tend to be more racially mixed, verbally outgoing and
superstitious. They are primarily the descendants of pirates and smugglers, with a
mixture of black slaves. They are also dancers, adventurers and people full of gaiety.
The Cachacos, on the other hand, are more formal, aristocratic and racially pure, who
pride themselves on their advanced cities, such as Bogota, and on their ability to speak
excellent Spanish. Traditionally, the tropical Caribbean coast has been a Liberal bastion
15
and in the cool mountains and interior valleys, the Conservatives are strong. Garcia
Marquez views himself as a Costeno. Throughout the nineteenth century, Colombia
was wracked by rebellions, civil wars of both the local and national variety and several
coup d‘etat. This century of bloodshed had its culmination in 1899, when the War of
Thousand Days began—Colombia‘s most devastating civil war, a conflict that ended
later in 1902. The war claimed the lives of over 1,00,000 people, primarily peasants and
their sons.
In 1934, the reformist President Dr. Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo, unanimously
voted to office by the Colombian Liberal Party, installed The Revolution on the March,
characterized by labour law and social services reforms, benefitting the working class
and the Indian peasants, much to the anger of the reactionary Conservatives. Twelve
years later, in August 1946, Mariano Ospina Perez assumed office as the first
Conservative party President of Colombia. Two years later, on 9 April 1948, the
assassination of the popular and influential Liberal candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan
began the decade period (1948–58) of Colombia‘s history known as La Violencia,
between the right-wing and the left-wing of the national political spectrum. By the mid1960s, the country had suffered some two hundred thousand assassinations; from 1946
to 1966, La Violencia had occurred in five stages: (i) resumption of political violence,
before and after the presidential election of 1946; (ii) popular urban insurrection
responding to the Gaitan assassination; (iii) guerrilla warfare-- against the Conservative
government of Ospina Pérez; (iv) incomplete pacification and negotiation from army
General Rojas Pinilla, who deposed Laureano Gomez; and (v) disjointed fighting under
the Liberal–Conservative coalition of the National Front from 1958 to 1975.
Violence was a stumbling block to the growth of Latin American literature.
Colombian literature was obviously on the wane. Colombia had always been a bastion
16
of Catholic conservatism, political traditionalism and literary purism. Its writers had
been either grammarians or academicians. Barring a few exceptions, the country had
been notorious as the source of some of the worst writings to appear in the continent,
being dominated mainly by extravagantly exotic, erotic and even pornographic
writings. In the name of realism, the novel of violence held sway for some time. The
Colombian literature confined itself to some superfluous, shallow and even anecdotal
themes.
The victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, opened a new chapter in the
history of the Latin American people. It opened new vistas, aroused new hopes and
aspirations. But more importantly, the Cuban Revolution focussed the attention of the
world on South America, which had remained isolated, if not insulated, thus far. The
people of the world were able to appreciate the immense potential, both material and
moral, that this hitherto obscure continent held for mankind. The relatively unknown,
safe and secret haven for U S exploitation was laid bare before the world by the Cuban
Revolution. This, in turn, increased the demand for all things Latin American,
including works of literature, as the world wanted to know more and more about the
continent of the future. The desire to know more about its literary creations was roused
to an unprecedented level. Apart from this, the Cuban Revolution had a tremendous
influence on the writers and intellectuals of Latin America. The literary world
witnessed a definite process of polarization between progressive and conservative
trends. The conscious pursuit, by the revolutionary government of Cuba, of a cultural
policy aimed at focussing attention on the neo-colonial danger and galvanizing antiimperialist sentiments played a catalytic role in this process.
In spite of the long turmoil and disorder that existed in Latin America, after the
Cuban Revolution, the region enjoyed increasing economic prosperity and a new-found
17
confidence which gave rise to a literary boom. From 1960 to 1967, the major works of
the boom were published. Many of these novels were somewhat rebellious, from the
general point of view of Latin American culture. Authors crossed traditional
boundaries, experimented with language, and often mixed different styles of writing, in
their works. Structures of literary works were also changing. Boom writers ventured
outside traditional narrative structures, embracing non-linearity and experimental
narration. The figure of Jorge Luis Borges, though not a Boom author per se, was
extremely influential for the Boom generation. Latin American authors were inspired
by North American and European authors as well as each others‘ works; many of the
authors knew one another and influenced their styles. The Boom really put Latin
American literature on the global map. It was distinguished by daring and experimental
novels such as Julio Cortazar‘s Rayuela's, that were frequently published in Spain and
quickly translated into English. Though the literary boom occurred while Latin
America was having commercial success, the works of this period tended to move away
from the positives of the modernization that was underway. Boom works tended not to
focus on social and local issues, but rather on universal and, at times, metaphysical
themes. Of all the Boom writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the most influential
writer of the period. He was the first of the four Latin American novelists to be
included in the literary Boom; the other three writers were the Peruvian Mario Vargas
Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortazar and the Mexican, Carlos Fuentes. One Hundred
Years of Solitude earned him international fame as a novelist of the magical realism
movement within the literatures of Latin America.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on 6 March 1928 in Aracataca, a town in
Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents, in a house filled
with countless aunts and rumours of ghosts. His childhood was a happy one, in which
18
he enjoyed a close relationship with his grandfather and he was raised in a storytelling
environment in that the elders were constantly reliving the past and recounting
anecdotes about the history of the family and the town. His grandfather, Colonel
Nicolas Marquez, had fought on the liberal side against the ruling Conservatives in the
Thousand Days‘ War, the last of a succession of civil wars that had rent Colombia, and
would often reminisce about stirring times. His grandmother and aunts were credulous
and superstitious women who believed in the supernatural and recounted all sorts of
magical happenings, as if they were everyday events. The author has often claimed that
it was from his grandmother that he learned his narrative manner.
In the law college where he studied, Garcia Marquez found that he had
absolutely no interest in his studies. He began to skip classes and neglect both his
studies and himself. He wandered around Bogota and rode the streetcars. He read
poetry instead of law. But, one day, his life changed upside down after he read a simple
book. It was Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis. The book had a profound effect on Garcia
Marquez, making him aware that literature did not have to follow a straight narrative
and unfold along a traditional plot. The effect was liberating. For the first time he
realized that he could write in this way too. Had he known it before, he would have
started writing a long time ago. He also remarked that Kafka‘s ‗voice‘ had the same
echoes as his grandmother‘s—his grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things
with a completely natural tone of voice. Kafka‘s influence made him read all the
literature he had been missing. He began reading voraciously; devouring everything he
could get his hands on. He also began writing fiction, and to his surprise, his first story
―The Third Resignation‖ was published in 1946 by the Liberal Bogota newspaper El
Espectador. He entered a period of creativity, penning ten more stories for the
newspaper, over the next few years.
19
Faulkner and Sophocles were the two big influences on him. Faulkner amazed
him with his ability to reformulate his childhood into a mythical past, inventing a town
and a county in which to house his prose. In Faulkner‘s mythical Yoknapatawpha, he
found the seeds of Macondo; and from Sophocles‘ Oedipus Rex, he found the ideas of
plot revolving around the society and the abuses of power. Garcia became dissatisfied
with his earlier stories, believing them to be too abstract from his true experiences.
They were simply intellectual elaborations, nothing to do with reality. Faulkner taught
him that a writer should write about what is close to him; and for years Garcia Marquez
had been struggling to understand the meaning of this statement. Even his earlier
stories Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour were unemotional
and abstract. Leaf Storm was too indebted to Faulkner and No One Writes to the
Colonel and In Evil Hour were too far away from his imagined goal, the image he had
been developing for years. He knew that his ultimate work would take place in the
mythical town of Macondo, but he had to find the right tone in which to tell his tale; he
had to discover his true voice. Finally, in 1965, an inspiration suddenly struck him and
he could find the tone of his novel. For the first time in twenty years, a stroke of
lightning clearly revealed the voice of Macondo. He started writing and he wrote every
day for eighteen months. In 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude was published and,
within a week, all 8000 copies were gone. From that point on, success was assured and
the novel sold out a new printing each week, going on to sell half a million copies
within three years. It was translated into over thirty seven languages and it won four
international prizes. Garcia Marquez himself acknowledges in one of his interviews to
Gene H. Bell-Villada that the novel is a great success in many languages:
Gene Bell-Villada (GB-V)
:
How many languages has One Hundred
Years of Solitude been translated into?
20
Garcia Marquez
:
Thirty seven at my wife‘s latest count.
GB-V
:
How did the Japanese version fare? Did
readers understand it?
Garcia Marquez
:
It caught on fast. Not only did they
understand the book, they thought of me
as Japanese….
GB-V
:
Outside of Spanish, which language has it
sold best in?
Garcia Marquez
:
It‘s hard to track down. The first Russian
edition sold a million copies, in their
foreign literature magazine. Apparently
they‘re preparing translations into other
Soviet languages. The Italian version has
sold well, I believe. (19)
Gabriel Garcia was 39 years old when the world first learned his name. His fame grew
exponentially, not only in Latin America but throughout the international community.
When the sales of One Hundred Years of Solitude skyrocketed, awards and honours
rained down on him. Its critical acclaim and popularity have forever changed Garcia
Marquez‘s life. Gene H. Bell-Villada praises the novel ―as a glorious instance of
literature‘s possibilities, of what prose narrative can do for our imaginations and
emotions, our politics and pleasures, our knowledge of life and our sense of humor‖
(204). Unlike the other books of the Boom, One Hundred Years of Solitude moved
beyond an academic audience and elite writing circles, to reach popular audiences
across the world. In Latin America, people from all socioeconomic classes and various
backgrounds read the book and recognized their world. Though several Boom authors
21
were important during this period, One Hundred Years of Solitude was the only book
that truly won popular and critical success. Immensely popular with Latin Americans,
the novel also transcends any notion of regionalism, and captures international
attention.
In 1969, the novel won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy and was named the Best
Foreign Book in France. In 1970, it was published in English and was chosen as one of
the best twelve books of the year in the United States. Two years later, Gareia Marquez
was awarded the Romulo Gallegos Prize and the Neustadt Prize and in 1971, a
Peruvian named Mario Vargas Llosa (he won the Nobel prize for literature, 2010) even
published a book about his life and works. In 1981, he was awarded the French Legion
of Honor, and in 1982, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most prestigious
recognition possible for a major writer. He was the fourth Latin American to win a
Nobel Prize and the first Colombian. Colombia went wild with excitement, sending
Garcia Marquez off to accept the prize with an entourage of sixty dancers and musical
performers to bring a tropical celebration to Sweden. Garcia Marquez delivered a
moving speech about the political tragedies of Latin America, and the Nobel
Committee acknowledged Garcia Marquez for his global readership and
humanitarianism. For more than forty years, Garcia Marquez has had a great impact on
the scholarly and academic worlds. Numerous studies have been written about his
work, both in Latin America and throughout the international community. In the United
States, Garcia Marquez has been well received and admired. In the United States, many
scholarly and critical studies have emerged in the past fifteen years; important critics
include Gene H. Bell-Villada, Steven Boldy, Harley Oberhelman, and Raymond
Williams. Garcia Marquez‘s influence on other writers in Latin America, the United
States, Europe, and across the globe has been significant and lasting. Before the Boom,
22
in the twentieth century, it was typically the French who influenced the American
writers. When One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared in translation in the United
States, it was something new and wholly different. American reviews of Garcia
Marquez‘s work are typically positive, and writers such as Robert Coover and John
Barth, have praised One Hundred Years of Solitude as brilliant literature. Garcia
Marquez‘s work has influenced such highly acclaimed American authors as Anne
Tyler, Jonathan Safran Foer, Oscar Hijuelos, and fellow Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
Morrison‘s writing in particular, which focuses on the experiences of African
Americans, blends the fantastical and mythical elements with realistic depictions of
racial, gender, and class conflict. The influence of Garcia Marquez is apparent in such
Morrison novels as Song of Solomon and Beloved, in which the heavy weight of the
past presses down on present reality.
Garcia Marquez‘s literary influence also extends far beyond the United States.
Garcia Marquez has been a major influence on contemporary Chinese fiction, and
echoes of his style can be detected in the work of the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben
Okri, who describes both the mundane and the metaphysical in his works. The success
of the Latin American Boom helped set the stage for the postmodern novel and the
Post-Boom novel. The Boom itself changed the way Latin American culture and arts
are perceived around the world and opened the doors for many new writers. Like
Borges‘ work, Garcia Marquez‘s writing was revolutionary and affirmed the power of
invention. Of all the Boom writers in his generation, only Garcia Marquez was a true
Magical Realist. The critic Bell-Villada attests, ―Because of the enormous reach of his
reputation, Garcia Marquez is now seen not just as another major author but as the
prime symbol of the surge of creativity in Latin American letters in our time‖ (203). In
Latin America, writers cannot escape Garcia Marquez‘s looming shadow, and his
23
popularity and success are viewed as both a blessing and a curse. The style of magical
realism is apparent in the works of Isabel Allende, one of the first successful women
novelists in Latin America. Allende‘s novels often focus on the experiences of women,
weaving together myth and realism. The House of the Spirits concerns a cast of bizarre
characters, telling a story that covers several generations, and it includes psychic
abilities, ghosts, and strange accidents. Allende is often compared to Garcia Marquez,
and critics have analyzed The House of the Spirits as a unique reworking of One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Many Latin American authors have tried to free themselves
from the shadow of Garcia Marquez and from magical realism, including the critically
acclaimed writers Jose Manuel Prieto, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Francisco
Goldman. Other Post-Boom authors include Antonio Skarmeta, Rosario Ferre, and
Gustavo Sainz, who have typically used a simpler, more readable style than the Boom
authors or have returned to realism. Yet almost all Latin American writers have learned
from Garcia Marquez‘s imaginative oeuvre, and, in fact, he galvanized Colombian
literature in a way that was unprecedented. For many writers in Latin America, Garcia
Marquez was the model Latin American writer of their youth, a hero and mentor who
inspired many to pick up a pen. He raised the bar high with the quality of his novels,
however, and each succeeding generation of Latin American authors, runs the danger of
being pigeonholed as writers of magical realism.
In Colombia and throughout much of Latin America, Garcia Marquez is an
icon. In Colombia, everyone knows who he is, and most people have read One
Hundred Years of Solitude, or at least a story or newspaper article written by him; his
work is very much in the public realm. Garcia Marquez has greatly affected the reading
public, specifically Latin Americans, who immediately respond to and recognize the
world that he presents as their world—the social and cultural reality, and the specific
24
history of their countries. Yet his work is also widely appreciated around the world by
readers who can identify with the solitude suffered in modern times. No South
American writer or literary novel from South America had ever had such an impact.
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Garcia Marquez‘s diverse, acclaimed work that
followed, have inspired a vast array of critical scholarship and inspired readers from
around the world. Garcia Marquez is considered one of the most significant authors of
the twentieth century, and his work has influenced ideas about the novel, the technique
of magical realism, and the power of imagination. It is difficult to imagine the
contemporary novel without Garcia Marquez. One of the most famous, beloved, and
critically acclaimed literary writers alive today, Garcia Marquez has greatly contributed
to and rejuvenated contemporary literature.
Though it is for his long-lasting impact on literature that Garcia Marquez is
most widely known, he is also famous for his political ideologies and journalistic
background. Garcia Marquez has always been outspoken about politics. Early on in his
career, he committed himself to several years of vigorous journalistic activity, in
support of the revolution, and over the years, his fame and journalism have provided a
platform from which he could fight against human injustices and support leftist causes.
He has been outspoken about the U.S. involvement in Colombia and other Latin
American countries, and for many years he was denied a visa by the U.S. government.
After three decades spent on the U.S. Immigration blacklist owing to his Marxist ties,
he finally saw the curious travel ban lifted by the administration of President Bill
Clinton, whose favourite novel, it seems, is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though
Garcia Marquez is well respected for serving as an intermediary between governments
and revolutionaries, he is often criticized in Latin America for remaining close to
25
Castro; unlike many artists and writers who later changed their views about the Castro
regime, Garcia Marquez has always supported the Cuban Revolution.
Though Garcia Marquez is a social critic in his fiction and assertively leftist in
politics, his fiction is not didactic or overtly political. Turning to journalism instead of
fiction to deal directly with political and social issues, Garcia Marquez rejects socialprotest literature, believing that it limits artistic expression and freedom. Yet nearly all
of his work addresses social-political concerns in some way—though often subtly. His
fiction examines the realities of colonial and postcolonial history and cultures in the
Americas while also exploring the truths and myths of national histories. Though critics
focus on the magical realism of his work, Garcia Marquez claims, he writes ―socialist
realism,‖ and critic Raymond Williams agrees: ―One Hundred Years of Solitude might
seem at first like a book of fantasy, but it is one of the most historical books of the
Boom and it abounds in social and political implications‖ (96). Constant political
discontent, national instability, and Colombian history and myths have shaped not only
Garcia Marquez‘s ideology but also the grand scope and depth of his fiction.
There are many incidents that happened in the Colombian history which have a
tremendous influence on his works. An important event that would influence his
writings was the Banana Strike Massacre of 1928. Although coffee is generally
considered Colombia's main export, for the first few decades of the twentieth century,
bananas were also of crucial importance to the economy. The banana trade had its
principal manifestation in the United Fruit Company, an American outfit, that had a
virtual monopoly on the banana industry, which at the time was the only source of
income for many of the costeno areas, including Aracataca. One of the more lamentable
examples of Western Imperialism veiled as prosperity, the UFC had unlimited
economic power and tremendous political clout, but it was a corrupt and amoral
26
company that exploited its Colombian workers terribly. In October of 1928, over
32,000 native workers went on strike, giving a charter of demands. The response of the
Yankees was essentially to ignore their demands; shortly after the strike began, the
Colombian government occupied the banana zone and employed the military as
strikebreakers. One night in December, a huge crowd gathered in Cienaga to hold a
demonstration. In order to quell the incident, the Conservative government sent in the
troops, who fired on the unarmed workers, killing hundreds. Over the next few months,
more people simply vanished, and finally the whole incident was officially denied and
struck from the history books. Garcia Marquez incorporates the incident in One
Hundred Years of Solitude.
La Violencia or The Violence is the event that would eventually affect Garcia
Marquez‘s writing. The Violence had its roots in the banana massacre. Jorge Eliecer
Gaitan was the only politician who was courageous enough to take a stand against the
government‘s corruption. He was a young Liberal member of the Congress who
convened meetings to investigate the incident. Gaitan began to rise in prominence, a
champion of the peasants and the poor, but an annoyance to the powerful members of
both parties, who viewed him with something akin to fear and loathing. Using the radio
as his medium, he heralded a time of change, a time when the people would take part in
a true democracy and corporations would be forced to act responsibly. By 1946, Gaitan
was powerful enough to cause a split in his own party, which had been in power since
1930. The split caused a Conservative return to power, and fearing a reprisal, they
began organizing paramilitary groups whose ultimate purpose was to terrorize the
Liberal voters, which they did admirably, killing thousands of them by the end of the
year. In 1947, the Liberals gained control of the Congress, putting Gaitan in charge, as
party leader. Tensions rose, and on April 9, 1948, Gaitan was assassinated in Bogota.
27
The city was convulsed by lethal riots for three days, a period called el
Bogotazo, and responsible for 2500 deaths. La Violencia then shifted into an even more
deadly phase. Guerrilla armies were organized by both parties, and terror swept through
the land. Towns and villages were burned, thousands -- including women and children - were brutally murdered, farms were confiscated, and over a million peasants
immigrated to Venezuela. In 1949, Conservatives even gunned down a Liberal
politician, in the middle of giving a speech in the very halls of Congress. The
Conservatives finally dissolved the Congress, declared the country to be in a state of
siege, and the Liberals were hunted, persecuted, and murdered. The country was ripped
apart. The Violence would later become the backdrop to several of Garcia Marquez's
novels and stories.
Garcia Marquez is a great exponent of magical realism. He is a master in
transforming the fabulous into true existence. He brings magic realism by fusing the
fantastic with the factual. In magical realism, he integrates unusual incidents into
everyday life. He achieves magic realism by presenting the events in an exaggerated
manner. However, the exaggeration is almost always numerically specific and each
occurrence becomes a sense of reality. Magical realism is normally associated with the
fictions that tell the tales of those on the margins of political power and influential
society. It is practised in many of the postcolonial countries that are battling against the
influence of their previous colonial rulers and consider themselves to be at the margins
of imperial power. It resists the dominant culture imposed by Western imperialism, in
all aspects. It pursues a postcolonial agenda with its characteristic literary technique,
with which it re-evaluates the perspectives that are different from the dominant Western
rational-empirical outlook. It abandons a conventional linear plot, set by the West.
There is no straight timeline and the story often moves back and forth. It includes
28
bizarre events and stories in the plot, mostly exploiting myths. Thus, it implicitly
questions the rational cultural traditions of the West. It mimics, subverts, exaggerates
and parodies the way in which the western European culture has used the novel to make
sense of experience. It incorporates into a basically realistic world, elements which,
according to the standards of literary realism, would be considered highly implausible,
impossible, or even disturbing intrusions from another realm. It not only critiques the
West, it challenges Eurocentricism by expressing the experiences of the margins and
drawing on local cultural traditions. It also exploits the long-standing social and
cultural constructs of the dominant Western world-view, only to undermine them. The
Western construction of the ‗other‘ is primitive and irrational. But, in magic realism,
the ‗other‘ perspectives are also accepted as equally valid ways of seeing the world.
Thus, magic realism levels the hierarchy between margin and center, arguing that
alternative outlooks must be taken into account. With magic realism, Garcia Marquez
wants to rebuild the true identity in the twisted reality caused by the dominant culture.
He uses it to create a new identity for his nation in particular and for the whole of Latin
America in general.
With his magic realism, he tries to bring out the true reality which was blurred
by subjective historian, political power and dominant paradigms, caused by high
culture. The reality that he brings out, raises the colonized nations to reconsider the true
reality, with the exclusion of the dominant paradigms caused by political and other
powers. These paradigms are predefined concepts that exist in unquestionable and
unchallengeable circumstances. He shows a confused and uncertain world in which
conflicts arise because there is a great desire to keep the ethnic identity and the social
political structure, despite oppression from the powers that be. In short, he wants to
29
show in his novels that ‗other‘ cultures have a unique value, based on their native
myths and superstition.
Garcia Marquez has written many novels and novellas which include, Leaf
Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), In Evil Hour (1962), One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch(1975), Chronicle of a Death
Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth
(1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994), Memories of My Melancholy Whores
(2004), A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. The novels taken for study are No One
Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the
Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Of Love and Other Demons.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the history of the isolated village, Macondo
and the Buendia family which founded it. For years, the town has no contact with the
outside world, except for gypsies, who occasionally visit, bringing in technologies like
ice and telescopes. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is impulsive and
inquisitive. He maintains peace and order in Macondo for some time. But, gradually,
the village loses its innocent, solitary state when it establishes contact with the other
towns in the region. Civil wars begin causing violence and death to the peaceful
Macondo. Imperialist capitalism reaches Macondo in the form of banana plantations,
exploiting the land and the workers. Years of violence and false progress lead Macondo
and the Buendia family towards destruction. The last surviving Buendia, with the help
of Melquiades, translates a set of ancient prophecies and finds that all has been
predicted. The novel is a history of Colombia right from the days of the Spanish
conquest. It also pictures how imperialist capitalism reaches Macondo in the form of
banana plantations, exploiting the land and the workers.
30
In Of Love and Other Demons, Garcia Marquez creates the story of an
impossible, yet undeniable love. The novel is set in a South American seaport during
the colonial era, the home of bishops, viceroys and others. Sierva Mara, the rebellious
child of a decaying family, has been raised by her father‘s slaves in their quarters,
behind his mansion. On her twelfth birthday, she is bitten by a rabid dog and made to
withstand therapies which are nothing but tortures. Believed to be possessed, Sierva
Mara is imprisoned in a convent, where she meets Father Cayetano Delaura, who has
been sent to oversee her exorcism. Father Delaura is unprepared for the love that is
awakened in his soul by Sierva Mara. Their love may be improbable but deeply moving
and defying - even in death - the constraints of reason and faith. Of Love and Other
Demons is a sustained, direct and complete exploration of colonialism. Apart from the
direct and prolonged focus on the theme of colonialism, it also deals more pointedly
with the role the church played in sustaining colonialism in Spanish America.
The Autumn of the Patriarch is about the life and death of a Patriarch. He is an
ancient dictator whose exact title is General of the Universe. But his domain is a poor
Caribbean country. He is dependent upon the charity of world powers. He commits the
greatest treachery of selling the sea of his country to the ―gringos‖, in exchange for the
security of his power. In other words, he betrays the life of his country and of its
people, the sea being the universal symbol of life. The Patriarch symbolizes the
absolute power enjoyed by the colonizers.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold revolves around the events surrounding the
murder of Santiago Nasar, a youngman thought to have taken the virginity of Angelo
Vicario. On her wedding night, after discovering that she is not a virgin, Angela‘s
husband, Bayardo San Roman, returns her to her house. Angela‘s twin brothers, Pedro
Vicario and Pablo Vicario, ask her who took her virginity. She tells them that Santiago
31
Nasar did. The brothers find Santiago and kill him. Even though the Vicario brothers
repeatedly announce their plan to murder him, everyone thinks that the Vicarios are
bluffing. After the murder, the entire Vicario family leaves the town because of the
disgrace the events have brought upon the family. The murder shows that violence has
become a habit for the people of Colombia.
In his next novel, In Evil Hour, the novelist prefers an unnamed village to
Macondo, as its setting. The novel is about the mysterious lampoons which suddenly
appear on the walls of the village. Someone puts these placards to undermine the
town‘s stability. These anonymous notes contain personal accusations that lead to
conflicts, fights, people moving from the town, and even deaths. The mayor, who had
been proud of the control he had established in the town before the appearance of the
placards, is forced to repress the town‘s inhabitants, in order to maintain order. When
the slanderous broadsides proliferate, the villagers become increasingly restless and
fearful. The police arrest a boy, when he distributes the posters at the cockfights. He is
only distributing them and not putting them on the walls. The boy is murdered during
the interrogation by the police and violence follows his death. In the end, the posters
are forgotten but the effects of the posters gain in importance. The novel pictures the
fear and distrust that pervaded the national consciousness in Colombia during La
Violencia.
No One Writes to the Colonel is the story of a stoic retired colonel who waits
for fifteen years for a pension cheque that never arrives. The colonel is in his mid
seventies and he and his wife are down to their last money, selling heirlooms to eat.
The colonel goes to the post office everyday to see if the pension letter has come. Even
in their growing hunger, they maintain the life of the fighting cock, which their son left,
when he supposedly was killed for political reasons a year ago. While the colonel‘s
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wife is in deep mourning for her son, the colonel knows that actually, he lives and is in
hiding. He keeps his son‘s cock alive for much the same reason he keeps hoping for his
pension—to seek a meaning to living beyond the mere fact of eating. Besides the
psychological portrayal of the colonel, the characterization and actions of the other
characters in No One Writes to the Colonel reveal a town suffering from corruption and
repression. Garcia Marquez, in a subtle way, incorporates the social and political
realities of life in Colombia during the period of La Violencia.
Postcolonial theory and criticism have been used to study the novels of Garcia
Marquez. Postcolonial studies have their own importance, because more than threequarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the
experience of colonialism. They cover all the culture affected by the imperial process
from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is, because there is a
continuity of preoccupation throughout the historical process initiated by the European
imperial aggression. It is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the
period of European domination and the effects of this on contemporary literatures. Post
colonialism refers to the political and social attitude that opposes colonial power,
recognizes the effect of colonialism on other nations and refers specifically to nations
which have gained independence from the rule of another imperial state. Postcolonial
writing can be a way of reconsidering the identity of a nation after its independence or
it can be a means of expressing opposition to the idea of colonialism. It is generally
agreed in postcolonial theory and criticism that the effects of colonialism are not just
the imposition of one nation‘s rule over another, but it includes attempts to change the
colonized people‘s ways of thinking and beliefs to accept the cultural attitudes and
definitions of the colonial power. This often involves the attempt by colonial rulers to
define the colonized people and their nation from the colonizer‘s perspective and to
33
impose a homogeneous, authoritative, historical and cultural identity on the colonized
nation. These disruptive and displacing effects on the cultural life of the colonized
nation, have been the most difficult aspects of colonialism to change. Postcolonial
writers like Garcia Marquez, at their best, try to change or modify everything that was
imposed by the colonial power. What is special about his writings is that they emerge
out of the experience of colonization and assert themselves by foregrounding the
tension with the imperial power and by emphasizing their differences, from the
assumptions of the imperial center.
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that
consists of reactions to, and analyses of, the cultural legacy of colonialism. The
ultimate goal of post-colonialism, is that of combating the residual effects of
colonialism on indigenous cultures. It is not simply concerned with salvaging past
worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond this period together, towards a
place of mutual respect. It emerges from the inability of European theory to deal with
the complexities and the varied cultural provenance of postcolonial writing. European
theories emerge from particular cultural traditions, which are hidden by false notions of
‗the universal‘. Theories of style and genre, assumptions about the universal features
of language, epistemologies and value systems are radically questioned by the practices
of postcolonial writing. Postcolonial theory has proceeded from the need to address this
different practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the differences
within the various cultural traditions as well as the desire to describe, in a comparative
way, the features shared across those traditions. Magic realism comes in handy to
explain what the European theory could not deal with the indigenous cultures and
complexities.
34
Postcolonialism recognizes that many of the assumptions which underlie the
―logic‖ of colonialism, are still active forces today. Exposing and deconstructing the
racist and imperialist nature of these assumptions, will remove their power of
persuasion and coercion. As a postcolonialist, Garcia Marquez recognizes that they are
not simply airy substances, but have widespread material consequences for the nature
and scale of global inequality. A key goal of postcolonial theorists is that of clearing
space for multiple voices. This is especially true of those voices that have been
previously silenced by dominant ideologies. It is widely recognized within the
discourse that this space must first be cleared within the academia. Garcia Marquez
highlights this multiplicity in his novels and disregards the views of the metropolitan
and prefers instead, to rely on the intellectual superiority of the ‗other‘ and its peers.
During the imperial period, writing in the language of the imperial center was
inevitable. The aim of these writings by the literate elite of this period was to identify
with the colonizing power. The literature produced in the colonizer‘s language was
alone given license for publication and distribution. But, the modern postcolonial
writers like Garcia Marquez, abrogated the constraining power of the colonial center
but appropriated the language of the colonizer for new and distinctive usages.
The political and cultural monocentricism of the colonial enterprise was a
natural result of the philosophical traditions of the European world. The imperial
expansion and the culmination of the outward and dominating thrust of the European
into the world beyond Europe or the West, was underpinned in complex ways by these
assumptions. In the first instance, this produced practices of cultural subservience or
cultural cringe. Subsequently, the emergence of identifiable indigenous theories, in
reaction to this, formed an important element in the development of a specific national
and regional consciousness. The aim of Garcia Marquez‘s novels is to create a new
35
national consciousness. He wants to create a new Colombia, which is free from any
colonial consciousness or any traces of colonialism. A study of his novels from a
postcolonial perspective, would bring out the zeal of the colonized nations which strive
to create a new identity. Indeed he has changed the way Latin American culture was
viewed by the western world. His works have become an emblem of resistance to the
western culture and an example to the other marginalized countries, which strive to
make their imprint in world literature.
The first chapter of my thesis would discuss the development of Latin American
fiction, a detailed note on the author, his contribution to the literary world and the
relevance of a postcolonial study of his novels.
The second chapter discusses magic realism as a postcolonial narrative
technique. Most of the magic realist writing is postcolonial. Much of it is set in a
postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the
assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. It seeks to disrupt the official and
defined authoritative assumptions about reality, truth and history. Magic realism, with
its dual narrative structure, is able to present the postcolonial context from both the
colonized people and the colonizers‘ perspectives, through its narrative structure as
well as its themes. It is able to produce a text which reveals the tensions and gaps of
representation in such a context. Moreover, it provides a means to fill in the gaps of
cultural representation in a postcolonial context, by recuperating the fragments and
voices of forgotten or subsumed histories from the point of view of the colonized. It
also points to the inherent problems created by the imposition of a bizarre and unreal
European world-view onto the local reality of the colonized. Magical realism uses
circular time transgressing the basic tenets of the ‗center‘s‘ sense of time. It uses the
center‘s linear time as the base to explore the circular time, of magical realism.
36
The Third chapter of the thesis is about the Reconstruction of Past: a
Postcolonial Search for Identity. The colonialists are the supposed history makers who
see their homeland as the point of reference and who consider the history of the colony
an extension of metropolitan accomplishments. Thus, there will be an official version
of events and an imposed succession in which the history of colonization becomes
another link in the forward march of the metropolis and, by extension, of its progeny.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez works against such constructs. He rewrites the expurgated
version of colonial history in his novels. Further, he wants the people to learn lessons
from the past; he exhorts his people not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
The fourth chapter is on Violence: a Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Nations.
All the novels of Garcioa Marquez abound with violent incidents. Violence has been
woven into all his novels, because he was a witness to various internal struggles of his
country. Colombia has a long history stained in blood. After the end of the
institutionalized colonial rule, the Liberal and Conservative parties battled for control, a
fight that continues to this day. As a result of this internal strife, the country Garcia
Marquez was raised in, was frequently the site of harsh violence, even though the two
parties were more like clans than entities with distinct philosophical differences. This
violence has its roots in the colonial period. Garcia Marquez wants his people to
understand that it is the ploy of the colonial powers which have deliberately sown the
seeds of violence in the soil of the colonized nations and knowingly or unknowingly,
this colonial legacy continues even today in the colonized countries. The worst thing
which happened to the colonized nations is that this colonial legacy of violence has
marred their development. Through his novels, Garcia Marquez warns the people about
the dangers of allowing violence to continue, when peace is possible. He strives to
create a new identity for Colombia, by wiping the blood stains off its face.
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Chapter II
Magic Realism: A Postcolonial Narrative Technique
The history of magical realism goes back to the time of the discovery of
America and the Conquistadors. In their chronicles, Americo Vespucci, Cortes and
Columbus have written about the marvellous reality that they found in the newly
discovered world. T.Todorov quotes Columbus in his book The Conquest of America:
―I saw many trees unlike ours, and many of them have their branches of different kinds
and all on one trunk and one thing is of our [i.e. European] kind and the other of
another, and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder of the world‖( 7). The ordinary
world appeared mystical and magical to them. It was like a marvellous fairy tale
produced by magic. It must be considered that the Spaniards had preconceived ideas
about what they would see. When they came to America, some of them had been under
the influence of literature dealing with the Age of Chivalry and the Arabian legends.
They saw men with animal heads, mermaids, and beautiful Amazon women. The whole
land was fantastic to them.
The development of magical realism is a complicated story spanning eight
decades with three principal turning points and many characters. The first period was
set in Germany in the 1920‘s, the second period in Central America in the 1940‘s and
the third period, which began in 1955 in Latin America, continues internationally to
this day. All these periods are linked by literary and artistic figures whose works
spread the influence of magical realism around Europe, from Europe to Latin America
and from Latin America to the rest of the world. The key figures in the development of
the term are Franz Roh, a German art critic, Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban writer of midtwentieth century, Massimo Bontempelli, an Italian writer of the 1920‘s and the 1930‘s,
38
Angel Flores, a mid-twentieth century Latin American literary critic and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez of Columbia. Magical Realism is a contested term primarily because the
majority of critics increase the confusion surrounding its history by basing their
consideration of the term on one of its explanations rather than acknowledging the full
complexity of its origins. But the consensus among the majority of the critics is that the
term was first introduced by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a new form of
post-expressionist painting during the Weimar Republic. He coined this term in 1925. It
stood for a form of painting that differs greatly from expressionist art in its attention to
accurate detail, a smooth photograph-like clarity of picture and the representation of the
mystical non-material aspects of reality. Some of the magic realist painters of Roh‘s
time were Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Alexander Kanoldt, George Grosz and Georg
Schrimpf. Even the paintings of these artists differ from one another.
Alejo Carpentier, a French Russian Cuban, was widely acknowledged as the
originator of Latin American magical realism. He was greatly influenced by European
artistic movements while living in Paris in the 1920‘s and the 1930‘s. After returning
from Europe to Cuba, he instigated a distinctly Latin American form of magical
realism, coining the term ‗marvellous realism‘. When Latin America gained its
Independence from Spain, writers were free to promote the new rational humanism,
because the church no longer dominated society so effectively. Liberal reformers
opposed the Old Spanish authoritarian, superstitious heritage, although many of the
people remained under the influence of long-held beliefs. The writers‘ task, according
to Carpentier and others, was to lead the people away from old myths and convince
them of being native-born Americans, and not transplanted Europeans. Carpentier
resided in Paris from 1928 to 1939. He became disillusioned with rationalist humanism
because he saw that it robbed the people of their instinct and imagination. During this
39
time, he lost much of his respect for European civilization, as Fascism and Nazism
swept France. He became involved with Surrealism in opposition to the lack of
imagination of the rationalists. On his return to Haiti in 1943, he re-examined the role
of religion and voodoo among the black slaves and foresaw the possible development
of a new hybrid civilization, formed by a very diverse mix of New World cultures. The
Marvellous Real proposed by Carpentier, was a genuine, unadulterated, spontaneous,
extraordinary event or experience, found frequently in Latin American native cultures:
So we should not establish a definition of the marvellous that does not depend
on the notion that the marvellous is admirable because it is beautiful. Ugliness,
deformity, all that is terrible can also be marvellous. All that is strange is
marvellous. Now then I speak of the marvellous real when I refer to certain
things that have occurred in America, certain characteristics of its landscape,
certain elements that have nourished my work. (Carpentier 75)
Having been witness to European surrealism, he recognized a need for art to
express the non-material aspects of life but also recognized the differences between his
European and his Latin American contexts. The term ‗marvellous realism‘ described
the concept that could represent for him the mixture of differing cultural systems and
the variety of experiences that create an extraordinary atmosphere, alternative attitude
and a differing appreciation of reality in Latin America. For him, Magical Realism is a
combination of reality, myth, magic and fantasy, terms that Latin Americans often
identify with, because all of these terms are important elements in the diverse but
unique cultures created by the sudden juxtaposition of the primitive cultures with those
of the modern society. This occurs there in contrast to those cultures, which have
developed a common cultural identity over time. Carpentier saw the unique aspects of
Latin America in its racial and cultural mixture rather than in the flora and fauna. He
40
felt that the improbable juxtapositions and marvellous mixtures exist by virtue of Latin
America‘s varied history, geography, demography and politics and not by manifesto.
After the World War II, and the fall of the Spanish Republic, the Latin American
countries wanted to create and express a consciousness distinct from that of Europe.
Carpentier was at the forefront of such a movement and was commissioned to write
books on topics like ‗history of Cuban music,‘ etc. His artistic enterprise was a search
for origins, an attempt to recover the history and tradition and the foundation of an
autonomous American consciousness. It was the basis for a literature faithful to the
New World.
Carpentier and other writers tried to create an indigenous form of Latin
American literature, because Latin America has a form of postcolonial relationship with
Europe and, particularly, in relation to the colonial power of Spain, until the midtwentieth century. This relationship placed Latin America on the margins of European
perception, knowledge and culture. It was able to make a shift away from the position
of marginal cultural production, in which all things European were esteemed, with the
development of magical realist fiction in Latin America. This resulted in the emergence
of a new literary tradition in Latin America, known as the ‗boom‘ of the 1950‘s and the
1960‘s. The fiction of this period became known as the ‗new novel‘ and is generally
considered to be a modernist movement due to the attitude of the writers who sought to
break away from the previous literary traditions and to find a new means of expression.
Soon Latin American writing was developing in many countries as a distinct tradition
from that of Spain and, gradually, this mode of fiction became closely associated with
the development of a Latin American literary tradition.
Even in the early stages of magical realist writing in Latin America, Carpentier
created a distinction between the European magic realist writing and the Latin
41
American magical realist writing that he defined and named as ‗American marvelous
realism‘. He saw European magic realism as ‗tiresome pretension‘, unconnected in
magical content to its cultural context of production. Seeing Europe as a rational place
where magic consisted of fairy-tale myths, he considered the European magic realists to
be creating a sense of mystery narrative technique rather than cultural beliefs. In the
prologue to his book The Kingdom of this World, he made a statement that broke away
from the influence of Roh‘s magic realism and established a new form of magical
realism that was specific to and arose out of a Latin American context. For Carpentier,
the mixture of cultures is what he considers to be at the heart of the spirit of the Latin
American that makes magical realism such an apt mode of fiction to express its culture.
He states that ―the marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and
omnipresent, in all that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace and
always was commonplace‖ ( Carpentier 78).
In the English speaking world, magic realism first appeared in early 1970‘s in
Canada, West Africa and the United States and now it spans many locations across the
globe. The best known writer of magical realism in the English language is the BritishIndian writer Salman Rushdie. His writings are influenced by Garcia Marquez, Gunter
Grass and Mikhail Bulgakov. His English form of magic realism straddles both the
surrealist tradition of magic realism as it developed in Europe and the mythic tradition
of magic realism as it developed in Latin America. What locates these writers
politically is their narrative position outside the dominant power structures and cultural
centres. Although Salman Rushdie is located at the centre of cultural production, his
narrators and subject matter are located outside it. What often connects the English
language magical realists with one another is their opposition to British colonialism in
countries such as India, Canada, Australia and the regions of West Africa and the
42
Caribbean. In addition, writers currently in conditions of oppression in the United
States, such as Native American, Chicano and African Americans, have also adopted
magical realism as a means to write against the dominant American culture. Because
of this, there are many similarities between anti-British-colonial magical realist writing
and anti-neo-American-colonial magical realist writing, since both groups of writers are
concerned with the incorporation of oral culture and indigenous myth into the dominant
Western cultural form of the novel.
The majority of magical realist writing cannot be said to occupy the mainstream
of these countries‘ literary production. In Indian writing, for instance, Salman Rushdie,
Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy are very notable prize-winning writers and all are
writers of magic realism, but they do not constitute a movement or group in Indian
literature, each being unconnected to the other and located in different countries.
Rushdie and Ghosh are diasporic Indian writers whose writing is influenced by their
hybrid cultural context. Magic realist writing, because of its inherent mixture of
opposing perspectives, is the perfect form of writing for cosmopolitan postcolonial
middle-class emigrant writers such as Rushdie and Ghosh whose life has been
influenced by British Colonialism and Indian popular culture, with all their
multiplicities and contradictions. As political writers, they are deeply concerned with
the future of India and are fascinated by the diversity of its population, religions and
languages. Their India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism and
hybridity. Arundhati Roy is concerned with the local and the things considered
insignificant in a larger society, which reinforces its concern for the mistreatment of
those in the margins of the Indian society. As the magical realist narrative is told from
the perspective of a native child, it provides a critical commentary on and contrasts
with the ugly world of Indian social prejudice. But, in spite of their use of magic
43
realism in their writing, the Indian magical realist writers are not able to constitute a
group like that of the Latin American.
But in Canada, magic realism is recognized as a sub-genre of Canadian
literature. In the 1970‘s, at a time when Canadian writers were attempting to conceive a
sense of Canadian nationhood divorced from British colonialism, Robert Kroetsch and
Jack Hodgins in the Canadian west, away from the centre of power in the eastern
cities, were writing magic realist fiction. Kroetsch‘s use of the magical realist mode in
his novel What the Crow Said was a deliberate choice, following the influence of
Garcia Marquez, specifically to find a mode of fiction that would provide a means to
express both the marginal perspective of rural western Canadians and also the Canadian
perspective in relation to Britain and to the powerful neo-colonial neighbour, the
United States. Another notable contemporary writer to be associated with magical
realism in Canada is Michael Ondaatje. In his works, it is the form of magical realism
that, in its exuberant and colourful content and setting, has more connection to Indian
or Latin American magical realism than to that of the harsh Canadian West. This is
because of his transcultural background rather than his Canadian nationality: he was
born into a mixed race Sri Lankan family and immigrated to Canada. The settings of
his novels reflect this cosmopolitanism: Sri Lanka, the United States, Canada, Europe
and North Africa, although his magic realist events are only set in Sri Lanka.
On the African continent, magical realism and postcolonialism have gone handin-hand particularly in West Africa and South Africa. In West Africa, the Yoruba
mythologies and beliefs, in particular, have provided material for the other African
writers such as Ben Okri and Amos Tutuola. In addition to drawing on the western
novel form and upon themes such as colonialism, religion and internationalism, the
West African magical realism often incorporates local influences to produce the cross
44
cultural literature that emulates the situation of many West Africans today. South
Africa, unlike West Africa, has a significant history of European settlement. Its colonial
history and culture are notably different and so its magic realist writing is also different
from that of West Africa. Moreover, the need to reconsider its history and its
mythologies in the light of the nation‘s new post-apartheid political conditions provide
a motivation for Afrikaner writers to employ magical realist techniques.
In United States, magical realism is used by cross-cultural women with a political
agenda relating to gender and the marginalization of cultures. Due to the dominant
Anglo-European culture of the United States and its predominant immigrant society,
there are many cross-cultural groups which, like the African Americans, sense that they
are marginalized and misrepresented in Anglo-European American life. This is doubly
true for cross-cultural women who face prejudices, both as a member of a marginalized
culture and as women. The Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison writes magical realist
narratives that draw from her cross-cultural context as an African American. Magical
realism is employed by Morrison in order to create a specifically cross-cultural African
American cultural memory with which to rebuild a sense of an African American
community at a time of crisis, when the majority of the African American population
seems to her to be held in a position of economic and spiritual poverty. Leslie Marmon
Silko is a mixed blood Native American writer. Her main magical realist text is her epic
postmodern novel The Almanac of the Dead. Whilst proposing an environmental and
community-building political view point, this novel incorporates Native American,
Native Mexican and even West African mythologies and belief systems into the equally
Anglo-European American text. The novel includes the story of a political movement
to save Mother Earth from misuse and ultimately from destruction by the AngloEuropean Americans. The cultural and political perspective of the novel is in accord
45
with the native American belief in the spiritual interconnectedness and equality of all
physical aspects of the environment and the animals that inhabit it. This is contrasted
with the dominant cultural attitudes in America that treat the earth as a commodity and
resource. The novel‘s magical realist plot follows the work of an eco-warrior.
In Europe, many writers were influenced by the writings of the Italian, Massimo
Bontempelli, who adopted the idea of magic realism from Roh. He thought that magic
realism would provide a means to de-provincialize Italian literature and also that it
could contribute to Mussolini‘s unification of Italy by creating a common
consciousness. Later his writings became the inspiration for many writers from
Belgium. The well known magic realist writer in mainland Europe is the German
novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass. His magic realist novel, The Tin Drum
was written in a retrospective narrative, looking back to the context of his early life. He
had been brought up in a household that accepted the Nazi propagandists‘ version of
truth, which was overturned at the fall of the Nazi regime at the end of the war. This
severely disrupted his perception of reality and prompted him to include a recognizably
magical realist account of life under the Nazi regime, from the matter-of-fact
perspective of a boy, and later, a man with an extra-ordinary capacity for perception.
Although Grass himself admits to having been influenced by fairy tales, his magical
realism can be seen to have arisen from the same source as Garcia Marquez‘s; that is,
the distortion of truth through the effects of extremely horrific violence, which Grass
had witnessed during and immediately after the Second World War. Rushdie cites The
Tin Drum, as one of the most influential texts for him whilst writing Midnight’s
Children.
Thus, in mainland Europe, magic realism remains a narrative mode that is chosen
for the purposes of literary experimentation and does not have its source in the writers‘
46
mythological and cultural context. Although magic realism originated in Europe, it is
now more particularly associated with the Latin American form of magical realism and
with its associated mythology and cultural context. However, postcolonial and crosscultural contexts, and particularly those in the English-speaking world are producing
writers who adopt magical realism in order to express their non-Western mythological
and cultural traditions. They develop new variations of magical realism that are
relevant to their marginalized, postcolonial or cross-cultural contexts.
The variable features of the magical realist novel are local or native narrative
traditions that are brought by the practitioners of this literary genre into contact with
and incorporated into the European realistic novel. To be sure, the distinctions between
foreign and native, cosmopolitan and local, western and nonwestern are eroded, if not
altogether collapsed, in the successful magical realist texts. In any event, to insist upon
a difference between a local narrative tradition and an imported or alien one is to make
an arbitrary and historical distinction. Legends of medieval Catholic saints, like
indigenized versions of Spanish chivalric romance or West African myth and folklore,
are hardly the pure product of the Latin American soil. Many elements of voodoo were
imported from West Africa and Western Europe. But the fact that these exotic
narrative strands within the magical realist text, typically appear to even sophisticated
readers as native or indigenous elements, merely underlines the modern historical
horizon within which the magical realist novel is both written and read. Garcia
Marquez depends, in no small part for his literary success, on the exotic appeal of the
magical elements in his novels. In fact, all magical realist writers wish to inculcate in
their readers, the sense that they are encountering a new, a pre-modern and nonwestern
world, which is yet to be disenchanted. This self-consciously staged encounter between
the West and its ‗other‘, always involves a meeting between a modern literary tradition
47
and one or several pre-modern, pre-secular, pre-scientific, and, sometimes, preliterate
narrative traditions. Magical realism replicates in its narrative form, the sedimentcharacter of global postcolonial culture: beneath the topmost layers of modernity, one
finds the lower strata of cultural traditions that predate the arrival and the imposition of
―Western‖ modernity.
Magical realism hybridizes elements borrowed from Western and nonwestern
cultures and modern and pre-modern ways of life. Such a synthesis does not necessarily
require, however, that these elements be combined in equal measure, or that they be
granted an equal ontological, epistemological and historical status. The question that
arises here is, whether these writers implicitly favour modern Western culture or the
many traditional non-western cultures, represented in magical realist fiction. The
authors of many magical realist novels, as well as their reviewers and critics, have
emphasized the ways in which new alternative voices of the marginalized and the
subaltern are to be heard in their pages. Magical realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to
invade and take over dominant discourses. It is a way of access to the main body of
―Western‖ literature, for authors not writing from the perspective of the privileged
centers of literature for reasons of language, class, race, or gender. At the same time,
they avoid being simply epigones by not adopting the views of the hegemonic forces in
their discourse.
For Colombia, magical realism is its postcolonial identity. The country is aware
of the cultural and racial mixture that makes up its nationhood. The reality of the
Spanish is not the only reality that the Colombians know. This is especially the case
with Garcia Marquez. As he was born in Aracataca, a small town near the Caribbean
coast of Colombia, he has perceived a wide range of cultural manifestations, entirely
different from the inland culture of Bogota. The coastal area has absorbed not only the
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dominant culture of the colonial Spanish, but also the alternative cultures of the native
Indians and the Afro-Caribbeans. It is in this space of cultural heterogeneity that Garcia
Marquez learns a distinct, hybrid reality. In an interview, he claims:
The Caribbean taught me to look at reality in a different way, to accept the
supernatural as part of our everyday life. [...] The history of the Caribbean is full
of magic -- a magic brought by black slaves from Africa but also by Swedish,
Dutch and English pirates who thought nothing of setting up an Opera House in
New Orleans or filling women‘s teeth with diamonds. Nowhere in the world do
you find the racial mixture and the contrasts which you find in the Caribbean.
[...] Not only is it the world which taught me to write, it‘s the only place where I
really feel at home. (Mendoza 55)
This alternative sense of reality that Garcia Marquez derives from his childhood
space can be argued to play an influential role in the emergence of magical realism in
One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo is marked by extraordinary events that
cannot be explained by dint of rationalism. Father Nicanor Reyna rises six inches above
the ground after drinking a cup of hot chocolate . The blood of Jose Arcadio‘s
murdered body finds its way from his home back to the kitchen of the Buendia‘s house,
where his mother is preparing food. The rain of yellow flowers takes place in Macondo,
covering roofs and blocking doors, when the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia dies.
Remedios, the Beauty, rises into the sky, along with Fernanda‘s expensive sheets.
Macondo becomes at once a real yet uncanny town, where fantastic events are
normalized. For Macondo‘s population, these fantastic events are banal and happen
every day. However, normal events, or at least ‗normal‘ events in our own view, are
strange and fabulous for them. They are, for instance, surprised at ice, magnets, and
magnifying glasses brought in by the gypsies. These contradictions between the normal
49
world and Macondo raise questions about truth and reality. European readers might not
understand the reality behind the magical elements in his stories, because their
rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn‘t limited to the price of tomatoes and
eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most
extraordinary things. In saying this, Garcia Marquez, commits himself to the argument
made by Alejo Carpentier, that magical realism should be used to represent the true
Latin American reality. According to Carpentier:
Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian
presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent
discovery, its fecund racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its
wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a
chronicle of the marvellous real? (88 )
The politics behind Carpentier‘s use of the marvellous real is clear; his version
of magical realism should be used as a dominant literary mode in Latin American
literature, as it truly represents the consciousness of the continent, which has long been
subjected to the domination of Europe, in this respect, objectified by its sense of
rationalism. Now magical realism is synonymous with Latin American literature with
writers claiming that the reality of Latin America is different and needs an alternative
way to recapture it. In his Nobel Address, Garcia Marquez himself asserts that:
To interpret our reality through schemas which are alien to us only has the
effect of making us even more unknown, even less free, even more solitary.
‗Schemas which are alien to us‘ are in a sense analogous to the epistemological
patterns which European colonialists or present-day US neocolonialists have
used to comprehend Latin America, similarly distinguished in their firm basis of
rationalism . ( 289)
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For Garcia Marquez, it is useless to adopt such schemas in Latin America, because it is
a continent full of wonders and marvels, those that cannot be explained by rationalism.
If one follows this argument closely, magical realism then signals what
Amaryll Chanady terms ‗the territorialization of the imaginary‘, especially in its
insistence on the exceptional nature of New World geography and partly to the Latin
American strategies of identity-construction that emphasize regional specificities. In
this light, one can see that Garcia Marquez attempts to use magical realism in his novel
as a way to represent the uniqueness of his own nation or, to the same effect, his own
continent. However, it should also be highlighted that magical realism is not a literary
style native to Colombia, or to Latin America as a whole. It has transferred from
Europe to the Latin American continent in a process of what might be called reverse
colonization, whereby it is reappropriated and made to bear on Latin America‘s
geographical and cultural specificities. If Garcia Marquez wishes to purport that
magical realism is a poetic mode unique to his continent, his claim is justified in the
sense that it represents the Latin American consciousness in terms of its hybridity, i.e.
the fact that its origins are highly multicultural and heterogeneous. Following this line
of thought, he manages to find a suitable identity for his post-colonial voice, while, at
the same time, evincing that this voice is not at all monolithic, but already hybridized,
as is the coastal area where he was born.
With his magical realism, the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez move towards
a new direction for Latin American literature after the new novel, despite his
involvement in his younger days with the Latin American avant-garde. Hailing from a
highly traumatized country of Colombia and writing about long periods of civil unrest
such as the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902) and government brutality known as
La Violencia (1948-58), his magical realist exuberance is not only a celebration of the
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diversity of Latin America, but a way to express the excessive violence and confusion
of Colombian politics. The horrific past and present of much of Latin America, lends
itself to magical realism due to its ability to convey the unearthly tidings of Latin
America. The use of hyberbole in events such as the thirty-two armed uprisings, the
seventeen sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the three thousand casualties in the
banana strike etc, is meant to express the enormity of violence and the chaos which
prevailed in Colombia‘s politics.
Garcia Marquez uses magical realism to attack the assumptions of the dominant
culture. Zamora and Faris claim that ―Magical realist texts are subversive: their inbetweenness, their all-at-oneness, encourages resistance to monological political and
cultural structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to writers in
postcolonial cultures…‖ (6). Magic realism symbolizes a cultural conflict between the
dominant ruling classes and those who have been denied power. The dominant culture
remained dominant by denying others the power to govern and the power to challenge
the truths that they proposed. When magic realism is considered from the position of
the ‗other‘, it can be seen that the transgressive power of magical realism provides a
means to attack the assumptions of the dominant culture and particularly the notion of
scientifically and logically determined truth. In effect, magic realism brings into
question the very assumptions of the dominant culture and the influential ideas of the
Enlightenment. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez questions the
assumptions of the dominant ruling classes through the use of magical realism. First,
Garcia Marquez ironically debunks Spain‘s claim that it has bequeathed to America the
benefits of European civilization. The early phase of Macondo, evokes Latin America‘s
colonial period, when communities lived isolated from one another and the
viceroyalties themselves had little contact with the distant metropolis. Latin America‘s
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isolation from intellectual developments in Europe is hilariously brought out when Jose
Arcadio‘s researches lead him to the discovery that the earth is round and colonial
underdevelopment is reflected in his acute awareness of Macondo‘s backwardness in
relation to the outside world. Indeed, the conquest itself is parodied, in a passage
reminiscent of the chronicles by the expedition in which the men of Macondo re-enact
the ordeals of the Spanish explorers and conquistadores, in order to make contact with
the civilization that Spain allegedly spread to its colonies.
Furthermore, the Spanish colonial heritage is identified as one of the principal
factors in Latin America‘s continuing underdevelopment. Significantly, the expedition
of Macondons fails to make contact with civilization and succeeds only in finding the
hulk of an old Spanish galleon, stranded on dry land and overgrown with vegetation,
symbol of a heritage that is anachronistic, out of contest and ill-equipped to tackle the
awesome American environment. Above all, that heritage takes the form of a mentality,
personified in the novel by Fernanda del Carpio. An incomer from the capital, she
embodies the Castilian traditionalism of the cachacos, the inhabitants of the cities of
the Colombian altiplano, and, beyond that, a whole set of values and attitudes that
Latin America has inherited from Spain. Nursing aristocratic pretensions that are
reflected in her name --an echo of that of Bernardo del Carpio, a legendary Spanish
hero of medieval times -- she lives the illusion of a grandeur that no longer exists and
clings to antiquated customs in a world that no longer has any use for them; and, as
Macondo falls into the hands of the Banana Company and is invaded by lower-class
upstarts, she comforts herself with the belief that she is spiritually superior to the vulgar
tradesmen who have taken over the world, an attitude that echoes the response of
Spanish American intellectuals of the Arielist generation to the North American
expansionism. The heirlooms that she receives from her father as Christmas gifts are
53
ironically described by her husband as a family cemetery, and, as though to confirm the
truth of his works, the last gift turns out to be a box containing the father‘s corpse.
What they symbolize, in fact, is an outmoded, traditionalist mentality that prevents
Latin America from coming to terms with the modern world.
The peculiar characteristic of magical realism which makes it such a frequently
adopted narrative mode by Garcia Marquez and others is its inherent transgressive and
subversive qualities. It is this feature that has led many postcolonial writers to embrace
it as a means of expressing their ideas. When Aureliano exclaims that the ice is
―boiling‖, he subverts or overthrows the basic Western tenet of ice. Magic realism also
transgresses or resists the law of European scientific beliefs. In Macondo, one can find
that a gunshot is not fatal. Colonel Aureliano shoots himself in the chest but survives.
Thus magical realism unsettles the received ideas on how reality is to be perceived and
portrayed, and explores alternative approaches as to their epistemological potential.
Of course, the transgressive and subversive qualities are hinted at in the term
itself. The oxymoron ‗magical realism‘ reveals that the magic of the Latin America
and the realism of the dominant countries are brought into question by their
juxtaposition. If in magical realism, the magical is presented as a part of ordinary
reality, then the distinction between what is magical and what is real is eroded. The
magical events of One Hundred Years of Solitude cannot be assimilated to a
rationalistic worldview. By the same token, the realism of Garcia Marquez's Macondo
is never entirely abandoned -- the world of science, technology, and empirical
knowledge exists side by side with the world of the magical and the supernatural. The
characters of Garcia Marquez notoriously fail to acknowledge that there even exists a
tension between the ―real‖ and the ―magical‖ features of the world they inhabit. As
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris put it, in ―magical realists texts ... the
54
supernatural ... is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence -- admitted, accepted, and
integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism ‖(9 ). By equating
magic with realism, Garcia Marquez has sabotaged the notion that Western realism is
superior to the myth and magic of the colonial nations. Nevertheless, he wants magic
and realism to coexist together. In One Hundred years of Solitude, magic and reality
reinforce, support and depend on each other. Father Nicanor Reyna levitates only after
having sipped hot chocolate of Latin America. Remedios, the Beauty, rises to heaven,
while waving good-bye, clinging to the treasured monogrammed sheets of the
comically snobbish Fernanda, who proceeds to rave about her lost family linens.
Hitherto, the Westerners associated themselves with the realistic discursive mode and
looked down upon the magic of the margins. But, now, the characters of Garcia
Marquez do not acknowledge this distinction. For them, both the magic and the real
are the same. By placing myth and magic on par with realism, Garcia Marquez pushes
the ‗other‘ towards the ‗centre‘, equating the ‗margin‘ with the ‗metropolitan‘. He
creates a Latin American world which is quite similar to the world found in the Old
Testament. There is an original sin, an exodus, the discovery of an (un) promised land,
a plague, a deluge and an apocalypse. He does not reverse or improve upon the biblical
world. He creates a world that is parallel to the Christian world.
Garcia Marquez wants his countrymen to be original. For him the imitation of
the dominant culture is suicidal. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the leader of the
gypsies, Melquiades, represents Western knowledge. He brings many scientific
instruments to Macondo. Jose Arcadio, who stands for the colonized, tries to find a
practical application of these ―useless‖ inventions, in spite of Melquides warning that
his attempts will lead to naught. Jose Arcadio recognizes the superiority of the gypsies
(Westerners) over the stagnant knowledge of the people of Macondo. He looks upon
55
the Western scientific knowledge as far superior to that of the marginalized countries
and accepts the ignorance of these countries when he says, ―incredible things are
happening in the world…. Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical
instruments while we keep on living like donkeys‖ (OYS 8).
Jose Arcadio is awestruck at the immense scientific knowledge of the Western
world. He tries to improve upon them and puts them into practical use. He does not
make any attempt to find anything new but simply improvises upon the given
knowledge on the West. He tries to use the magnets to extract gold from the bowels of
the earth. When Melquiades introduces the magnifying glass to him, he tries to invent
a weapon of war out of it.
In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed
himself to the concentration of the sun‘s rays and suffered burns which turned
into sores that took a long time to heal….at one point he was ready to set the
house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the
strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together
a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible power of
conviction. (OYS 3)
Whether it is astronomy or alchemy, experiments with astrolabe or sextant, his
entire scientific pursuit ends up in vain because they are nothing but the imitation of the
Western knowledge. Garcia Marquez condemns such imitation and exhorts his
countrymen that only through a systematic study of nature, true knowledge and the
practical application of that, can knowledge be acquired. He is also confident that his
people would one day excel in the field of science and come out with better inventions
than what the Westerners have done in the field of science. ―Let them dream…We‘ll do
56
better flying than they are doing, and with more scientific resources than a miserable
bedspread‖ (OYS 32).
On the thematic plane also, Garcia Marquez emphasizes that imitation is
useless. But, he uses a comic tone to parody the scientific knowledge of the Western
world. Melquiades, the man of science, introduces the ordinary magnets as the eighth
wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. The way he showcases the power of
the magnets evokes laughter.
He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was
amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and
beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and
even objects that had been searched for most and went dragging along in
turbulent confusion behind Melquiades‘ magical irons. ―Things have a life of
their own.‖ the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. ―It‘s simply a matter of
waking up their souls‖. (OYS 2)
The hyperbolic power of the magnets corresponds to the exaggerated superiority of the
imperialistic scientific knowledge. In the same way, when displaying the telescope and
the magnifying glass to the inhabitants of Macondo, he proudly proclaims that science
has eliminated distance. But the humour does not stop there. He goes on to say that
man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his
own house. The same comic tone continues when Jose Arcadio announces with august
solemnity that the earth is round like an orange. These lines are included not just to
expose the ignorance of the marginalized people, but to make fun of the superior
attitude of the imperial states.
Garcia Marquez uses his ―tone‖ as an anti-colonial device to shake the
foundations of European realism. Tone belongs, by all rights, to the narrator's voice:
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someone who would report all the incidents calm and untouched, without comments or
moral judgments on what has happened. Garcia Marquez chose to employ this serious
tone to make unbelievable ideas seem real, because it allows him to dispense with
explanations and justifications. According to Gullon, the most crucial element of
Garcia Marquez‘s masterpiece that allows the reader to accept as real, what would
otherwise be considered otherworldly events, is the fact that the narrator maintains an
unwavering, almost matter-of-fact tone throughout the novel:
He does not doubt or question events or facts. For him there is no difference
between what is likely and what is not; he fulfills his mission—his duty—of
telling all, speaking as naturally of the dead as he does of the living, associating
with the greatest of ease, the intangible with the tangible. His steadfastness
reveals itself in his unchanging, constant tone. From the first page to the last, he
maintains the same tone levels, without fluctuation or variation. Prodigious
events and miracles, mingle with references to village and household events.
The narrator never allows it to become evident, by interjection or amazement,
that there may be a substantial difference between the extraordinary and
commonplace. (28)
With his authentic presentation of events, there is no need for him to justify all the
implausible phenomena in the story. His sole duty is to simply recount the tale in the
most natural fashion, so that the intangible can be associated with the tangible with
ease. As Garcia Marquez has once asserted himself, ―the key to writing One Hundred
Years of Solitude was the idea of saying incredible things with a completely
unperturbed face‖ (McMurray 87). In order to fuse the fantastic or improbable
perfectly into realistic occurrences, the only effective way is to deliver them as if they
were the implacable truth. There are many examples for this remarkable narrative tone.
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Garcia Marquez, in a casual tone, describes the priest‘s levitation: ―Just a moment, now
we shall witness an undeniable proof of the infinite power of God‖ (OYS 85). This
statement was said by the priest who levitates by means of chocolate. By depicting this
absurd occasion as an unquestionable truth, the author has merged the grotesque into
his fictional world so naturally, that no one suspects its existence. Another example is
the plague of insomnia that comes to Macondo:
‗The children are awake too, ‗the Indian said with her fatalistic conviction.
'Once it gets into a house no one can escape the plague‘. They had indeed
contracted the illness of insomnia. Ursula, who had learned from her mother the
medicinal value of plants, prepared and made them all drink a brew of
monkshood, but they could not get to sleep and spent the whole day dreaming
on their feet. In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did they see the
images of their own dreams, but some saw the images dreamed by others. (OYS
46)
The examples show how the constant tone and the matter-of-fact manner in
which the narrator introduces the illness of insomnia, an apparently contagious disease
that will go on to infect the whole town, lull the reader into accepting as real, in the
world of the novel what would, under other circumstances, be considered extraordinary.
What is important is the consistency of the author‘s narrative tone which persists
without fluctuation or variation, throughout the novel. Garcia Marquez himself admits
in an interview to Peter H. Stone that he tells the story without any expression on his
face:
The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on
the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded
supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness [...]
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What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not
change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was
surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing
in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write
them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a
brick face. (Stone 188)
This brick face with which the story had been told--from the recounting of the
discovery of ice in the first pages, to the plague of insomnia and the labeling of all
things in order to remember their function, to the levitation of the priest when he drinks
hot chocolate --is maintained throughout the novel.
Stephen Slemon defines magical realism as an important literary manifestation
of the postcolonial spirit. In his article ―Magical Realism as a Postcolonial Discourse,‖
Slemon appropriates the mode‘s lack of theoretical specificity for postcolonial uses,
seeing in both its narrative discourse and thematic content an adequate representation of
―real social and historical relations obtaining within the postcolonial culture in which
they are set‖ (408). He notices an ―incompatibility of magical realism with the more
established genre systems‖ (408) arguing that it ―seems most visibly operative in
cultures situated at the fringes of mainstream literary traditions‖ (408). He sees magic
realism as implicitly ‗ex-centric‘, a literary practice closely linked with a perception of
―living on the margins,‖ (408) and encoding a system of resistance - a specific mode of
oppositional discourse. In this sense, it is not incidental that magical realism has come
to signify the experience of the subversive and the resistant, since it is in itself a genretransgressing mode, falling in-between established generic systems, belonging to
several, but to none, in its entirety. Magic realist texts introduce enchantment, the
fantastic and the extra-ordinary within the seamless fictional fabric of realism--the
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privileged discourse of the colonizer--thus undermining its authority and power and
foregrounding the very gaps and absences characteristic of the mode‘s disjunctive
language of narration. The thematisation of a postcolonial discourse, involving the
recuperation of silenced voices and the imaginative reconstruction of reality, is
essential in the analysis of the transgressive potential of the mode. By foregrounding
the gaps, absences and silences, the text invites plurality to step in, allowing space for
multiplicity and subversion. In a way similar to the workings of textuality itself, this
thematisation allows for a supplementation of discourse with that which the discourse
attempts to suppress. Magical realism thus reveals itself as the mode of a conflicted
consciousness, the cognitive map that discloses the antagonism between two views of
culture, two views of history and two ideologies. The banana strike is the best example
that brings out the truth suppressed by imperialism. Garcia Marquez uses magical
realism in order to recuperate the silenced voices and reconstruct the reality. He uses
the banana company episodes for this purpose, because they are the most forceful and
dramatic episodes in the entire saga of Macondo. He rewrites the events related to
banana massacre in order to demystify them. The establishment‘s tradition of
manipulating history is exposed, when the authorities hush up the massacre of the
striking banana workers and the roundup and disappearance of all potential subversives,
claiming that Macondo is a peaceful and contented community where social harmony
reigns. ―You must have been dreaming‖, the officers insisted. ―Nothing has happened
in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy
town‖ (OYS 316). Later, young Aureliano, brought up by his uncle to regard Macondo
as the victim of the Banana Company‘s imperialist exploitation, discovers that the
school history books portray the company as the benefactor which brought prosperity
and progress. Garcia Marquez, with the help of magical realism, sets out to debunk the
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official myth by offering an alternative truth. He presents an exaggerated number of
workers killed in the incident. While the authorities are able to silence the voices of the
village, he brings to light the number of persons murdered in the banana incident. This
is evident in the conversation that takes place between Jose Arcadio Segundo and a
woman of Macondo, immediately after the massacre. ―There must have been three
thousand of them‖, (OYS 313) he murmured. He is sure that the number of persons
killed in the incident is more than what the official version has declared. Garcia
Marquez exaggerates the number considering the immensity of the episode.
Garcia Marquez‘s notion of death is distinct from that of the West‘s. Death is
normally associated with sorrow. It is an event of mourning. But, Garcia Marquez
reverses this idea and presents death in his works as if it were an ordinary matter. The
Gypsies report that Melquiades died in Singapore. But, at the same time, he returns to
live with the Buendia family. He tells in a matter-of-fact tone that he has come back
because death bored him. ―He really had been through death, but he had returned
because he could not bear the solitude‖ (OYS 50). Amaranta is not scared of death and
in fact she gets ready for death as if she were going to sleep. ―It was around that time
that Amaranta started sewing her own shroud‖ (OYS 258). She announces her death
without making any fuss. ―She announced without the least bit of dramatics that she
was going to die at dusk. She not only told the family but the whole town…‖ (OYS
285). Ursula plans her death in advance. After the massacre of the banana workers, the
town is saturated by heavy rains that last for five years. Ursula says that she is waiting
for the rains to stop so that she can die last. ―Ursula had to make a great effort to fulfil
her promise to die when it cleared‖ (339). Thus with magic realism, Garcia Marquez
makes death an ordinary event and reverses the general notion that it is fearsome.
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Magic realist texts play an active role in decolonization. Magic realist texts
reconfigure structures of autonomy and agency that destabilize the established
structures of power and control. Individuals merge or identities are questioned in other
ways, and mysterious events require us to question who or what has caused them. With
respect to autonomy, the characters are merged with others. In One Hundred Years of
Solitude the Buendias repeat the names and there are at least four Arcadios, namely,
Jose Arcadio Buendia, Jose Arcadio, Jose Arcadio and Colonel Aureliano Buendia,
who look similar. Even some of the characteristics of José Arcadio and Aureliano are
the same throughout the novel. With regard to agency, magical elements question that
as well. What force causes Remedios, the Beauty, to rise skyward, cannot be explained.
By writing about the unearthly tidings of Columbia, Garcia Marquez strives to
recreate a distinct social and cultural selfhood. With his magic realism, he rewrites the
culture and instills a sense of nationalism that works against absolutist cultural
hegemony. The phenomenon of re-establishing a culture through literature, negotiates
cultural hybridity, while establishing selfhood. Thus he maintains the aspects of the
colonized culture vital to his existence, while manipulating it (the colonized culture) to
serve as the building blocks of an independent society. He does not want to abandon
the science of western countries, but at the same time he wants his people to be
independent of the western knowledge. He treats myth on par with science. In this way
he creates a kind of hybrid moment, in which, whatever he writes is not a copy of the
colonial original, but a qualitatively different thing in itself. The misreading and
incongruities in his writings expose the uncertainties and ambivalences of the colonial
text and deny it an authorizing presence. The textual insurrection against the discourse
of cultural authority is located in his interrogation of the colonizer‘s literature within
the terms of his own system of cultural meanings.
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The colonized state is a hybridized state where the people are forced to occupy
two conflicting worlds or spaces, referred to as the ―duality of postcolonial doubled
identity and history‖ (Wilson 204). The colonization creates a duality of worlds for the
native people. The ―reason‖ and ―logic‖ of the European intellectual tradition collides
with the "mysterious" and "mythic" perspective of the natives. The two worlds are
incompatible in many ways, and the colonized cannot avoid defining their identity in
terms of the dual worlds or spaces they are forced to inhabit. Colombia is no exception.
According to Robert Wilson, magic realism creates a ―space in which the spatial effects
of canonical realism and those of axiomatic fantasy are interwoven. In magic realism,
space is hybrid (opposite and conflicting properties co present)‖ (204). Wilson calls this
phenomenon ―dual spatiality‖. This dual spatiality is found in Garcia Marquez‘s
Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the hybrid nature of space becomes
apparent in the natural way in which abnormal, experientially impossible, and
empirically unverifiable events take place. For example, Father Nicanor‘s arrival at
Macondo to officiate the marriage of Aureliano Buendia and Remedios Moscote and
his decision to stay back in Macondo for another week constitute a common
phenomenon. But soon, something magic happens, when Father Nicanor Reyna rises
six inches above the ground after drinking a cup of hot chocolate. In the same way Jose
Arcadio Buendia‘s death is a natural event. But soon after his death, there is a ―light
rain of yellow flowers‖ (OYS 144) covering roofs and blocking doors, and smothering
the animals which sleep outdoors. How the Father is able to rise six inches above the
ground and where the yellow flowers come from, are not questions that are asked.
Indeed, Wilson suggests, ―it is as if there are two worlds, (wholly distinct, following
dissimilar laws) which interact, interpenetrate, and intertwine, unpredictably but in a
fully natural manner."(204)
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The opening up of hybrid space in magic realism makes it difficult to conceive
of the ―real‖ as a single world with a single set of rules or laws. It accommodates a new
set of rules. In the context of postcolonial writing then, magic realism points to the
inherent problems created by the imposition of a bizarre and unreal European worldview onto the local reality of the colonized. In the beginning, the Macondons live a life
of innocence. Jose Arcadio Buendia is able to create a paradise-like village in which all
the inhabitants are happy. A perfect harmony prevails in the society, even with the
limited knowledge of science. But soon the village is disturbed by the arrival of
Melquiades and his men. A great hullaballoo is created with the help of ‗magical‘
things like ice, magnet etc. The Melquiades culture gets synthesized with the
Macondon culture. Macondons occupy two different worlds which become inseparable
for ever.
The Banana Company has made its presence felt in Macondo and gradually, it
is able to bring the village under its control. ―So many changes took place in such a
short time that eight months after Mr. Herbert‘s visit the old inhabitants had a hard time
recognizing their own town‖(OYS 234). The Banana Fruit Company changes the
texture of the society in its favour. The government is on its side and, at the behest of
the company, it kills the striking workers of the Banana Fruit Company. The company
presents a distorted view of the massacre and is successful in hiding the facts of the
murder. As usual, a conventional imperialist‘s world-view is carefully detailed while, at
the same time, Garcia Marquez introduces another level of reality, which is
inexplicable according to the logic and reason of Western thought. He introduces the
number of persons massacred in the Banana incident which is a magic number and
which cannot be explained by the westerner‘s logic and reason.
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These two incidents offer two system, of possibility, one that aligns with
European rationality and another which is incompatible with a conventional Western
world-view. Magic realism does not create imaginary worlds. What it does create,
through its ―dual spatiality,‖ is a space where alternative realities and different
perceptions of the world can be conceived. The imposed social and political systems of
Western culture effectively deny a space in which the native voices could speak for
themselves. The possibility of a "dual spatiality" provided through the deployment of
magic realism, gives space where the silenced voices can speak and be heard.
Binarisms and dualities operate within settler cultures, binarisms such as Europe
and its other, the colonizer and the colonized, and the West and the rest, for example.
Garcia Marquez‘s magic realist narrative in One Hundred Years of Solitude,
recapitulates a dialectical struggle inherent within the postcolonial culture. The binary
oppositions undergo a process of dialectical interplay, which undermines the fixity of
borders between them, foregrounding the gaps, absences and silences produced by the
colonial encounter. The binarisms of the civilized and the barbaric, the colonizer and
the colonized, the vocal and the silent, the centre and the periphery are all present in the
novel. The Banana Fruit Company represents the civilized, colonizing power. The
advent of the company changes the mood of the society. A sense of fear permeates the
atmosphere of Macondo. The direct suppression and oppression disturb the internal
peace of the village. Thousands of workers are killed and hauled up into the sea. A
distorted version of the banana massacre is given to the world by the imperialists.
Macondons are forced to live in yet another world, which is in no way similar to the
erstwhile paradise-like Macondo. Garcia Marquez‘s presentation of the Banana
incidents undermines or in a way ridicules the description of the imperialists.
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Garcia Marquez‘s magical realism is a double-edged sword. On one side, it
gives a strong resistance to the Western ideology. On the other, it gives a call to the
colonized people that they should be self-reliant and self-confident that they should not
blindly follow in the footsteps of the Westerners, as it leads only to destruction. Garcia
Marquez, through magical realism, wants to show that the imperialism of the past,
prefigures the imperialism of the future. Jose Arcadio is never able to foresee this end.
As he is a man of science and technology, he is not able to understand this end. Right
from the beginning, he is after magic-science-with the notion that ―right across the river
there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys‖(OYS
8). This attitude, which considers that western knowledge is superior to that of the
others, brings the ―apocalypse‖, at the end, to his state, Macondo.
Jose Arcadio‘s quest for western knowledge begins with the arrival of gypsies
at Macondo. The gypsies come every year ―with an uproar of pipes and
kettledrums‖(OYS 1 ) and always with new inventions, until the wars make such trips
too dangerous and the natives become too indifferent. They first appear in a distant
past, ―when the world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to
indicate them it was necessary to point‖( OYS 1 ). Into this primitive world, the gypsies
bring an omen of the future, an invention of great wonder and potential: the magnet.
Melquiades calls this invention ―the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of
Macedonia‖ (OYS 2). He drags it around, from house to house, so that everyone can
see pots and pans fly through the air, nails and screws pull out of the woodwork and
long-lost objects reappear. Like a great missionary of progress, Melquiades is
concerned with enlightening the natives; so he also provides an explanation; ―Things
have a life of their own…It‘s simply a matter of waking up their souls‖ (OYS 2 ).
Confronted with a marvellous magnet, Jose Arcadio feels that it is necessary to
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discover a useful application. Whereas Melquiades is content to mystify the natives,
Jose Arcadio must look with a wonder of his own toward the future. He comes up with
an idea that is portentous, just as his technological imagination will be fatal. Through a
process no one else seems to understand, he calculates that it must be possible to use
this marvelous invention ―to extract gold from the bowels of the earth‖ (OYS 2 ). Jose
Arcadio‘s overestimate of and blind faith in western technology is ridiculous. But, to a
man like Jose Arcadio, a brilliant idea should translate into a well-deserved profit. Even
though Melquiades is honest and tells him that this idea will not work, Jose Arcadio
begins to search for gold, enough and more, to pave the floors of the house. He trades
in his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots and explores every inch of
the region; but he fails to find anything he considers valuable. All he finds is a suit of
fifteenth century armor that had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside
of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. Searching
for gold, Jose Arcadio finds the remains of Spanish imperialism. Jose Arcadios‘ blind
quest with the help of western scientific knowledge results in Spanish imperialism.
Unaware of the consequences, Jose Arcadio continues his experiments with western
science which is both mystifying and exploiting.
The following March, when the gypsies next appear in Macondo, they bring a
telescope and a magnifying glass, ―the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam‖
(OYS 4). Once again, Melquiades provides an explanation—Science has eliminated
distance—and not surprisingly, he once again mystifies the natives. His theory of the
elimination of distance, like the theory of magnetic souls, is a fusion of chicanery and
advanced science—and it is as prophetic as Jose Arcadio‘s accidental discovery of the
suit of armor. Even though the natives are unable to understand the principles of
Melquiades‘ discoveries, they are all too willing to assume that, it is because they are
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not ―advanced‖ enough. The natives are in no qualms in accepting the superiority of
the western scientific knowledge. Later, the westerners cash in on the ignorance of the
natives and make them slaves through the banana company. The natives believe that
Melquiades‘ perspective, unlike theirs, is global; he has circled the world many times;
he seems to know ―what there was on the other side of things‖ (OYS 4 ). Melquiades
promises them that such a perspective will soon be available to everyone, through the
wonders of science, with no disruption of domestic tranquillity, without the
inconvenience of travel.
―In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place of the
world without leaving his own house‖ (OYS 3). Jose Arcadio and other natives believe
this pseudo promise not knowing that, in future, their domestic tranquillity will get
disturbed, through the death of thousands of natives working for the banana company
which is a symbol of imperialism.
Jose Arcadio‘s practical approach to western science suffers from a fatal
blindness. He believes that science is essentially democratizing. He does not understand
that his misdirected discovery of the rusted armour and its ―calcified skeleton‖ has
already brought to Macondo a vision of ―progress‖ that is both mystifying and applied,
but not democratizing. Years later, after the prolonged senility and death of Jose
Arcadio. after the innumerable deaths of Melquiades, Macondo will eventually see the
outside world—which Jose Arcadio tried so hard to discover with the help of the
western science. But by then, the chicanery of the gypsies will only be replaced by
more sophisticated and more determined exploitation. Craze for westernism results in
imperialism. Garcia Marquez gives a clairvoyant call to the countries which blindly
follow westernism.
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Unaware of this truth, Jose Arcadio continues with his fantasies, which
transport him to an ―outside‖ reality which he badly misunderstands. After watching
another of the gypsies‘ demonstrations, in which the magnifying glass is used to set a
pile of hay on fire, he immediately decides that this invention has even greater potential
than the magnet, because it can prove useful as an instrument of war. Ignoring the
legitimate fears of his wife, Jose Arcadio is compelled to invest in an invention. This
time, he uses a more progressive currency, the two magnetized ingots and three
colonial coins. His enthusiasm prevents him from noticing that his currency is being
debased. He is not able to buy the magnifying glass with his magnets. He has to shell
out his colonial coins along with his magnets to buy the magnifying glass. Many years
later, the currency of Macondo is debased by the scrip of Banana Company. Gold and
even colonial coins are superseded by the scrip which is ―good only to buy Virginia
ham in the company commissaries (OYS 305, 306). But Jose Arcadio will never be
able to understand how the debasement of the currency helps support the domination of
his people. He is happy to dream of progress, to experiment, to burn himself, to almost
set the house on fire. The colonized people, like Jose Arcadio, are in their slumber,
without knowing anything about the debasement of their economy by the western
countries.
Then, Jose Arcadio makes the greatest of his many misjudgments. He sends his
manual to the military authorities. With it, he sends all the scientific evidence he
considers appropriate, ―numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of
explanatory sketches (OYS 3, 4). He is determined to leave no doubt that he is ready to
do his part for the perfection of military technology: if called upon, he will even train
them himself in the complicated art of solar war. But nothing happens. Jose Arcadio is
disappointed. He never recovers from his disappointment at having been denied the
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excitement of futuristic wars. He revives his spirits just long enough to prove that ―The
earth is round like an orange‖ (OYS 5). By this time Ursula and others are convinced
that he has lost what little was left of his mind. Finally, he ends up with a strange
senility, interrupted only by prophecies in Latin.
Jose Arcadio‘s experiment with science was initially a spirit of social initiative.
His first creations were the traps and cages he used to fill all the houses in the village
with birds. He made sure that the houses were placed ―in such a way that from all of
them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort‖ (OYS 9). He
devised the town plan in such a way that no house received more sun than another.
From the beginning, he was useful to his people, having faith in his ingenuity. His
plans were sane and beneficial to the people of Macondo. They enjoyed the fruits of his
experiments and no one showed any resistance to his endeavors. But the peace of
Macondo and the inner peace of Jose Arcadio are disturbed with the advent of
―advanced‖ science. That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled
away by the fever of magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of
transmutation and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. The appearance of the
‗outside‘ science in Macondo ruins the ingeniousness of the native people. Beginning
with Jose Arcadio, throughout the history of Macondo, the ‗outside‘ science mystifies
the citizens of Macondo and exploits them till the end. The novel‘s arresting first
sentence suggests that these two purposes--mystification and exploitation—have
always been inseparable. ―Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to
discover ice‖ (OYS 1). But perhaps, if his father had avoided such discoveries,
Aureliano Buendia might never have wound up before a firing squad of his own
government. Further, Jose Arcadio‘s mental stability is disturbed when his own
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government does not recognize his knowledge of solar war. There is a craze for
everything that comes from ‗outside‘. In developing countries, there is no place for
native wisdom. Garcia Marquez wants the people of developing nations to have faith in
themselves.
Jose Arcadio is doomed because he has convinced himself that ―Right across
the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like
donkeys‖ (OYS 8). His greatest fear is that he might die without receiving the benefits
of science. The village is doomed by the same belief that magic—in particular,
advanced technology—is valuable in itself, uplifting, and the privileged possession of
the outside world. Once the people believe that science, like all uplifting things, must
come from elsewhere, that the outside world is better because it is more ―advanced‖,
then imperialism becomes much easier to justify. The discoveries of the ―gypsies‖ are
always excessively foreign. Later, the residents of Macondo easily convince
themselves of the innate superiority of Italian music and French sexual techniques. The
Crespi brothers‘ business in mechanical toys, aided by their foreign looks and foreign
manners, develops into a hothouse of fantasy. If the government had only understood
this inclination when they received Jose Arcadio‘s manual on solar war, it could have
saved itself a lot of time. But Jose Arcadio‘s plans did not convince it that Macondo
was a regular hothouse of applied fantasy, in this sense, it did not fully appreciate its
natural sources until it learned from Mr. Brown and the Banana Company.
The villagers too for their part never understand what all these foreign wonders
do to them. Like Jose Arcadio, when he bumps into the soil of armor, they let their
infatuation with the promises of the future render them incapable of uncovering their
past. ―Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo did
not know where their amazement began‖ (OYS 229). They merely enjoy, with more
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moderation than Jose Arcadio, the excitement of closing the ―technical gap‖ that has
separated them from the ‗outside world‘. The bearers of science are always strange,
unusual and different to them. At the same time, the villagers‘ primitive past is
rendered so insignificant that it is not worth remembering. To them, the important
things have always happened somewhere else- and their future will be determined by
somebody else.
Many years later, when the government massacres thousands of civilians in
order to crush a union strike, no one except Jose Arcadio Segundo, the great-grandson
of the first Jose Arcadio, will even be capable of remembering ―the insatiable and
methodical shears of the machine guns‖ (OYS 311). As for the rest, they will remember
only what they have been taught to remember by the technocrats and the government
that supports them. The banana company, with the help of the government, is raising
the village‘s standard of living, so it must be benevolent. It cannot be responsible for a
massacre. The irony that Jose Arcadio Segundo has the name of his great-grandfather
is an indication that the oppressed have been unable to learn what is really important.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez reformulates the early
modern narratives of self-discovery and dominion. He does it with the help of magical
realism. He signals his intention of rewriting the great Renaissance narratives of
discovery, when he begins his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with an account of
Antonio Pigafetta. As a navigator aboard Magellan's (1519-21) voyages around the
world, Pigafetta kept a log that Garcia Marquez categorizes as an ancestor ―of our
contemporary novels‖(Garcia Marquez, 207). The voyage of discovery into Latin
America that is One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins with the Renaissance narratives
that created a real story that is not yet finished. Over and over, Garcia Marquez
dramatizes, how Latin America was created through these ways, inherited from the
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European Renaissance. Where revisionist histories focus primarily on what stories have
been told, Garcia Marquez invokes these narratives of discovery to rethink what kind of
stories can be told. Thus, this ―epic‖ of the New World is told through the forms which
it has inherited. These forms have invented not only Garcia Marquez but a culture in
America, that, in the end, has become not what the Europeans imagined but what their
imagination has wrought. Garcia Marquez uses the Renaissance narratives as the
platform, in order to introduce a new kind of narrative peculiar to Latin America.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a conventional revisionist history
attempting to correct facts, offer new perspectives, or give voice to previously unheard
testimony, but it rewrites the narratives that were most important during the Age of
Discovery, as the western Europeans defined themselves, in relation to the rest of the
world. One Hundred Years of Solitude is at once both mythic and historical, because it
emerges out of a Renaissance genre which used myth to create what then became
history, while it also transformed existing history into a form of myth.
Garcia Marquez invokes Pigafetta in his Nobel Speech to extend and redefine
Alejo Carpentier's classic definition of ―lo real maravilloso‖. In Carpentier's account,
the history of Latin American fiction is a reaction against a repressive aesthetics
imposed during the Colonial period. His arguments about the ―marvellous real‖ as a
reaction against an externally imposed ―realism‖, reflect the literary history of the
colonial and postcolonial period. But, Garcia Marquez's work implicitly recognizes the
fact that the Conquistadors who carried the classics and other fabulous tales in their
cargo, imposed, not the rigors of realism, but rather the marvels of fictive romance onto
the New World. By suggesting that marvellous realism begins in the Renaissance with
Antonio Pigafetta, Garcia Marquez thus transforms what is for Carpentier a thirty-year
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literary history into a four-hundred-year one. What is ―imported‖ from Europe is thus
not its recent realism but its sense of what constitutes the marvellous.
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first
voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of
America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into
fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches,
clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still,
resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having
seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body,
the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native
encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that
impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image. This short and
fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day
novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age.
(Garcia Marquez 287)
Garcia Marquez insists that the marvellous real way of writing originated with
Pigafetta and other early European Chroniclers of the Indies. The ―marvelous real‖ that
Carpentier experiences as a distinctly Latin American response to the world, is, for
Garcia Marquez, more specifically a consequence of the first European responses to
America.
As Stephen Greenblatt points out, the marvel is a prominent component of the
European discovery narrative: ―the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New
World is at the very center of virtually all of Columbus's writings about his
discoveries‖ (73). Writers such as Columbus, Vespucci, and Pigafetta use the term
―marvel‖ to describe phenomena which they cannot explain: the abundance of gold, the
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size of the trees, and the nakedness of the people fill the observers with wonder. Where
ordinarily passions stand in opposition to reason, marvelling is an epistemological
passion that exists in the interval between ignorance and knowing. While an integral
part of the discovery narrative, the marvel is often at odds with its claims to knowledge.
Reinventing the early modern narrative of discovery as the point of origin for
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez portrays how these narratives of
discovery continue to shape representations of America. Ursula and Jose Arcadio
decide to leave their native village to found Macondo because their families fear that
they will breed a race of pig-tailed descendants. The race of pig-tailed humans, born
with a ―cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the
tip‖ (OYS 20), that Ursula and Jose Arcadio's family fear is a marvel first told of in
Columbus's 1493 Letter to Luis de Santangel (Cecil 138). As one of the few ―marvels‖
that Columbus never himself had seen, the ―pig-tailed‖ men become a future that
Garcia Marquez imagines as a consequence of those first encounters between
Columbus and the Indians. Just as Amerigo Vespucci's ship follows the singing of
"countless birds of various sorts" (Vespucci 3) as they search for land in the New
World, Melquiades's gypsies subsequently find Macondo by following the singing of
Jose Arcadio's parrots. Once ―discovered‖, Macondo is bounded by the early voyages
of discovery and conquest. Jose Arcadio attempts to reverse the trajectory of the
narratives of discovery, when he sets out on an exploration of the outside world in
order to find out not what is out ―there,‖ but to discover the ―here‖ where he is. After
weeks of expedition whose ardours match the deadly travels reported by Pigafetta or
Raleigh, all Jose Arcadio and his men find is ―an enormous Spanish galleon‖ (OYS
12).
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The ―truth‖ of One Hundred Years of Solitude consists equally in magnets and
magic carpets, butterflies and cameras. While critics are correct to attribute this
combination of science and magic to Garcia Marquez's ―magical realism,‖ the
argument can be extended by suggesting that what Garcia Marquez has done is to
transform the organizing epistemological structure of the discovery narrative. As a
genre, the discovery narrative tells a story of intellectual dominion: where Caesar's
imperial epigram was ―I came, I saw, I conquered,‖ the early modern discovery
narratives write a new nationalist identity in the terms ―I came, I knew, I conquered.‖
Yet discovery narratives are also moments of epistemological challenge in that they
achieve intellectual dominion through stories they tell of confrontation with the
unknown. In this context, marvels are isolated interludes which appear within and
contribute to a larger narrative of progress and truth. By virtue of its familiar
inexplicability, the marvel functions to confirm the truths of the narrative as a whole.
Garcia Marquez, by contrast, asks us to imagine a world in which the balance between
knowing and marvelling has been reversed: the marvel is no longer a brief interlude but
a rather a three-hundred-year experience that overtakes the novel as a whole. In doing
so, One Hundred Years of Solitude explores the tension between the teleological plot of
knowing and the interludes of marvelous unknowing that characterize early discovery
narratives.
The history of Jose Arcadio's interaction with the gypsy Melquiades illustrates
the historical and narrative consequences of rewriting the epistemology that
characterizes the European narratives of discovery. Just as Pigafetta uses marvels to
establish the ―truth‖ of his narrative, Garcia Marquez begins with the marvels of
Melquiades, as a way of establishing his novel's concern with ―truth.‖ The treasures
that Melquiades first brings to Macondo-the magnet, the telescope, magnifying glass,
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maps and charts, astrolabes, and sextants--are icons of discovery. On the one hand,
such objects are wonders to be shown to natives as evidence of the divinity of the
Europeans. Thomas Hariot, for example, records that the natives responded to
compasses, magnifying glasses, and other European inventions with wonder, "so
strange ... that they thought they were rather the works of gods than of men‖ (429). At
the same time, such instruments also represent the progress of knowledge that
characterizes the age. Constantly reappearing in the discovery narrative, these
inventions are figures of the production of wonder in the Indian and of knowledge for
the European. Simultaneously illustrating both the marvel and the knowledge, these
inventions typify the epistemological doubleness of the act of ―discovery.‖
Conscious of this duality, Garcia Marquez uses Melquiades‘s marvels to
imagine a rediscovery narrative in which the discoverers and the discovered have
become one and the same, just as the Europeans and the Americans coexist in the
inhabitants of Macondo. When Melquiades and the gypsies first arrive in Macondo they
bring magnets, invented by the ―learned alchemists of Macedonia‖ (OYS 2). The
magnet is the first invention that Melquiades brings to Macondo because, as an
instrument of navigation in the compass, it was what enabled sailors like Columbus to
discover places like Macondo. Yet, it is not the gypsies who are directed by the magnet
for they have been led to Macondo by the singing of Jose Arcadio's parrots. Rather, it is
Jose Arcadio Buendia himself who seeks to follow the science of the magnet. In
proposing to use the magnet to discover gold--in what is the first of his expeditions of
and from Macondo--he acts like the Conquistadors who followed their compasses
across the Atlantic with the hope of finding gold. What Jose Arcadio finds, however, is
not gold but the Conquistadors themselves:
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The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century
armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which
there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When Jose
Arcadio Buendia and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor
apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a
woman's hair around its neck. (OYS 2)
In this initial "discovery," Jose Arcadio finds not new land, people, or
knowledge; instead, he finds the past as he himself reenacts it. Garcia Marquez, with
magical realism, brings both the discoverer and the discovered on the same platform.
In magical realism, time does not always move forward. Realistic novels follow
the Western pattern of linear time. But in magical realism, Garcia Marquez uses
circular time transgressing the basic tenets of the ‗centre‘s‘ sense of time. But it is
typical of Garcia Marquez that he uses the centre‘s linear time as the base to explore the
circular time of magical realism. His One Hundred Years of Solitude is closely linked
to myth. He chooses magic realism over the literal, thereby placing the novel‘s
emphasis on the surreal. To complement this style, time, in One Hundred Years of
Solitude, is also mythical, simultaneously incorporating circular and linear structures.
The novels, based on the Westerner‘s sense of time, are structured linearly. Events
occur chronologically, and one can map the novel‘s exposition, rising action, climax,
falling action, and denouement. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also linear in its
broad outlines. The plot of the novel is simple: The story starts with the founding of
Macondo, through the various stages up to a flourishing modern town, to its decline
and eventual and irrevocable annihilation. In general, the linear history of the town falls
into four sections: utopian innocence and social harmony, in which Macondo exists like
an early Eden, its inhabitants so innocent that no one has yet died and they do not even
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have names for things, the world ―was so recent that many things lacked names, and in
order to indicate them it was necessary to point‖ (OYS 11). The story then moves on to
the military struggle in the various civil wars and revolutions, then into a period of
economic prosperity and spiritual decline, and finally to decadence and physical
destruction. The development of the Buendia family, in a sense, underscores this linear
sense of time, for they form a series of figures who, in part, symbolize the particular
historical period of which they are a part. The patriarch Jose Arcadio is, in some sense,
a Renaissance man of many interests and with pioneering ambitions and energies; his
son Aureliano becomes a great military leader, a main participant in the civil wars; in
turn, he is succeeded by a bourgeois farmer-entrepreneur, family man, Aureliano
Segundo and by the twin Jose Arcadio Segundo, who works for the American
capitalists and becomes the radical labour organizer. And so on. So, as the story moves
from generation to generation, there is a sense of strong linear force, imposed from
outside, driving events in Macondo.
On the contrary, the repetition of experiences and personality traits within the
family create a circular sense of time in the novel. One of the most obvious connections
between the characters is their names. Often these characters have been set into an
identity that their name, not their upbringing, dictates. Ursula, after many years, drew
some conclusions about "the incessant repetition of names" (OYS 106) within the
Buendia family. While the eldest Jose Arcadia Buendia was slightly crazy, his raw
maleness is transferred to all the Jose Aracadios that follow. They tended to be
impulsive and enterprising, though marked with a tragic sign. On the other hand, the
Aurelianos, corresponding with the open-eyed Colonel, seem to be ―indifferent‖ and
―withdrawn‖, yet sparked with a ―fearless curiosity‖ (174). The Aurelianos‘ tendency
towards solitude that shut the Colonel away in his later years would give his distant
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descendant Aureliano Babilonia, the stamina to decipher Melquiades‘s scriptures. Even
their deaths are, in a sense, preordained. The Jose Arcadios suffer as victims of murder
or disease; all three Aurelianos die with their eyes open and their mental powers intact.
And they all succumb to a self-imposed exile in a solitude that can last for decades.
The women also share the same characteristics of their ancestors. Amaranta
Ursula inherits the boundless energy and initiative of her namesakes, in particular,
Ursula. In describing Amaranta Ursula‘s return at the end of the novel, the text
compares her directly to the great mother figure and even uses the same adjectives,
―active‖ and ―small‖ (OYS 403), which had been applied to Ursula in the beginning of
the novel. There is also a less visible link with the Remedios, all three of whom remain
immature and either die young or disappear from the scene, before they are fully able to
develop. Girlish Meme, incidentally, is the only character in the novel that bears a
nickname, the symbol of her continuous youth. In addition, there is Rebecca who
shows infantile characteristics such as a prolonged thumb sucking, and the initial
syllable in her own name suggests her belonging in part to the Remedios group.
Out of this sense of repetition, there exists a constant irony of ―inevitable
repetition of probable futile previous actions‖ (Williams 80), as one of the most
important images in the book makes clear:
There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for [Pilar
Ternera] because a century of cards and experience had taught her that history
of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetition, a turning wheel that
would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and
irremediable wearing of the axle. (Williams 402).
Furthermore, the people of Macondo and the Buendias often have a vital and
amusing present, but their lives, sooner or later. lose meaning because they are
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incapable of seizing their own history. Their past is largely unknown to them, except as
nostalgia, their present is barely active, and their future non-existent. In addition, the
novel stresses the importance of knowing one's family history in order to truly grow,
which the characters cannot do. Instead of learning from the mistakes their ancestors
made, almost all the characters end up repeating them.
The men are characterized by an obsessive repetitiveness in their lives. Full of
ambition and intelligence, and they are unable to realize any long-term success. They
are much less grounded than the women are. The men spend their time foolishly
chasing dreams, while the women carefully plan their moves. Hence while Jose
Arcadio Buendia is vainly pursuing his scientific and technological explorations, it
becomes Ursula's mission to expand the family home and to bring in income by
launching and supervising the animal-candies business. In the same way, Aureliano
Segundo‘s monumental dissipation would be impossible without the enterprise of his
mistress Petra; and once Santa Sofia de la Piedad, the last of the old reliable Buendia
women, simply leaves, the house falls rapidly into desrepair. Amaranta Ursula, on her
return from Belgium, brings temporary renovations, but the ensuing affair with her
nephew leads the two down the path of total irresponsibility, and they all but yield the
old mansion to the vegetation and the ants.
The women too tend to fall into types. The common sense and determination of
the Ursulas, particularly of the stern will of the founding woman, play off against the
enduring figures outside the family: Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes. The women, for the
most part, are firmly anchored in daily reality, but with the routines of daily living.
Ursula fights all her life against the incest taboo, and Fernanda devotes her life to
imposing the rigorous order of high Spanish Catholicism on an unruly home.
One consistently used technique contributing to the effect of blurring the lines
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between fantasy and reality, is an absolute coolness or understatement, when describing
the incredible situations, and overstatement or exaggeration, when dealing with the
commonplace. In the ice episode in the first chapter, for example, the narrator's
language shares the characters‘ exaggerated reaction to Melquiades‘s new object. At
first Jose Arcadio Buendia calls it ―the largest diamond in the world‖ (OYS 18). The
narrator uses the language that is similar to Jose Arcadio‘s, a few lines later: ―His heart
filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery‖ (OYS 18). He wants his
children to live this ―prodigious experience‖ (OYS 18). By the end of the episode the
narrator has used the words ―mysterious‖ and ―prodigious‖ to describe what would
seem to the reader the most common of everyday experiences, touching ice. The
narrator, like the characters, regularly expresses his astonishment over the
commonplace.
In contrast, the narrator regularly reacts to the most marvelous and fantastic
things with absolute passivity. Jose Arcadio and his children experience the
disappearance of a man who becomes invisible after drinking a special potion.
― [Jose Arcadio]…found a taciturn Armenian who in Spanish was hawking a
syrup to make oneself invisible. He had drunk down a glass of the amber
substance in one gulp as Jose Arcadio Buendia elbowed his way through the
absorbed group that was witnessing the spectacle, and was able to ask his
question. The gypsy wrapped him in the frightful climate of his look before he
turned into a puddle of pestilential and smoking pitch over which the echo of
his reply still floated…‖ (OYS 17)
Neither the narrator nor the characters pay any particular attention to this incredible
occurrence. It is presented as if it were something commonplace.
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There are only rare exceptions to the narrator's basic position of third-person
omniscience. The entire issue of the narrator undergoes a radical change at the end of
the novel when it is revealed that in reality the narrator of the entire story was
Melquiades. The magician of Macondo has also been the creator of magic for the
reader. Suddenly, the reader comes to the realization that the narrator is not outside the
story but within. This discovery underscores the story's basic functionality, another fact
which might have been momentarily forgotten by the reader, absorbed in this history of
Colombia and the saga of Western civilization.
One of the most striking instances of cyclical structure is found in the novel‘s
opening line: ―Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice‖ (OYS 1). Two generations later, chapter eleven opens the same way: ―Years later
on his death bed, Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June
when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son‖ (OYS186). These two sentences
are grammatically parallel. They open with an adverbial phrase (―Years later‖),
followed by the subject and then the predicate in exactly the same verb tense. The
sentences begin with an event in the distant future and conclude with an allusion to a
future event that, in both cases, occurs within the same chapter. The words ‗many years
later‘ appear so often in the novel that they become the heartbeat of the novel.
The reader is not the only one who notices these cycles. Garcia Marquez makes
his characters realize the tendency of events to repeat themselves. When Jose Arcadio
Segundo builds a canal, Ursula says, ―It‘s as if time had turned around and we were
back at the beginning‖ (OYS 199). Later, when AurelianoTriste decides to bring the
railroad to Macondo, Ursula ―confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle‖
(OYS 226).
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These cycles serve as a means of mythical rebirth for the Buendias.The
Buendias are a condemned race. Jose Arcadio and Ursula‘s incestuous marriage
becomes the original sin and makes the clan‘s extinction inevitable. The Buendias can
only postpone their demise by initiating another cycle. At the end of the novel, the
possibility of another cycle is gone, and the family is doomed. Aureliano, the last of the
Buendias, wanders ―aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went
back to the past‖(OYS 418). Pilar Ternera, the mistress of one of Macondo‘s brothels,
uses a metaphor to explain time in the Buendia family: ―A century of playing cards and
experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with
unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity
were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle‖ (OYS 402). The
wheel becomes the novel‘s temporal mechanism, with the axle representing linear time
and the turning of the wheel representing cyclical time (McMurray 84). Linear time
finally wears down, making the possibility for ―mythical renewal‖-- another cycle-impossible. At this point, the machine time stops, and Macondo no longer exists.
One pair of devices Gabriel García Márquez uses extremely skillfully is
flashbacks and flash-forwards. Flashbacks are references to events prior to the novel‘s
present time. These are fairly common in literature; often a novelist will interrupt the
story to tell the audience about the hero‘s earlier life, for instance. Flash-forwards,
anticipations of events that will occur later on in the novel, are less common. A writer
may give the reader a hint of some looming threat or other event, sometimes called
foreshadowing, but will rarely describe the details or the coming event, because that
might rob the story of its suspense. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, vivid
images of things that have not yet happened are employed in ways that keep the
audience reading. Furthermore, to create the particular impression of time that he wants
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to convey, the author may even use a flashback and flash-forward in the same passage.
Sometimes a coming event is announced by a character, as when Amaranta declares
that her foster sister Rebeca will never marry Pietro Crespi, and later when she prepares
for her own impending death by weaving a shroud and Ursula announces she will die
when it stops raining. And, sometimes, it is mentioned in the anonymous voice of the
narrator, as when the destruction of Macondo is foretold at the beginning of the
fifteenth chapter.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold also, Garcia Marquez uses circular time in his
magic realism against the western canon of linear time. The novel is an investigation
into the murder of a local Arab who supposedly dishonours another family in town. The
first chapter concentrates on Santiago's final ninety minutes of life; the second, on
Bayardo and on the wedding night; the third, after some legal matters, on the Vicario
brothers; the fourth, following the autopsy and a report concerning the fate of the
respective families, on Angela‘s late-budding love; and at last, the fifth, after an
account of the townspeople‘s reactions, on the tense few minutes of pursuit and murder.
There is an overwhelming sense of time in this story. There are really three time spans
in the novel. The murder itself lasts about ninety minutes, which is described in full,
gruesome detail at the end of the novel. The events leading up to the murder span about
twelve hours, and are described in separate parts by the many different people who are
in some way involved with the murder. And finally, the narrator is investigating the
murder twenty-seven years after it took place, but uses many quotes from the different
characters he has questioned about the murder. Because he is narrating in the present
tense, the book has a very realistic quality.
Through unconventional perceptions of time, Garcia Marquez attempts to
convey that time does not always mean progress in Colombia. He understands its full
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irony, as, in fact, time does flow and the world needs to go on. When one says that
history keeps repeating, it is a claim made in the framework of progressive time; if time
had not passed, one would not have realized that history repeats itself. What Garcia
Marquez attempts to get across here is the belief that Colombia needs to live with the
paradox, acknowledging the quirkiness of time, yet simultaneously realizing that it does
go on and that a better world can take place. If people believe that time does not signal
progress, they will live in complacent resignation and no longer believe in any
technological advancements, as evidenced in Jose Arcadio Buendia‘s attempts to
destroy Melquiades‘s and his own inventions or in Colonel Aureliano Buendia‘s
unproductive acts of making little gold fish, and, once finished, melting them and
starting all over again.
On a larger scale, this can also be interpreted as Garcia Marquez‘s own criticism
of his country‘s mythmaking. It is natural and understandable to learn that, somehow,
the notion of time as signifying progress is not applicable to Colombia, because the
country has not experienced political progress for the past fifty years; however, it is
another matter to claim that this should be a watershed that helps a country find its
post-colonial identity by breaking up with the myths of its colonial past. This leads to
the fact that Colombian identity is marked by its circular time, that Colombian history
seems to foster the view of circuitous history, as a strategic move away from the
concept of linear history which is largely believed in by European colonialists.
Garcia Marquez‘s magical realism operates as the mode of a disjunctive,
essentially subversive sensibility. Its double-coded nature in terms of both content and
style, often facilitates the expression of various forms of dissent, by allowing the
‗silenced‘ to find its way back into the text. That such critical potentialities are inherent
in its unstable, highly ambiguous form, partly explains its occurrence in cultural and
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ideological contexts, variously marked by political and epistemic violence. In the light
of the above, it becomes possible that Garcia Marquez is on his way to formulating a
more inclusive theoretical model of magical realism. Professing a totalizing conception
of the universe and insisting, at the same time, on the phenomenal, sensible
manifestations of the real, his magical realist art strives towards an intellectual, intuitive
or imaginative apprehension of the ontological foundations (whether metaphysical,
religious or mythical) of empirical reality. Immanent in either the exterior world or in
the perception of the observer, the ‗magic‘ of magical realism in his novels defines
itself against ‗rational‘ understandings of the real, aiming at the incorporation of the
irrational, the unexplainable, the miraculous and the supernatural into the fictional
universe it projects. Hence its hybrid ontology and generic instability; hence, as well,
the disturbing imaginative possibilities that it opens up. Its double-coded nature speaks
of the mixed culture of Colombia that has been ‗peripheralised‘ in one way or another
by hegemonic Western discourses. Therefore, Garcia Marquez‘s magical realism can
be seen as a liminal, ex-centric mode of aesthetic apprehension, whose filiations with
the counter-tradition of the carnivalesque and its constant subversion of boundaries,
whether generic, ontological or ideological, makes it best suited for the expression of a
resistant and sceptical imagination.
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Chapter III
Reconstruction of the Past: A Postcolonial Search for Identity
Latin American novel was born at the moment the Spanish colonies became
independent and many of the significant early novels were historical. The writers
imaginatively re-created the past, as it was necessary for their nation-building project.
Works such as Vincent Fidel Lopez‘s The Heretic’s Love (1846) and Jose Marmol‘s
Amalia (1851) deal with conflictive moments in Latin America‘s history; the rivalries
and repressions of the colonial period, the tragic relations between Native Americans
and Europeans in the wake of the Spanish Conquest and the difficulties of achieving
post-independent stability and freedom. For the Latin Americans, the writing of
historical novels was not just a way of seeking a particular social or class identity, but
a search for identity itself; a political national identity in recently constituted countries
fractured by ethnicities and races and a literary identity in an area with a colonized
imagination. This search for identity largely determined the persistent historical bent
of literary works. In their approaches to history and propositions for self-identification,
these works have travelled a long way. But the historical commitment to engage
history in the search for identity has not changed throughout this long travel. In the
1960‘s, the Boom writers also devoted their novels to Latin American history and
identity. The search for identity through history becomes necessary, because only the
settler makes the history of the colonies and he is conscious of making it. As he
constantly refers to the history of his mother country, his accounts may not represent
the true history of the natives. It must be a biased record and not written from the
native‘s point of view. Garcia Marquez wants to put an end to the history of the
colonizers which is nothing but the obliteration or distortion of the history of the
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natives and bring to existence the true history of the nation-the history of
decolonization. He reconstructs the history of Colombia in order to construct a new
identity for his nation.
The long Colombian history is a tale of turbulence; it knows no peace. The
Colombian history can be divided into five major periods: the Pre-Colombiano Period,
The Colonial Period, The Independence Period. The Period of Consolidation and
Trends since the 1920‘s. The country was torn by civil wars and guerilla attacks. In
short, Colombia cannot boast of a glorious past. In this scenario, Garcia Marquez bases
many of his novels on the historical incidents of Colombia. By presenting the
bloodstained history in his novels, he searches for a new identity to his nation,
Colombia. Garcia Marquez himself once remarked that the reader of his novels who
was not familiar with the history of his country, might appreciate the novel as a good
novel, but much of what happens in it would make no sense to him.
South America has been inhabited for about 20,000 years by hunters and
gatherers who began developing agriculture around 4000 BC. During the preColombiano period, Colombia was inhabited by indigenous people who were primitive
hunters or nomadic farmers. The Chibchas who lived in the Bogota region, dominated
the various Indian groups. The Chibcha linguistic communities were the most
numerous, the most territorially extended and the most socio-economically developed,
of the pre-Hispanic Colombians. By the third century, the Chibchas had established
their civilization in the northern Andes. At one point, the Chibchas occupied part of
what is now Panama, and the high plains of the Eastern Sierra of Colombia. The areas
that they occupied were the areas where the first farms and the first industries were
developed, and where the independence movement originated. They are currently the
richest areas in Colombia. They represented the most populous zone between the
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Mexican and the Inca empires. In the Oriental Andes, the Chibchas were composed of
several tribes such as Muiscas, Guanes, Laches, and Chitareros, who spoke the same
language, Chibchan. The use of the sacred coca leaf, respect for water and nature and
the other practices of the pre-Colombian Chibcha or Muisca culture survive in
Colombia even today. The culture was as highly-developed as those of the betterknown Inca, Maya and Aztec people, according to scholars. But with the advent of
Spanish culture in the land of Colombia, many Chibcha traditions and customs were
demonized by the Spanish and the people were encouraged to forget them. The violent
subjection of the Chibchas to the colonial regime, gradually destroyed their economic,
social, political and cultural organization, which led to a demographic catastrophe
among their people in the mid-17th century. The Spaniards understood nothing about
this civilization, and as the Chibcha were not warriors, they perished as victims of the
conquerors‘ violence.
Spaniards first sailed along the north coast of Colombia as early as 1500 A.D.
but their first permanent settlement at Santa Marta was not established until 1525. In
1549, the area was established as a Spanish colony with the capital at Santa fe de
Bogota. In 1717, Bogota became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada which
included what is now Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. The city became one of the
principal administrative centers of the Spanish possessions in the New World along
with Lima and Mexico city. The group of Spaniards that first came to the New World,
consisted of conquistadors, administrators and the Roman Catholic clergy. The
adventurous conquistadors were risk-taking entrepreneurs, financing their own
expeditions in the expectation of being able to get rich quick. The administrators were
appointed by and represented the crown in the colonies and sought to maintain the New
World colonies as a source of wealth and prestige for the Spanish Empire. The clergy
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sought to save the souls of the native Indians, and in the process they acquired land and
wealth for the church. The conquistadors, who felt they owed nothing to the crown,
often came into conflict with the latter's attempts to centralize and strengthen its
authority over the colonies.
Colonial society relied on ―purity of blood‖ as a basis for stratification. The
elites at the top of the social pyramid were peninsulares, persons of Spanish descent,
born in Spain. Peninsulares held political power and social prestige in the society.
Below them were the criollos, those of Spanish descent born in the colonies. This group
had limited access to the higher circles of power and status. For generations, the
criollos accepted a position of inferiority to the peninsulares, but in the late eighteenth
century their acquiescence was transformed into a resentment that ultimately led to
their fight for independence. Next in importance and the most numerous, were the
mestizos, persons of mixed Spanish and Indian descent who were free but relegated to
positions of low prestige. Most Indians gradually became absorbed linguistically or lost
their identity through mixture with other peoples; by the late 1980s, Indians constituted
only one percent of the Colombian population . Black African slaves and zambos,
persons of mixed African and Indian descent, were at the bottom of the social scale and
were important only as a source of labour.
Colombia‘s struggle for freedom begins in 1812, with individual provinces
declaring absolute independence from Spain. That year, Simón Bolivar Palacio,
considered the liberator of South America, tried for the first time to gain independence
for New Granada. The absence of united support from the various provinces, however,
frustrated him. Bolivar left New Granada in 1815 and went to Jamaica. The continuing
tension between federalist and centralist forces led to a conflict that left New Granada
weak and vulnerable to Spain's attempts to reconquer the provinces. At the time of
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Bolívar's departure, the cause of independence New Granada was desperate. Ferdinand
VII, who was ousted from the throne by Napolean, had been restored to the Spanish
throne and Napoleon's forces had withdrawn from Spain. A pacification expedition led
by Pablo Morillo on behalf of the king, proceeded from Bogota, and those who laid
down their arms and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish crown were pardoned.
Morillo also granted freedom to slaves who helped in the reconquest of the colonies.
Because of dissension between the upper class and the masses and inept military
leadership, Cartagena fell to the royalists by the end of 1815.
In early 1816, Morillo moved to reconquer New Granada and changed his
tactics from pardons to terror; Bogota fell within a few months. Morillo repressed
antiroyalists (including executing leaders such as Torres) and installed the Tribunal of
Purification, responsible for exiles and prisoners, and the Board of Confiscations. The
Ecclesiastical Tribunal, in charge of government relations with the church, imposed
military law on priests who were implicated in the subversion. The Spanish reconquest
installed a military regime that ruled with violent repression. Rising discontent
contributed to a greater radicalization of the independence movement, spreading to
sectors of the society, such as the lower classes and slaves that had not supported the
previous attempt at independence. Thus, the ground was laid for Bolivar's return and
ultimate triumph. At the end of 1816, Bolívar returned to New Granada, convinced that
the war for independence was winnable only with the support of the masses. In the
earlier attempt at independence, large segments of the population had been lured to the
royalist side by promises such as repartition of land and abolition of slavery. However,
when, the masses saw that the promises were unfulfilled, they changed their allegiance
from Spain to the independence movement.
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Two significant military encounters led to the movement's success. After having
won a number of victories in a drive from the present-day Venezuelan coast to the
present-day eastern Colombia via the Río Orinoco, Bolívar gave Francisco de Paula
Santander the mission of liberating the Casanare region, where he defeated the royalist
forces in April 1819. After the decisive defeat of the royalist forces at the Battle of
Boyaca in August 1819, independence forces entered Bogota without resistance. Total
independence was proclaimed in 1813 and in 1819 the Republic of Greater Colombia
was formed. After the defeat of the Spanish army the republic included all the territory
of the former viceroyalty. Simon Bolivar was elected its first President and Francisco
de Paula Santander, the Vice President. Two political parties that grew out of conflicts
between the followers of Bolivar and Santander--the Conservatives and the Liberals-dominated Colombian politics. Bolivar's supporters who later formed the nucleus of the
Conservative Party advocated a strong centralized government alliance with the Roman
Catholic Church and a limited franchise. Santander's followers, forerunners of the
Liberals, wanted a decentralized government state rather than church control over
education and other civil matters and a broadened suffrage.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, each party held the presidency for
roughly equal periods of time. Colombia, unlike many Latin American countries,
maintained a tradition of civilian government and regular free elections. The military
has seized power three times in Colombia's history: in 1830 when Ecuador and
Venezuela withdrew from the republic (Panama did not become independent until
1903); in 1854; and in 1953-57. In the first two instances, civilian rule was restored
within one year. Notwithstanding the country's commitment to democratic institutions,
Colombia‘s history has been characterized by periods of widespread violent conflict.
Two civil wars resulted from bitter rivalry between the Conservative and the Liberal
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parties. The War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902) cost an estimated 100 000 lives and
up to 300 000 people perished during La Violencia (The Violence) of the late 1940‘s
and 1950‘s.
A military coup in 1953 brought General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power.
Initially Rojas enjoyed considerable popular support due largely to his success in
reducing La Violencia. However, when he did not restore democratic rule, he was
overthrown by the military in 1957 with the support of both political parties and a
provisional government was installed. In July 1957, the former Conservative President,
Laureano Gomez (1950-53) and the former Liberal President, Alberto Lleras Camargo
(1945-46) issued the ―Declaration of Sitges‖ in which they proposed a National Front
whereby the Liberal and the Conservative parties would govern jointly. Through
regular elections the presidency would alternate between the two parties every four
years; the parties also would have parity in all other elective and appointive offices.
The National Front ended La Violencia.
Garcia Marquez includes all the major events of Colombian history in his
novels viz., the pre-Hispanic life, the Civil Wars, The War of Thousand Days, La
Violencia, Banana Strike, etc. One Hundred Years of Solitude is organized into three
large thematic sections or narrative blocs: the utopian foundation of the town of
Macondo; the town‘s consolidation, the development, the expansion and the onset of
crisis; and its decline and destruction. Those who are familiar with Latin American
history recognize certain locative cues that pertain specifically to Colombian national
history and so, the story of Macondo allegorically parallels the foundation,
consolidation and eventual violent decline of the Colombian national state.
Garcia Marquez‘s reference to the ―pig-tail‖ in One Hundred of Years of
Solitude takes the history of Colombia back to the days of the discovery of America by
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Columbus and his men. He dramatizes how intimately connected the New World's birth
is with the Old World's imagination of it, through the interbreeding that takes place
between the Europeans and the Native Americans. If European representations of the
―discovery‖ are structured on an initial perception of ―otherness" that becomes an
image of the ―self,‖ Garcia Marquez recognizes that this narrative contains within it a
genealogy of Latin America, in which the fear of radical exogamy alternates with and
gives way to the fear of incest. The family narrative that Garcia Marquez tells, not just
of Jose Arcadio and Ursula, but of all Latin America, thus takes Columbus's account of
a race of pig-tailed men as its moment of origin. Columbus first mentions the pig-tailed
men in his 1493 Letter to Luis de Santangel, when he discusses some of the further
provinces he has not yet reached, including one ―they call `Avan,' and there the people
are born with tails‖(Cecil 27). In this first letter, the pig-tailed man appears as a figure
of radical and monstrous otherness. Indeed, Columbus admits that he is surprised at the
absence of human marvels: ―In these islands I have so far found no human
monstrosities, as many expected, but on the contrary the whole population is very wellformed‖ (Cecil 14). As a point of departure for Columbus's definition of the New
World ―marvel,‖ this monstrosity thus appears as a paradoxically familiar image of
otherness.
The pig-tailed men are again mentioned in Columbus's second voyage. In his
account of this voyage, Andres Bernaldez recounts how Columbus received reports of
people inhabiting the region of Magon: ―all the people had tails, like beasts or small
animals, and that for this reason they would find them clothed‖(Cecil 132). Bernaldez
doubts the veracity of this story and concludes that ―This was not so, but it seems that
among them it is believed from hearsay and the foolish among them think that it is so in
their simplicity ... it seems that it was first told as a jest, in mockery of those who went
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clothed‖ (138). This second, more elaborate, version of the tailed men has an obviously
different conclusion. Whatever this story may say about native attitudes toward
clothing, Bernaldez's interpretation reveals much about changes in the Europeans'
attitudes toward the peoples they have met. Where the humans with tails are in some
sense expected, what comes as more of a surprise ultimately is the tribes that wear
clothing. Clothing becomes a cultural mark of the apparently natural differences that
seem to separate the Europeans from the natives. In its subsequent reinterpretation,
then, this story is no longer about otherness; rather, it suggests the more threatening
possibility of a tribe which, in wearing clothing, may violate what the Europeans had
come to see as a fundamental difference that separated them from these peoples. That
is, the people of Magon represent the possibility of a kind of ―mixed breed.‖ They are
not the familiar myth of otherness, but in appearance they are too close to the
Europeans themselves. Columbus‘ myth of a race of pig-tailed men becomes, in Garcia
Marquez, a similar story of origin for Latin America. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred
Years of Solitude thus tells a myth about the birth, not of man as a biological being, but
of Latin America as a culture. In this cultural birth narrative, it is believed that Latin
America is born out of the union of two peoples and their cultures. By reconstructing
the creation of Latin America, Garcia Marquez drives home the point that the European
―self‖ and the native ―other‖ were present together in the land of Latin America right
from the days of discovery. He equates the identity of the ‗other‘ with that of the west.
Jose Arcadio Buendia‘s Macondo, in its infancy, resembles a Chibcha
chiefdom. The life in Macondo is as peaceful as that of a Chibcha clan. As the
Chieftain of the group, Jose Arcadio Buendia provides the needs of the inhabitants and
maintains the harmony of the village.
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Jose Arcadio Buendia, who was the most enterprising man ever to be seen in the
village, had set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of
them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he
lined up the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than
another during the hot time of day. (OYS 9)
Macondo was "a village that was more orderly and hard-working than any
known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no
one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died." (OYS 9) . The town
exemplifies the ―social initiative‖ promoted by Jose Arcadio: every house receives
equal access to the water from the river and equal protection from the sun in the streets.
This is prelapsarian Macondo, a communal paradise before the Civil wars, where equity
of opportunity and resources governs social life among the founders and their progeny.
Throughout the descriptions of the village‘s early development, there is virtually no
direct mention of class or social difference among the people of Macondo. When the
outsider Don Apolinar Moscote testifies to his belief in the name of the magistrate by
hanging a sign that reads "Magistrate" on his door, Jose Arcadio explains that laws are
not needed in Macondo: ―In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper. . . we
don't need any judges here because there‘s nothing that needs judging‖ (OYS 57). The
Macondons lead an idyllic, peaceful and self-contented life. The advent of the
Spaniards disturbs the peaceful life of the Chibchas. In the same way, the arrival of
Melquiades and Don Apolinar Moscote brings catastrophe to Macondo. By creating a
Macondo on the model of the Chibcha clan, Garcia Marquez yearns for the return of
pre-Hispanic life to Colombia. Further, he reverses the conventional wisdom that
attributes the political instability of the nineteenth century to the barbaric countryside,
whose backwardness and lawlessness hinder the civilized cities‘ efforts to lead the
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subcontinent toward order and progress, and comes out with a new notion that the
governmental intervention in local affairs is the origin of Macondo‘s troubles.
Macondo is attacked by insomnia – a plague of forgetfulness; people forget the
names of objects, and forget the significance and uses of the anonymous objects, such
as tables and chairs.
…when the sick person used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his
childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of
things, and finally the identity of the people and even the awareness of his own
being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. (OYS 45)
The plague reminds of the Spanish colonization and its attempts to obliterate the
customs of the pre-Hispanic life of the native Indians. The plague is brought to the
town by the Indian servants of the Buendias, Cataure and Visitacion. They are the
symbolic depiction of the pre-Hispanic population of the Americas, a group forgotten
and crushed by the conquering Spaniards, who, in the process, forget their own past. It
threatens to make the inhabitants of Macondo forget everything. Macondons forget
their past; their identity is lost. The plague symbolizes loss of both political and social
memories, loss of language and loss of reality. Colonization results in the loss of
identity of the indigenous people; it completely wipes out one‘s past. They begin to
label all objects and describe their purpose. They save their memory through the tool of
writing, attempting to hold on to their awareness of their surroundings and
consequently, the past. Macondo‘s plague of insomnia is a kind of nostalgia for the
―better days‖ of the barbaric, primitive past. It is an allegory to symbolize the potential
repercussions when collective means of communication do not function in relation to
the past and it prefigures the subsequent development of the idea that the inhabitants of
Macondo cannot create a history. The insomnia incident is a clarion call given by
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Garcia Marquez to the people of Colombia that they do not have a glorious history to
their credit and it is time for them to create a new identity and a new history for their
nation.
As dangerous as this collective loss of memory and historical awareness, is the
individual repression of the past, as carried out by the characters of the novel. Most of
them have acrimonious recollections and emotions, especially Colonel Aureliano
Buendia, who brings the second invasion of paradise with his thirty-two civil wars.
After the assassination of his sons, the Colonel opened Melquiades' room looking for
traces of a past before the war, and he found only rubble, trash and piles of waste,
accumulated over all the years of abandonment and, in the air that had been the purest
and brightest in the house, an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated. By way of
cleaning up these rotten memories, Garcia Marquez gives vent to the feelings of the
repressed past. He wants his people to create a new future which they can feel proud of,
for ever.
One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the history of Colombia since
independence. The novel shows the burden of Garcia Marquez who wants to constitute
a national identity, through the establishment of the Buendia family in the imaginary
town of Macondo. Garcia Marquez himself said in an interview that ―One Hundred
Years of Solitude can be read as an account of Latin American history‖ (Mendoza, 73).
Gerald Martin also suggests that ―the story of the Buendia family is obviously a
metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the
neocolonial period‖(97). Like the other countries in Latin America, Colombia gained
its postcolonial independence in the early nineteenth century; yet, their sense of
collective nationhood has still not been properly formed. This can be attributed to the
rise of oligarchic control in many Latin American countries after the Spanish
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domination: the stabilization of the nation state (often built on old colonial bureaucratic
infrastructures) occurred, for the most part, without grass-roots participation or any
form of democratic means and was often structured by autocratic authoritarian regimes.
In addition, its vague territorial aspect and political instabilities resulting in its
ambiguous spatial borders, complicate Colombia‘s rapport with the Continent.
At the beginning of the novel when Macondo is established, the founding
people are full of hope and optimism. They leave their original homeland with a view
to founding a town by the sea. However, after months of failure they decide to stop
travelling and simply establish a new city in the middle of nowhere:
Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men, with wives and children, animals and all
kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet
to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded
Macondo, so they would not have to go back. It was, therefore, a route that did
not interest him, for it could lead only to the past. (OYS 10, 11)
In fact, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran are relatives and their
marriage in their homeland is scandalized, as people believe that their offspring will be
cursed and be born with a pig‘s tail. This unfortunate situation is rendered more tragic
when Jose Arcadio Buendia kills Prudencio Aguilar, to defend his honour. Even though
the killing is later legitimized as a duel of honour, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar
continues to haunt him. Thus, Jose Arcadio Buendia thinks that it is time he and his
wife left the town and founded a new one, where people can live without their past. To
analyze Macondo as a nation in this light, can thus be compared to a journey back
through time, to the time when a nation first comes to exist, develop, and encounter
extraneous influence, both benign and malign, not unlike the emergence of Colombia
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which has started with hope after a long period of colonization and has withstood years
of postcolonial conflicts and violence.
Thus the Buendia family and their hometown Macondo, become a stage
whereby Garcia Marquez directs the history of the colonization of his nation. The name
Macondo itself appears in Jose Arcadio Buendia‘s dream on the night that he and other
founders decide to choose the location of their town. A vivid image of a town looms
large in this dream:
Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night, that right there a noisy city with
houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they
answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all,
but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. (OYS 24)
The fact that the town he dreams of consists of houses with mirror walls, is
symbolically revealing, as it can be interpreted that Macondo itself serves as a mirror,
its emergence reflecting that of the real nation of Colombia.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude the consequences of colonization are clearly
perceivable. For instance, the presence of Spanish Catholicism is symbolized in the
character of Father Nicanor Reyna, whom Don Apolinar Mascote brings to Macondo to
preside over the wedding between his daughter and Colonel Aureliano Buendia. As the
narrative is set during the turn of the twentieth century, the presence of colonial culture
is more like lingering remnants, a bundle of traces that outstay their welcome. This is
metaphorically perceptible in the figure of the priest himself: ―His skin was sad, with
the bones almost exposed, and he had a pronounced round stomach and the expression
of an old angel...‖ (OYS 86).
Another manifestation of colonialism can be seen in the figure of Fernanda del
Carpio, the wife of Aureliano Segundo, who comes from an old historic town,
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presumably Bogota itself, where the domination of colonial culture has made itself
strongly felt. According to the narrator,
Fernanda was a woman who was lost in the world. She had been born and
raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights
the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two
belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was
paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen. (OYS 210, 211)
The symbols of the colonial period, such as the coaches of the viceroys and the thirtytwo belfries, still remain in the city where Fernanda comes from. It is a sad city, where
people are subjected to the oppressive tradition of colonial heritage. It is thus not
surprising that, when Fernanda arrives in Macondo, the relative ease and freedom from
rules pester her. She needs to set down rules and conform to them in her daily
activities. After marriage, when she moves to live in the Buendia house, she tries to
impose regulations and protocols in everyday routines. For instance: ―She put an end to
the custom of eating in the kitchen whenever anyone was hungry, and she imposed the
obligation of doing it at regular hours at the large table in the dining-room, covered
with a linen cloth and with silver candlesticks and table service‖ (OYS 216). Even
though the rest of the family members tolerate her idiosyncrasy, they do not understand
her. This is because, before Fernanda‘s arrival, Macondo is still a relatively new town,
founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, in an attempt to free themselves
from the constraints of the town where they had been living. In this aspect, what
happens in Macondo or, to be exact, in the Buendia family, is a replaying of what
happens at the macrocosmic level: Macondo is a microcosmos, in which various
sources of interventions and forces all play their roles in determining the course of the
town, not unlike the birth and evolution of a nation like Colombia itself, especially
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when taking into account colonial and neo-colonial impositions upon its establishment
at large. This interplay between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic is also
suggested by Homi K. Bhabha who argues for ―redrawing the domestic space as the
space of the normalizing, pastoralizing, and individuating techniques of modern power
and police: the personal-is-the political; the world-in-the home‖(11). The main crux of
portraying these colonial characters is to show that the culture of Colombia is
contaminated and that the innocent arcadia created by Jose Arcadio Buendia has lost
its indigenous traits with the arrival of the colonial people.
After its independence, Colombia had been subjected to a series of political
conflicts, as the Conservatives and the Liberals struggled for absolute power in their
never-ending tug of war. This resulted in the War of a Thousand Days and La
Violencia. The significance of political uncertainties can be seen in Stephen Minta‘s
claim that ―perhaps the single most important aspect of Colombian history since the
country gained independence from Spain has been the nature and extent of the political
violence it has experienced‖(5). If the War of a Thousand Days caused an estimated
100,000 deaths (in a country whose total population then amounted to less than four
million), La Violencia led to the tragic demise of roughly a quarter of a million people.
The Conservatives wished to restore to Colombia its ‗Catholic Arcadia‘, with its policy
to support Spanish traditional legacy and Catholicism. The Liberals, on the other hand,
sought to modernize the country which they considered ‗backward‘.
It was after La Violencia, that One Hundred Years of Solitude was first
published. Thus it would not be too far-fetched to argue that the novel is, in part,
steeped in immediate political concerns, as Garcia Marquez attempts to make sense of
what his country has experienced. This inevitably leads to his contemplation of the
nationhood of Colombia after its independence from Spanish domination. War and
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violence then become an integral part of the novel, as they function as an integral part
of the history of his country. In other words, if history plays an important part in
constructing nationhood, war and violence certainly become part of Colombian history,
with which the author needs to reckon in his reflections on nationhood. For him, war
and violence seem to yield a disparate impact in Colombia: if they tend to signify a
sense of progress in the western world, marking a demise of oppressive regime and a
recognition of the demand of the oppressed, its counterparts in Colombia appear to
convey a sense of vicious cycle, a manifestation of things coming back full circle and
ready to start all over again. This view is supported by the endless, repetitious wars
between the Conservatives and the Liberals, which lead to no absolute, clearly defined
progress.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, these wars are also significant and become
part of the historical backdrop against which the Buendia family and Macondo are set.
It all begins with the arrival of Don Apolinar Moscote, a magistrate appointed from
Bogota to govern Macondo. As a unified embodiment of the Conservatives, the
representative of the current central government, he asks the locals to paint their houses
blue (i.e. the colour of the Conservatives) to celebrate national independence. It can
thus be argued that Don Apolinar Mascote brings national politics to the microcosmic
scene of Macondo, where, before his arrival, the boundaries between the Conservatives
and the Liberals or the connotations of blue and red had not been known. Colonel
Aureliano Buendia, for instance, needs to ask Don Apolinar Mascote to tell him the
differences between the two parties, since, for him, the boundaries between the two are
very vague. While Colonel Aureliano Buendia and his leftist supporters roam the
various regions of Colombia, trying to revolt against the oppressive regime, he asks his
nephew Arcadio, who is also a champion of Liberal causes, to impose order upon
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Macondo. However, in doing so, Arcadio ironically becomes a harsh, cruel ruler, who
is drunk with power. At one point, he is tempted to give the order to kill Don Apolinar
Mascote, whose daughter, Remedios Mascote, is Arcadio‘s own aunt. Colonel
Aureliano Buendia himself starts to feel the blurred boundaries between the
Conservatives and the Liberals when he is capture and sent to Macondo to be executed.
He perceives ―how the town has aged. The leaves of the almond tress were broken. The
houses painted blue, then painted red had ended up with an indefinable coloration‘‘
(OYS 127). The fact that the houses end up with a mixture of blue and red paints,
attests to the fact that perhaps the clear boundaries between the two parties do not exist.
This leads to Colonel Aureliano Buendia‘s gradual recognition that the belief that
people fight for their ideologies is absurd, as these ideologies cannot be defined in their
own terms. In order to define their ideologies, both the Liberals and the Conservatives
need to construct the image of their opposite party and base their dogmatic beliefs on
such image formation. In a conversation with his friend Colonel Gerineldo Marquez,
Colonel Aureliano Buendia asks:
―Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?‖
―What other reason could there be? Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. ―For
the great
Liberal party.‖
―You‘re lucky because you know why,‖ he answered. ―As far as I‘m concerned,
I‘ve come to realize only just now that I‘m fighting because of pride….‖
―Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn‘t have any meaning for
anyone.‖ (OYS 139)
Colonel Aureliano Buendia perceives that the underlying force for both the
Conservatives and the Liberals is pride, i.e. the belief that one‘s ideology is superior to
that of the other and, therefore, the need to dominate the other. This leads to the
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Colonel‘s recognition that the wars between the two sides are futile and that they are
not completely over until both of the parties cease taking arrogant pride in their
ideologies. As for as their ideologies are concerned, there is no difference between the
two parties. The irrelevance of ideology appears on several levels. Moscote identifies
the Conservative Party with the church, but it is the Conservatives who brutalize a
priest and the church. The Liberals, in the person of Arcadio, are anti-clerical. As
Amaranta remarks with sardonic wonder to Gerineldo Marquez, the Liberals go to war
to destroy the church and give prayer books as presents. ―They spend their lives
fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts‖ (OYS 106). The Liberals
rebuild the church destroyed by Conservative bombardment. Another example for
ideology vacuum is Colonel Aureliano Buendia, whose ideological base at the
beginning of the conflict is nil. Moved by a vague humanitarianism, offended by the
stealing of elections, Colonel Aureliano Buendia takes his twenty-one men to war after
a series of atrocities committed by the Conservative forces occupying the town, the
summary execution of Dr.Noguera, the brutal beating of Father Nicanor, the murder of
a woman by pounding her to death with rifle butts. The response is, to the brutality of
power, not for or against any abstract ideas or threats to liberty. When the Liberals
possess power, their atrocities are less only because they are weaker; Arcadio is
prevented from murdering Moscote only by the superior force of his grandmother.
When they are not weaker, they are fully as brutal. Colonel Aureliano Buendia
connives at the murder of a general who threatens his position as the leader of the
Liberal forces. Vargas allows the execution of General Moncada and destroys the house
of Moncada‘s widow. In the background, the politicians in black frock coats negotiate
and compromise jockey for places in Conservative administration and alter the
ideological terms of the struggle. The Colonel himself finally embraces the conflict as a
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struggle for power alone, with which the terms of ideological conflict have nothing to
do. With this realization, he brings the war to an end and withdraws from political life.
The disillusioned Colonel Aureliano is filled with an acute sense of life‘s
futility. After undertaking thirty-two armed uprisings, he comes to the conclusion that
he has squandered twenty years of his life to no purpose and withdraws to his
workshop, where he devotes himself to making the same little golden ornaments over
and over again. This routine represents recognition of the vanity of all human
enterprise: it is completely senseless, but for the Colonel it is no more absurd than his
previous activities and it is a means of filling in the time, while he waits for death. A
few moments before he dies, a circus parades down the street, and in it he sees a
tableau of his own life, a showy, ridiculous spectacle that has given way to an
emptiness as bleak as the deserted street. Garcia Marquez shows the futility of the civil
wars through the Colonel‘s life.
Garcia Marquez is deeply hurt by the hypocrisy of the leaders of the two parties
who fight for pride and power without any ideological base. But the innocent people
fanatically follow their leaders in ignorance. Garcia Marquez lays the crooked and
cunning nature of the leaders of the two parties bare before the people of his nation,
who hitherto have been identifying themselves with either of these two parties. It is
time for them to come out of the clutches of these parties and form a new identity for
themselves. The reconstruction of events related to the two major political parties will
bring the people to light, who would, hereafter, strive for the unity of the people, and
thereby make their nation march towards a new identity.
Garcia Marquez highlights the fact that neither the Conservatives nor the
Liberals manage to gain a firm foothold in Colombian politics, and it seems as if time
did not yield any progress but supported the belief that Colombia was locked up in its
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own stagnant political whirlpool, sinking yet deeper into bouts of violence and
bloodshed. This negative sense of unproductiveness can be seen in a dialogue between
Colonel Aureliano Buendia and his mother, Ursula, after he perceives that the town of
Macondo has considerably changed since he left to fight for the Liberal cause: ‗What
did you expect?‘ Ursula sighed. ‗Time passes.‘ ‗That‘s how it goes,‘ Aureliano
admitted, ‗but not so much‘ (OYS, 127). For Colonel Aureliano Buendia, even though
the whole town has changed, it is still unclear which party gains the upper hand and the
progress of his country is hanging by a thread. Years later, Ursula is able to reach the
same conclusion. When she sees Jose Arcadio Segundo locking himself up in
Melquiades‘s room, she is surprised, not as much owing to his haggard looks, as
because she perceives that Jose Arcadio Segundo is repeating the pattern to which her
husband Jose Arcadio Buendia and her son Colonel Aureliano Buendia have chosen to
commit themselves. To her surprise, the identical dialogue takes place: ‗What did you
expect?‘ he murmured. ‗Time passes.‘ ‗That‘s how it goes,‘ Ursula said, ‗but not so
much‘ ( OYS 341). If Colonel Aureliano Buendia‘s acute perception of stagnation is
generated by the nature of war and violence, Ursula‘s route to such recognition is
different. As a central character of the novel literally trying to hold the family together,
Ursula lives long enough to see both the birth and death of her numerous children and
grandchildren, as well as the prosperity and decline of her own town Macondo. Finding
herself repeating the same dialogue that she had with Colonel Aureliano Buendia many
years ago, Ursula comes to realize that there cannot be any progress. Colonel Aureliano
Buendia and his mother are not the only two characters in the novel who are able to
perceive that there is stagnation. Jose Arcadio Buendia, Ursula‘s husband, also
experiences the same feeling. After he sees the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, the man
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whom he killed before moving to settle in Macondo, he starts wondering about the
progress of Macondo. Talking with his son Aureliano, he asks:
―What day is today?‖ Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. ―I was thinking
the same thing,‖ Jose Arcadio Buendia said, ―but suddenly I realized that it‘s
still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the
begonias. Today is Monday too.‖[...] On the next day, Wednesday, Jose
Arcadio Buendia went back to the workshop. ―This is a disaster,‖ he said.
―Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the
day before. Today is Monday too.‖(OYS 80)
Like the Colonel and Ursula, who believe that there is stagnation, Jose Arcadio
Buendia believes that nothing has changed.
Garcia Marquez‘s burden is to present the true nature of the two major political
parties of Colombia to the people of his nation and thereby make them aware of the
futility of the civil wars fought by these two parties. He exposes the hypocrisy of the
Conservative Party through its underhand works of rigging the elections. ―That
night…he (Apolinar Moscote) ordered the sergeant to break the seal in order to count
the votes. There were almost as many red ballots as blue, but the sergeant left only ten
red ones and made up the difference with blue ones.‖( OYS 99). In yet another
incident, Arcadio Buendia, as the Governor of Macondo, behaves like a petty dictator,
and the deal that he strikes with the second Jose Arcadio, whereby he legalizes the
latter‘s right to that lands that he has usurped in exchange for the right to levy taxes,
exemplifies and reinforces the traditional pattern of oligarchic domination and,
significantly, is later ratified by the Conservatives. Committed to a programme of
radical reform, Colonel Aureliano Buendia finds himself not only fighting the
Conservatives but also at odds with his own party. The Liberal landowners react to the
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threat to their property by entering into secret alliances with the Conservatives,
financial backing is withdrawn, and eventually the party strategists drop all radical
policies from their program in order to broaden their support. When Arcadio of the
Liberal Party gets power in his hands, he becomes one of the cruelest rulers of
Colombia; the reign of the Liberal Party does not bring any peace or progress in
Colombia. Garcia Marquez wants to drive home the point that the two parties are not
different from each other. When Garcia Marquez says that it is not ideology but pride
which is the cause for the civil wars, it goes straight into the minds of his people. With
the civil war going on for several years, the people understand that there is no place for
progress. Garcia Marquez, by retailing the dark side of the civil wars, makes his people
understand that unless they wriggle out of the menace of the civil wars, it is next to
impossible for them to achieve national identity. He reconstructs the past so that his
people can carve out a new identity for their nation in future.
Garcia Marquez, in his own inimitable style, reconstructs the events which
show how Latin America was desperately dependent on the United States, for its
economic development. In the beginning, Jose Arcadio articulates the dream of a world
transformed by scientific and technological progress. In fact, it is the dream of
Colombia since independence, the aspiration to modernize on the model of the
advanced industrial nations, in order to achieve a similar level of development. In the
event, Macondo does come to enjoy a period of economic growth. But what worries
Garcia Marquez is that the modernization does not come about as the result of internal
development but is imported from the outside. Thus Jose Arcadio‘s original dream of a
city of mirrors, takes on an ironic significance in that Macondo‘s role becomes that of
reflecting the developed world. Though Macondo does undoubtedly prosper and
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progress, it continues to trail behind the rest of the world, and, furthermore, it finds
itself the victim of foreign economic and cultural imperialism.
Through the story of the later Macondo, Garcia Marquez illustrates Colombia‘s
neo-colonial status as an economic dependency of international capital, particularly
North American. No sooner had Macondo embarked on a phase of autonomous
economic development than it falls under the domination of North American capital
and incorporated into the world economy, as a source of primary products, becomes
subject to cycles of boom and recession, determined by the fluctuations of the
international market. Aureliano Segundo accumulates a fantastic fortune quite
fortuitously, thanks to the astonishing fertility of his livestock, and the whole
community enjoys an equally fortuitous prosperity generated by the banana boom.
Macondo‘s or Colombia‘s experience of prosperity is not due to any real economic
development but to the amazing richness of the region‘s natural resources and to
international demand for those resources. Hence, it is defenseless against sudden
slumps in the market. A symbol of such slumps is the great deluge that ruins Aureliano
Segundo by killing his stock. The extent to which the Colombian economy is
manipulated by foreign capital is indicated by the suggestion that the crisis was
deliberately engineered by the Banana Company, whose directors were so powerful that
they were able to control the weather. In the wake of his ruin, Aureliano Segundo is
reduced to running a lottery to make ends meet and is nicknamed Don Divina
Providencia. He comes, in fact, to personify Colombia or Latin America, whose
economic role in the world is passively to wait for the stroke of good fortune that will
bring it another period of prosperity. By portraying the economic dependency of Latin
America on the United States, Garcia Marquez wants his countrymen to stand on their
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own feet. He does not want his country to hide behind powerful nations but bring it to
the limelight with a new radiant face.
The episodes of the Banana Strike and military repression in One Hundred
years of Solitude constitute the highest point in Garcia Marquez‘s extensive chronicle
of Macondo. They are among the most forceful and dramatic in the entire saga of
Macondo. The whole episode is a vivid and dramatic scene, packed with socio-political
suspense, capped with sanguinary horror and followed by uncanny official silence and
a fantastical rain. It is the last occasion in which the Macondons and their Buendia
leaders collectively resist the meddling of a high-handed central government. With the
army occupation and repression, the townspeople lose once for all the scant political
autonomy still remaining with them. With the five-year cloudburst, courtesy of the
Banana Company, the decline of Macondo as a historical subject and vital entity is
greatly accelerated. The biblical windstorm that sweeps everything off, completes the
inexorable cycle of physical and spiritual degradation. Banana Strike is one incident
which makes Garcia Marquez lose control over his emotion and he bursts out. This is
unusual for Garcia Marquez. He narrates any event, be it tragic or comic, with a ‗brick‘
face. He maintains an unwavering, almost matter-of-fact tone throughout the novel. For
him, there is no difference between what is likely and what is not; he fulfills his
mission by telling as naturally of the dead as he does of the living, associating with the
greatest of ease the intangible with the tangible. His steadfastness reveals itself in his
unchanging, constant tone. From the first page to the last, he maintains the same tone
levels, without fluctuation or variation. But, this narrative tone loses its control and
results in a burst of emotion. In the last line of the description of the Banana incident,
Garcia Marquez‘s brick face crumbles down:
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The child saw a woman kneeling with her arms in the shape of a cross in an
open space, mysteriously free of the stampede. Jose Arcadio Segundo put him
up there at the moment he fell with his face bathed in blood, before the colossal
troop wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high,
drought-stricken sky, and the whorish world where Ursula Iguaran had sold so
many little candy animals. (OYS 312)
The term ―whorish world‖ comes out of Garcia Marquez‘s agitated heart, because he is
not able to control his emotion.
Garcia Marquez reconstructs the banana events with a vengeance to show the
true history which was manipulated by the authorities of the Banana Company and the
government. He vehemently demystifies the history of the subcontinent by rewriting
the events surrounding the Banana Company. He exposes the ruling establishment‘s
tradition of manipulating history, because the authorities hush up the massacre of the
striking banana workers and the roundup and disappearance of all potential subversives,
claiming that Macondo is a peaceful and contented community where social harmony
reigns. Later, young Aureliano, brought up by his uncle to regard Macondo as the
victim of the Banana Company‘s imperialist exploitation, discovers that the school
history books portray the company as a benefactor which brought prosperity and
progress. Enraged by the official manipulation of the Banana incidents, Garcia
Marquez is set out to debunk official myths by offering an alternative history. The
banana strike and its bloody aftermath were the major events in the area in which he
was born. He has said that he remembers getting conflicting reports of the strike from
friends and neighbours, some of whom claimed there were no dead; others said an
uncle, a brother had died. The banana episode in One Hundred Years of Solitude
integrates the memories of childhood with the adult‘s outrage at the combined forces of
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foreign imperialism, domestic injustice and military repression, exerted against the
legitimate desires of the people. Garcia Marquez wants to reconstruct this past, because
it is threatened with oblivion. Minta cites three issues with which Garcia Marquez is
concerned in his depiction of the massacre. First is his obvious sympathy for the
strikers and their position. The second concern is his desire to rescue, from a continuing
conspiracy of silence, an important event in the history of Colombia, ―for once you fail
to admit the existence of something important in your past, you are close to denying the
past any significance at all; and, from then on, it is easy to deprive the present and the
future of all significance too‖ (Minta 15). Garcia Marquez' third concern is to question
the reliability of historical accounts and records. The military leader against the strikers
at Cienaga, Cortes Vargas, presents a version of the occurrences that differs from that
of a strike leader, Alberto Castrillon; newspaper reports also vary from the
investigations of Colombian lawyer Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Marquez's version of the
events, serves as a reminder that all versions of the past are incurably fictitious.
Garcia Marquez‘s narrative traces the history of the banana company in
Macondo from the arrival of the company and its physical and social transformation of
the town, through the organization of the workers against the company, to the strike,
the massacre at the station, the final ―mopping up‖ operation conducted by the army
afterwards, and the expunging of the events from the secondary school history books.
The United Fruit Company was incorporated in New Jersey in 1899, in the merger of
the Colombia Land Company and the Boston Fruit Company. In the first decades of the
twentieth century, it established itself as a state within a state in the ―banana zone‖ on
the Atlantic coast of Colombia. The company constructed an irrigation network,
maintained its own railroad, telegraph network, retail stores, and fleet to carry its
cargoes to U.S. ports. The company owned 30,000 acres in the region and employed
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about 18, 000 men. In addition to the company, there were independent growers, all
Colombian nationals, dependent on the company‘s irrigation network and transport
facilities. The development of the banana industry produced an influx of workers both
domestic and foreign that acquired the contemptuous nickname ―la hojarasca‖ from the
longtime inhabitants.
The period was a boom period, but the position of the workers was not
altogether advantageous. Workers were paid on a piece-work system, by the number of
bunches of bananas cut or the amount of land cleared. For the most part, they were not
employed directly by the company or by individual growers, but worked under
foremen-contractors and migrated from one plantation to another. Part of their wages
was paid in scrip, for exchange at the company‘s commissaries, kept stocked by the
ships of the banana fleet, that must otherwise have returned empty from New Orleans.
The system of contract labour allowed both native growers and United Fruit to evade
the provisions of Colombian law intended to protect the workers by requiring
employers to provide medical care, sanitary dwellings, collective and accident
insurance. Since the contractors lacked capital, they were not legally required to
provide those benefits; since the growers did not employ the workers directly, neither
were they. In 1918, the workers of the region had exerted enough pressure on the
company to persuade it to promise to consult its Boston home office on the complaints
raised by the workers, principally demands for wage increases and the elimination of
scrip payments, as well as fulfillment of the company‘s obligations under the labour
laws for workers‘ conditions. Ten years later, the workers raised their demands again,
and the company refused to bargain, but again promised to consult.
In his account, Garcia Marquez gives us two strikes, though they do not seem to
be separated by ten years. The first occurs on Fernanda‘s return from incarcerating
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Meme and when Jose Arcadio Segundo comes out of the houses of French whores into
political action. The second phase of the strike begins after a period of demonstrations,
agitation and the fruitless pursuit of the authorities of the banana company that had
begun when Aureliano, Meme‘s son, was a year old. To be precise, the banana strike
broke out on 12 November 1928, after the United Fruit Company refused to meet the
demands of the workers. The next day, General Carlos Cortes Vargas, the newly
appointed military commander of the banana zone, arrived with a regiment of troops
from Santa Marta and Barranquilla. News of sabotage against the railway moved the
army into action; some 400 strikers were arrested. However, most of them were soon
freed by the civilian authorities to the dismay of Cortes Vargas. According to Ignacio
Torres Giraldo, a contemporary union leader and co-founder of the Socialist
Revolutionary Party, that none of the major leaders of the strike had been arrested by
4 December, gave the labourers hopes for a settlement regarding the demands. The
government indeed took some action against the strikers, but there was little evidence
of strong repressive measures before 6 December. Moreover, the authorities did not
seem to be in a position to enforce law. At the end of November, for example, the
Magdalena governor issued a decree forbidding meetings that could obstruct public
roads. Similarly, an arrest warrant against the leaders of the strike could not be
enforced. There was no shortage of propaganda during the strike. Cortes Vargas was
accused of censuring the press. However, any attempt to silence the press was not
effective. Raul Eduardo Mahecha, the prominent leader of the strike and an active
figure in the Colombian labour movement during the 1920‘s, particularly in the oil
industry, made good use of his own printing machine. The newspapers which supported
the strike were circulated in the banana zone as well as in Bogota. The newspapers
created a big impact on the incredulous crowd of illiterates. The fact that the strike
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enjoyed the widespread support of the merchants and the newspapers in the region, is
signified by Father Antonio Isabel‘s approval of the workers‘ demands: ―The workers
demanded that they not be obliged to cut and load bananas on Sundays and the position
seemed so just that even Father Antonio Isabel interceded in its favour, because he
found it in accordance with the laws of God‖ (OYS 302). In spite of the public support,
the company was non-committal in its actions. Garcia Marquez presents the incredible
evasions by the banana company by the disappearances and multiple disguises of Mr.
Jack Brown.
As soon as he found out about the agreement, Mr. Brown hitched his
luxurious glasses-in coach to the train and disappeared from Macondo
along with the more prominent representatives of his company.
Nonetheless, some workers found one of them the following Saturday in
a brothel and they made him sign a copy of the sheet with the demands
while he was naked with the women who had helped to entrap him. The
mournful lawyers showed in court that that man had nothing to do with
the company and in order that no one doubt their arguments they had
him jailed as an impostor. Later on, Mr. Brown was surprised travelling
incognito in a third-class coach and they mad him sign another copy of
the demands. On the following day he appeared before the judges with
his hair dyed black and speaking flawless Spanish. The lawyers showed
that the man was not Mr.Jack Brown, the superintendent of the banana
company, born in Pratville, Alabama, but a harmless vendor of
medicinal plants, born in Macondo and baptized there with the name of
Dagoberto Fonseca. (OYS 306, 307)
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In the higher court, the lawyers skilfully argued that the workers‘ demand lacked
validity because the company did not have, and never would have, any workers in its
service, because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis. Agreeing with
this position, the court solemnly decreed that the company did not have any workers.
When the Company did not come forward for the talks, the thirty-two thousand
workers went out on strike. The response of the Conservative government in distant
Bogota was a military occupation of the Banana Zone. The soldiers themselves were
eventually put to work cutting and shipping banana bunches as strike-breakers. In spite
of the repressive laws and constant intimidation, the workers stood fast and the
government declared a state of siege.
In his account of the strike proper, Garcia Marquez conflates a few events and
does not disguise the incipient violence in the workers‘ confrontation with the army. In
his account, the army arrives to break the strike, martial law is declared, the workers
gather at the station to await a mediator, are fired upon by the army after having had
read to them Decree No.4. which is signed by General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his
secretary, Major Enrique Garcia Isaza, and in three articles of eighty words he declares
the strikers to be a ―bunch of hoodlums‖ and authorizes the army to shoot to kill:
…the row of machine guns opened fire. Several voices shouted at the same
time: Get down! Get down! The people in front had already done so, swept
down by the way of bullets. The survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go
back to the small square, and the panic became a dragon's tail as one compact
wave ran against another which was moving in the opposite direction, toward
the other dragon's tail in the street across the way, where the machine guns were
also firing without cease. They were penned in, swirling about in a gigantic
whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicenter as the edges
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were systematically being cut off all around like an onion being peeled by the
insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns. The child saw a woman
kneeling with her arms in the shape of a cross in an open space, mysteriously
free of the stampede. José Arcadio Segundo put him up there at the moment he
fell with his face bathed in blood, before the colossal troop wiped out the empty
space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, drought-stricken sky, and the
whorish world where Ursula Iguaran had sold so many little candy animals.
(OYS 312)
When the massive barrage of gun fire broke out, the proprietor of a nearby hotel heard
someone screaming ―AY MI MADRE‖, a common Spanish exclamation, roughly
equivalent to ―Oh my God‖. Several witnesses reported having seen the bodies thrown
into trucks, which then headed toward the sea. A few months later, Miguel Urrutia
reveals that ―the Fruit Company had been directly paying off the military, lodging the
officers in hotel rooms and sending complimentary beer, food, and cigarettes to the
grunts‖(99).
In One Hundred years of Solitude, Jose Arcadio Segundo wakes up to find
himself on a nightmare train ride, with thousands of corpses and returns to a Macondo
in which no one believes anything has happened. The workers‘ demands have been
reduced and accepted, but the rains have begun and the search for the assassins and
incendiaries of Decree No.4 continues, until the union leaders are eliminated. The exact
number of casualties will probably never be known. There are various estimates given
by contemporaries and historians ranging from 47 to 2000. Cortes Vargas took
responsibility for 47 casualties.
What irks Garcia Marquez most in the entire history of Banana incidents is the
number of people killed in the strike and the United Fruit Company‘s ability to
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obliterate the entire happenings from the consciousness of Colombia. But his
conscience is awake and he wants to tell the truth to the world. He estimates the
number of casualties to be 3000. He himself admits that it is an exaggerated figure.
What makes him register such a boosted number? Garcia Marquez is shocked to learn
that the Banana Company is able to distort the number of casualties. The truth will
never come to light. Now it‘s time for Garcia Marquez to give a startling shock to the
authorities and the imperialists by recording an overstated number. Moreover, Garcia
Marquez expects that the number would perform a magic in the minds of the people of
Colombia. The number might make the Colombians to think that their own fellowColombians were once killed in large numbers like cattle because of the disunity
among themselves. The magic number, Garcia Marquez believes, would bring his
people together. The stain on Colombia, that the country is a house divided against
itself, would be wiped out once for all. A new Colombia will be born, which would be
like the paradisiacal Macondo founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia.
What pains Garcia Marquez is not the physical pain that is inflicted on the
Colombian workers but the attempt to fool the Colombians with a perverted history;
with a conspiracy of silence.
―There must have been three thousand of them,‖ he murmured.
―What?‖
―The dead,‖ he clarified. ―It must have been all of the people who were at the
station.‖
The woman measured him with a pitying look. ―There haven‘t been any dead
here,‖ she said. ―Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has
happened in Macondo.‖(OYS 313, 314)
Even the official statement echoed the same feeling of the woman.
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The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the
country by means of communication the government found at hand, was finally
accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their
families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains
stopped. (OYS 315).
A careful revision of the Banana Massacre reveals that the casualties were too high;
that Cortes Vargas and the army behaved ruthlessly; that in the final analysis the
arrogance of the United Fruit Company and its reluctance to come to terms with labour
demands were ultimately responsible for the tragic outcome. Even Jorge Eliecer Gaitan
comes out with many charges against the army: that the action of the army was
cowardly and planned; that the wounded were hopeless workers; that the dead bodies
were thrown into the sea; that the officers, including Cortes Vargas, were drunk; that
the women from Cienaga were forced to attend orgies; that the army acted not to
protect Colombian but US interests. Gaitan arrived in the banana zone on 18 July 1929
and stayed there for a few days. He held a mass interrogation and gave speeches before
the crowds. On his return journey to Bogota, he stopped whenever he could tell the
growing crowd about the massacre. Later he started a debate in the Lower House,
which lasted for fifteen consecutive days. Gaitan‘s serious allegations were widely
publicized by the contemporary press. Among Gaitan‘s witnesses in the 1929 hearings,
was the treasurer of Aracataca, Mr. Nicolas R. Marquez, maternal grandfather of the
baby boy Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like Gaitan there were others who made the events
related to the Banana massacre public. Alberto Castrillon, one of the leaders of the
strike, sent from prison a full report giving his version of the strike to the Congress,
soon published in book form. The Alcalde (the Mayor) of Cienaga, Victor Fuentes, who
had been accused by Cortes Vargas of supporting the strike, also published his own in
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July 1929; so did the Magdalena Governor, Jose Maria Nunez Roca. In 1931, Gregorio
Castaneda Aragon, a Magdalenense poet who held an official position during the strike
published his papers on the strike which contained accusations against Cortes Vargas.
But in spite of all the efforts made by persons of the various sections of the whole
nation, the Banana Company and the government authorities successfully enforced the
conspiracy of silence. The deluge ―decreed‖ by Mr.Brown, effaces any recollection of
the slaughter, just like the insomnia plague, which wiped out memory in the early
epoch of Macondo.
What irks Garcia Marquez more is not the banana massacre itself but the
portrayal of Banana Company in the school history books as the benefactor, which
brought prosperity and progress to the country. He was totally crushed upon learning
that the army did not support the Colombian but the US interests. The fact that the
government betrayed its own people is something indigestible to him. It has been
lingering and pestering in his mind ever since he came to know of this incident. He
unburdens this emotional torment by setting the record straight in One Hundred Years
of Solitude. He wants to defeat the conspiracy of silence by thinking the incident aloud.
It was the Colombian elite that was responsible for the suppression of the truth from the
collective memory of the people. As a member of the Colombian elite, Garcia Marquez
wants to atone for the wrongdoing committed by his people. With a vengeance, he
reconstructs all the incidents pertaining to the banana massacre with minute details to
show the truth to the world, and, thereby, he wants to give a new face to Colombia. He
plunges into the nightmare of neo-colonial Colombian history, as a strategy of
liberation: his task is to annihilate a past consuming itself from within and create a new
history free from any imperial traces.
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Linked with the Banana massacre is the arrival of the train at Macondo. Garcia
Marquez expresses his deep anguish that the railroad in his country has been controlled
by the imperial agents and used against the people of Colombia during the Banana
incident. Under the dictatorship of General Rafael Reyes ―British capital was, for the
first time, invested in Colombian railways in substantial amounts‖ (Frank 220). Not
surprisingly, this period saw the completion of the railway between Bogota and the
Magdelena River. Macondo was irreversibly linked to the outside world. But, of
course, that was only the start. ―As the transportation improvements of 1904 to 1940
began to knit together a national market, significant innovations occurred in other
economic sectors‖(Frank 232) and it was the nationalization of Colombia‘s railways
that made many such innovations possible. In the period of the strike against the United
Fruit Company, in particular, the reorganization of the railroads was a central issue of
American diplomacy in Colombia. The National City Bank and the First National
Bank of Boston refused to extend short-term credit until a railroad bill was passed. By
1931, they demanded, in their negotiations with the Colombian government, an even
greater control: ―that the railroad system be taken out of the hands of the government
and placed under the direction of professional management‖(Randall 25). In his
description of the banana strike, Garcia Marquez makes the implications obvious: the
same trains that send bananas and profits to the north, transport the murdered bodies to
the sea. There—both the government and the ‗professional management‘ hope---they
will disappear, even from history.
For the Colombians, the Banana incident is ever important. Today, in Cienaga‘s
central plaza, there is an impressive memorial to the victims of the United Fruit
massacre, a fifty-feet statue of an Afro-Colombian field worker, matchete in hand. For
simple reasons of accessibility, few non-Colombians will ever set eyes on that
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commemorative sculpture. But millions worldwide have read and will read about the
Banana strike and the repression in One HundredYears of Solitude and understand the
true history of Colombia.
Garcia Marquez reconstructs in his writings, the gory past related to the
Conservatives and the Liberal Parties and the resultant decadence of the nation.
Another major influence on Colombia was the Catholic Church, supported by the
Conservatives. Beginning with the ―spiritual conquest‖ of the New World by the clergy
who accompanied the explorers and conquistadors, the church played a dominant role
in the Spanish colonial system. The church aspired to and usually attained a ubiquitous
presence in the Spanish American society. The omnipresence of the church in the daily
lives of the colonialists was the result of the transfer of the Spanish symbiosis of Crown
and Church to the New World. Under the colonial system of Latin America, the church
ruled, while the state governed. Tannenbaum Frank provides an overview of the
church‘s role even in the daily affairs of the colonialists.
The church ruled the most intimate and personal needs of the individual from
the cradle to the grave and beyond. The church in the large city, in the small
town, in the village, and even on the pathways over the mountains was everpresent, for there would be cross or small chapel at every difficult passage, at
the top of every hill one climbed. The church was everywhere even when the
priest was absent. (56, 57)
Yet the cultural reality of Spanish America was quite heterogeneous. A variety of
factors were attributed to the heterogeneity of the Spanish American colonial society:
the cultural diversity of the European immigrants, Spain‘s regional diversity, the
immigration of Portuguese Jews fleeing from the Inquisition, the diverse social levels
of the immigrants, the culture of the clergy, the growing number of creoles, the
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importation of African slaves, the varieties of indigenous peoples and, of course, racial
mixtures resulting from the intermingling of the various ethnic groups. The influence of
the eighteenth century Enlightenment filtered into the Spanish American through the
Spanish officials and the ecclesiastics, and the colonial culture became even more
heterogeneous, and consequently, more conflictive. One of the chief tasks of the
Inquisition was to ensure that Enlightenment ideas did not stain the purity of the
Christian faith. ―The Inquisition in America never attained the widespread violence that
characterized it in Spain‖ (Crow 210). By law, African slaves were supposed to be
converted to Christianity at their port of entry, but with perfunctory instruction and
baptism impracticable, they assimilated Christian doctrines in a very imperfect fashion,
fusing elements of their African religion with Catholicism.
Against this intensified clash of cultures and ideologies in New Granada, Garcia
Marquez sets his Of Love and Other Demons. The novel is a sustained, direct and
complex exploration of colonialism. In addition to the direct and prolonged focus on
the theme of colonialism in Of Love and Other Demons, he deals more pointedly with
the role the Church played as a major accomplice in sustaining colonialism in Spanish
America. Garcia Marquez reconstructs the role of the church in colonial Spanish
America, because he has a deep concern for his people who follow their religion with
blind faith. He wants to create awareness among people that their faith in religion
should not be misused by the church. The novel differs from his previous treatment of
colonialism in that it presents significant positive forces to counter the enslaving forces
of colonialism. These positive forces are presented as both signalling and hastening the
decadence of colonialism. In Of Love and Other Demons, a distinction is made between
colonial mentality and certain legacies of the Old World which are potentially lifeaffirming and productive of freedom. The political and religious institutions of the
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ancient regime are shown in a negative light, while certain currents of other European
traditions, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are shown in a positive
light.
In the novel‘s foreword, the author-narrator explains that as a young reporter he
was assigned to the exhumation of the remains of those buried in the ancient cemetery
of the convent of Santa Clara, where workers opened a crypt from which flowed more
than twenty-five metres of beautiful copper-coloured hair attached to the skull of a
twelve-year old girl. Through this exhumation, Garcia wants to dig out the hideous side
of the church. This exhumation is nothing but the reconstruction of the events
surrounding the death of Sierva Maria through which Garcia Marquez wants to show
the other side of the church. He wants his people to have a new understanding of the
church.
Sierva Maria, a twelve year old girl, is the protagonist of this novel. Garcia
Marquez uses the relation between the girl and the church as the principal means to
explore the implications of the conflicts among the various cultural traditions present in
the colony. His focus is chiefly on the role of the Catholic Church and, perhaps, that of
Christianity itself, in the colony. Even more specifically, Garcia Marquez turns his
spotlight on the operations of the Inquisition in America as a means of illuminating the
fundamental tenets of the Church, the mindset of the officials and the consequences of
its practices.
In Of Love and Other Demons, Garcia Marquez presents colonial Christianity as
a religion of death. The church, not only brings about the death of Sierva Maria, but its
cruel treatment of her in the process of exorcising what it imagines to be her demons is
tantamount to producing death in life. She does not die from the rabid dog‘s bite; she
dies rather at the hands of the church. Logically, then, in her case, falling a victim to
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the church resembles the consequences of being bitten by a mad dog. In his last
conversation with Cayetano, Abrenuncio, the Portuguese Jewish physician, refers to
Christianity as a religion of death. The church is multifaceted and manifests its
presence in various ways. The power of the church is best symbolized in the bishop of
the diocese, Don Toribio. His residence in the oldest palace in the city, now decayed,
affords him an overview of all the church towers and the roofs of the principal houses
and military fortifications, as well as the view of the sea. Hence, just as the Church
plays a dominant role in colonial life, so does its highest official in the colony, enjoy a
commanding view of the city. The image of an ancient palace in ruins occupied by an
ancient prelate, who is chronically afflicted by severe attacks of asthma, symbolizes the
church‘s decadence. The bishop always appears as an asthmatic person. His excessive
weight and bad health suggest that the church exercises too much power for its own
good and for the good of those it was established to serve. Though imposing and
impressive in many ways, as is the bishop, it no longer serves but rather oppresses and
destroys those it should help. The church has abandoned its spiritual mission to pursue
worldly power instead, as the following characterization of the bishop indicates: ―The
Bishop was not a man given to celestial visions, or miracles, or flagellations. His
kingdom was of this world‖ (OLD 79).
Ironically, the church, whose task in Sierva Maria‘s case is to exorcise the
demons she is believed possessed by, not only creates the demons through its
tendentious interpretation of her acts, but makes her life a hell on earth. Although
Sierva Maria herself is not burned, her long hair, a symbol of beauty and vitality, is
unceremoniously cut and consigned to the flames: ―Sierva Maria saw the golden
conflagration and heard the crackle of virgin wood and smelled the acrid odor of
burned horn and did not move a muscle of her stony face‖(OLD 139,140). An imagery
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of death appropriate to those consigned to hell is also present there. Constrained by a
straitjacket, Sierva Maris is carried to the chapel by two naked slaves: at the end of the
mass she is uncovered and stretched out on a catafalque as if she were dead. Later,
When Sierva Maria described the experience to Cayetano, she identifies the ―devil‖
who presided over that hell:
Sierva Maria recounted her terrible experience in the chapel. She told him
about the deafening choirs that sounded like war, about the demented shouts of
the Bishop, about his burning breath, about his beautiful green eyes ablaze with
passion. ‗He was like the devil,‘ she said. (OLD 142)
Garcia Marquez‘s deep concern is that the church should give life to those who are in
the death bed; it should not kill people in the name of religion.
Sierva Maria, neglected by her parents, is brought up in the slave courtyard. She
learns three African languages and assimilates African customs. She is consecrated to a
Yoruban deity. Despite her white skin and her status as the daughter of a Creole
aristocrat, she has an African soul. This identity explains why she habitually lies: the
slaves, it is said, lie to whites, but not to each other. The tribal necklaces she wears are
an expression of her African identity, which is why she becomes disorderly and violent
when anyone tries to take them away from her. It is largely such overt manifestations of
her African identity that lead Josefa Miranda and others to perceive her as possessed by
demons. Her heresy, simply put, is a product of their ignorance and rigidly held
ideology, a fanatical institutionalized intolerance of otherness. Moreover, just as an
array of physicians, healers and barbers reopen and inflame the wound in Sierva
Maria‘s ankle, so do the sessions of exorcism produce the symptoms the bishop
interprets as demonic possession. The bishop also interprets Sierva Maria‘s reaction to
the abuse of the healers as a clear sign of satanic presence. He calls the marquis to his
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palace to advise him of the matter: ―It is an open secret that your poor child rolls on the
floor in obscene convulsions, howling the gibberish of idolaters. Are these not the
unequivocal symptoms of demonic possession?‖ (OLD 57). The bishop makes this
statement shortly after the narrator has described at some length the prelate‘s chronic
and severe asthma, ―He was, moreover, a man assailed by poor health; his stentorian
body permitted him to do very little on his own and was corroded by a malignant
asthma that put his faith to the test‖(OLD 53). That his asthma is incapacitating is
confirmed when he suffers an attack during a session of exorcism:
Sierva Maria, beside herself with terror, shouted too. The Bishop raised his
voice to silence her, but she shouted even louder. The Bishop took a deep
breath and opened his mouth again to continue the exorcism, but the air died
inside his chest and he could not expel it. He fell face forward, gasping like a
fish on land, and the ceremony ended in an immense uproar. (OLD 141)
The juxtaposition of the bishop‘s charges that the humanly induced illness of Sierva
Maria is a sign of demonic possession with the pointedly lengthy description of his
illness suggests that the real demons are the church officials, who possess the simple
souls in their clutches.
Throughout the text, Garcia Marquez gives the evidence that demonic
possession is the result of Sierva Maria‘s upbringing on the slave courtyard. When the
bishop reviews Sierva Maria‘s conduct, such as her singing of ―demonic‖ songs,
mimicking other voices and making herself invisible to the abbess alone, Cayetano
responds succinctly, summing up the true explanation of Sierva Maria‘s acts: ―‘I
believe, however,‘ said Delaura, ‗that what seems demonic to us are the customs of the
blacks, learned by the girl, as a consequence of the neglected condition in which her
parents kept her‘‖(OLD 97). Abrenuncio, referring to the cruelty of the process of
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exorcism, comments on the Inquisition‘s ferocity in comparison with the benign
religious practices of the black slaves:
‘There is not much difference between that and the witchcraft of the blacks,‘ he
said. ‗In fact, it is even worse, because the blacks only sacrifice roosters to their
gods, while the Holy Office is happy to break innocents on the rack or burn
them alive in a public spectacle.‘(OLD 76)
In his reconstruction of the colonial church of Spanish America, Garcia
Marquez shows the dark side of the church. He exhorts the Colombians to use their
reason in following their religion and cautions them against blind faith. He wants to
give a new meaning to the religion by combining it with knowledge and reason.
Abrenuncio stands for knowledge and reason. As a Portuguese Jew on whom the
Inquisition maintains a file, he represents the ever fragile tradition of freethinking and
rationality. As a physician, he is also an empiricist and pragmatist, concerned with
observation and consequences. He is open to experience and capable of forming
judgments that do not fall clearly into any tradition. But his association with reason is
evident from the books he keeps in his library. His name Abrenuncio, composed of the
Spanish words abre (―he opens‖) and nuncio (―papal messenger‖) refers to the role
Abrenuncio plays in opening Cayetano, the ―papal messenger‖, to more ample
perspectives. His name also carries the word ―renuncio‖ which means in Spanish ―to
renounce‖. What he renounces is the blind faith in Christian religion which leads to
death. His conversations with Cayetano reveal both the traditional aspects of the
priest‘s ideology and his potential for liberation from the most inhumane of the
church‘s doctrines. Thus, it is through the character of Abrenuncio, that Garcia
Marquez wants to demonstrate that blind faith in religion results in death, whereas
religion combined with reason and knowledge affirms life.
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Garcia Marquez deplores that church sometimes becomes the supporter of
certain superstitious beliefs. The eclipse symbolizes the extension of medieval religious
values into the colonial period. Ironically, the bishop, who is the maximum
representative of such values, perceives the eclipse as a special occasion, and he invites
Cayetano to witness the event with him at his palace. ―Father Cayetano Delaura was
invited by the Bishop to wait for the eclipse beneath the canopy of yellow bellflowers,
the only place in the house with a view of the ocean sky‖(OLD 95). The young priest
stares too long at the eclipse and afterwards wears a patch over one eye. The
description of the eclipse and its effect on Cayetano alternate with his efforts to
persuade the bishop that what has been interpreted as demonic possession in Sierva
Maria‘s case is simply the result of neglect by her parents, her upbringing in the slave
courtyard and her mistreatment at the hands of the church. This is the occasion when he
suggests that the convent records are more useful in revealing the abbess‘ mentality
than Sierva Maria‘s condition. The bishop‘s rejection of these arguments and his
insinuation that Cayetano is bordering on rebellion dramatizes the lack of light, the
intellectual and moral darkness that the church typifies. When Cayetano suggests that
the common people err in associating society‘s ills with the eclipse, the bishop
conjectures that they may be right. Garcia Marquez is anguished that the church that
should stand for the life of the people, kills Sierva Maria because of its superstitious
beliefs. The reconstruction of events related to the colonial church will create a new
awareness in the minds of the people who would, hereafter, follow religion with reason
and faith.
From the very moment of contact between Europe and the Americas, the history
of the peoples of the Americas began to be rewritten using a European interpretive
framework. As Jose Hernan Cordova has pointed out, ―the absence of reciprocal
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understanding with the Indians left Columbus free to impose his own meanings on
everything‖ (66). Thus one of the earliest historical documents of the Americas,
Columbus‘s journal, speaks not of the true history of the Americas, but of a European
interpretation of that history. Garcia Marquez explores this phenomenon in Autumn of
the Patriarch, when the moment of contact is retold from the perspective of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas. As an anonymous indigenous witness to the
contact explains to the Patriarch:
―… we didn‘t understand why the hell they were making so much fun of us
general sir since we were just as normal as the day our mothers bore us and on
the other hand they were decked out like the jack of clubs in all that heat … and
they shouted that they didn‘t understand us in Christian tongue when they were
the ones who couldn‘t understand what we were shouting.…‖ (AOP 39)
The Europeans make fun of the natives because they are unable—or unwilling—to
interpret Latin America‘s reality with any lens other than that which is based on a
European framework. Therefore, early historical documents such as Columbus‘ journal
characterize the indigenous Americans as different or ―other‖ based on a Europeancentered world view, and this indigenous ―otherness‖ becomes ingrained in the history
of the Americas. During the colonial period, efforts to rewrite the history of the
colonized, took place all over the world. Frantz Fanon writes of this effort on the part of
the colonizer in his book The Wretched of the Earth: ―Colonialism is not satisfied with
snaring the people in its net or of draining the colonized brain of any form or substance.
With a kind of perverted logic, it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people
and distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it‖ (149). This colonial effort to manipulate
history was done with the intention of convincing ―the indigenous population that it
[colonization] would save them from darkness‖ and that if ―the colonist were to leave
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they [the indigenous population] would regress into barbarism, degradation, and
bestiality‖ (Fanon 149). What Fanon is implying, and what colonial governments
recognized, is that without a clear sense of their true history, the colonized cannot rebel
against the colonizer. Because their pre-colonial history has been manipulated, the
colonized have no basis for imagining a positive postcolonial future, and thus the
possibility of revolution is remote.
One of the important truths which the nation‘s textbooks seek to cover up, in
The Autumn of the Patriarch, is the truth of the Patriarch‘s origins. For example, when
the school textbooks mention the history of the Patriarch‘s birth, they ―attributed [to his
mother Bendicion Alvarado] the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to
any male …‖ (AOP 44). Beyond this reference to the Patriarch‘s apparently
miraculous conception, it is said that ―all trace of his origins had disappeared from the
texts …‖ (AOP 44). In fact, much of the Patriarch‘s effort to manipulate the history of
the nation involves obscuring his own origins and creating a false past for himself. One
of the most prominent examples of this takes place during the very same scene of
contact previously mentioned between Europe and the Americas. The key to
understanding the Patriarch‘s use of colonial techniques in the domination of the people
in this scene is the fact that the Patriarch himself is present—and not only present but in
power—at the moment of first contact. The Patriarch is described as ―evok[ing] again
and reliv[ing] that historic October Friday when he left his room at dawn and
discovered that everybody in the presidential palace was wearing a red biretta …‖
(AOP 38). Unable to understand what has happened to his nation, the Patriarch finally
finds someone ―to tell him the truth general sir that some strangers had arrived who
gabbled in funny old talk;‖(AOP 39) and, being ―so confused that he could not decide
whether that lunatic business came within the incumbency of his government,‖ (AOP
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40) the Patriarch apparently allows the colonization to begin. So as not to dispute the
nation‘s official history which places the Patriarch at the scene of Columbus‘s landing,
the regime obscures the Patriarch‘s past by creating multiple birth certificates for the
dictator. At one point, three separate birth certificates are found for the Patriarch, ―and
on all three he was conceived three times on three different occasions, given a bad birth
three times thanks to the artifices of national history which had entangled the threads of
reality so that no one would be able to decipher the secret of his origins …‖ (AOP 141).
This passage explicitly reveals the way in which history has been manipulated by the
regime. The Patriarch‘s origins have been destroyed so as not to refute the official
history which dictates that the Patriarch has ruled for hundreds of years.
According to Fanon, the regime has distorted the history in order to make it
impossible for the people to imagine a time before the Patriarch. The Patriarch has no
origin, he has simply always been, and thus it is nearly impossible for the people to
imagine that he will not simply always be. Just as the manipulation of history by
colonial powers prevents the colonized from imagining a potentially bright postcolonial future, so too has the regime‘s manipulation of history impeded the people‘s
ability to imagine a positive post-Patriarch future. It could, perhaps, be argued that the
Patriarch‘s description of the contact does not represent the official history of the nation
as constructed by the regime; that it does not represent an attempt to manipulate
history, but rather expresses the addled workings of a mind which has crumbled under
the weight of absolute power. However, there is some evidence to indicate that
whatever the Patriarch conceives to be the history of the nation becomes, before long,
the nation‘s official history. This can best be seen at a later point in the novel when the
Patriarch, reflecting on a distant memory, realizes that ―not even he himself could have
been sure with no room for doubt whether they were his own memories or whether he
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had heard about them on his bad nights of fever …or whether he might have seen them
in prints in travel books … but none of that mattered, God damn it, they‘ll see that with
time it will be the truth …‖ (AOP 161). Thus the Patriarch transforms his own
memories into the truth— into the official history of the nation—regardless of the
source or accuracy of those memories. And, it seems, the Patriarch‘s version of history
is rarely challenged:
… he [the Patriarch] put an end to all disagreement with the final argument that
it didn‘t matter whether something back then was true or not, God damn it, it
will be with time. He was right, because during our time there was not one who
doubted the legitimacy of his history, or anyone who could have disclosed or
denied it because we couldn‘t even establish the identity of his body, there was
no other nation except the one that had been made by him in his own image and
likeness where space was changed and time corrected by the designs of his
absolute will, reconstructed by him ever since the most uncertain origins of his
memory as he wandered at random through that house of infamy…. (159)
In this way, the Patriarch‘s presence at the moment of contact can be understood as
both a distortion of memory caused by the corruption of power, as well as a
representation of the official history which the regime constructs for the people in order
to impede their ability to form a revolutionary movement. There is no difference
between the Patriarch‘s memories and the official history of the nation, and therefore
the Patriarch‘s memory of colonial contact is historically accurate, according to the
official version of events. By tracing his origin back to the moment of contact, the
Patriarch becomes the beginning of the nation. According to Fanon: ―The colonist
makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning:
‗We made this land‘ ‖ (14). The nation, in its modern form, begins with the Patriarch.
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Therefore he, like the colonist, ―is the guarantor for its [the nation‘s] existence: ‗If we
[the colonists] leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages‘ ‖
(Fanon 14). The Patriarch echoes this very sentiment, saying ―when I finally die the
politicians will come back and divide up the mess the way it was during the time of the
Goths‖ (AOP 159). Not surprisingly given the level of historical manipulation achieved
by the Patriarch‘s regime, the people come to believe that the Patriarch really is the
beginning and the end, at times questioning ―what‘s going to become of us without him
…‖ (AOP 27). The people are kept in the dark as to the true history of their nation, and
because of this they come to believe that the Patriarch really is the beginning and that
his reign ended the time of the Goths; in fact, they cannot imagine the nation without
him. This inability to imagine the future without understanding the past is not unusual.
As Ngugi wa Thiong‘o writes:
An oppressed class, or nation, that believes in itself, in its history, in its destiny,
in its capacity to change the scheme of things, will obviously be stronger in its
class and national struggles for political and economic survival. Similarly an
oppressed class or nation that loses faith and belief in itself, in its history, in its
capacity to change the scheme of things, becomes weakened in its political and
economic struggles for survival. Such a class or nation can only work out its
destiny within the boundaries clearly drawn by the dominating class and nation.
(54)
In Autumn of the Patriarch, the people cannot believe in themselves or their history
because they are prevented from understanding their true history and are instead fed
lies about the past. Because of this, the Patriarch is ―the only one among us [the people]
who knew the real size of our destiny …‖ (AOP 97) The Patriarch controls the destiny
of the people—and thus naturally controls their ability to form a revolutionary
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movement—by preventing the people from having access to their past. Ngugi wa
Thiong‘o writes of the subversive power of history. He says that ―Change, movement,
is … the eternal theme in history.… Therefore no society is ever static.… History is
ever reminding The Present of any society: even you shall come to pass away‖ (96). By
perpetually wearing the gold spur which official history records as a gift from
Columbus, the Patriarch is attempting to create the image that history is, in fact, static.
History tells the story of change, but, as Ngugi wa Thiong‘o explains, official history
does just the opposite:
Tyrants and their tyrannical systems are terrified at the sound of the wheels of
history.… So they try to rewrite history, make up official history; if they can
put cotton wool in their ears and in those of the population, maybe they and the
people will not hear the real call of history, will not hear the real lessons of
history. (96, 97)
Evidence of change—of the dynamic nature of history—is a source of hope and a call
to revolution in an authoritarian state. In light of this, the Patriarch‘s decision to ―chop
down all trees in village squares to prevent the terrible spectacle of a Sunday hanged
man … [prohibit] the use of public stocks, burial without a coffin, everything that
might awaken in one‘s memory the ignominious laws that existed before his power,‖
(AOP 161) can be seen as an attempt to erase all evidence of change. Despite the fact
that evidence of the ―ignominious laws‖ of the past could potentially improve the
image of the dictator‘s regime, the Patriarch recognizes that all evidence of change is
potentially subversive. Thus he adorns himself and the pages of the official history with
evidence of stasis, while destroying all evidence of history‘s dynamic nature. The
people are unable to recognize that the potential for change always exists; they are
unaware that history proves this fact, because the only history which they have been
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exposed to is the one which has been manipulated and distorted by the regime, and
therefore they are unaware of their own potential to bring about the change they so
desperately need. In distorting the past, the regime seems to have created a real fear
amongst the people that, without the Patriarch, the nation would ―regress into
barbarism, degradation, and bestiality‖ (Fanon 149). Following the death of the
Patriarch‘s perfect double, Patricio Aragones, the Patriarch is described as having
watched as one woman ―embraced the perfumed corpse sobbing aloud that it was him,
my God, what‘s going to become of us without him …‖ (AOP 27). This sentiment is
echoed later in the novel when the people say of the dictator‘s rumoured death that ―we
no longer wanted it to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become
of us without him, what would become of our lives after him …‖ (AOP 207). History
has been distorted and destroyed to such an extent that, in the minds of the people, life
before and after the dictator is equally unimaginable. The regime‘s policy of historical
manipulation has been so effective that, in the end, the people cannot even bring
themselves to wish for the Patriarch‘s death, let alone create a revolutionary movement
to bring that death about. Unfortunately for the people of the nation, the Patriarch‘s
death does not necessarily imply an end to the manipulation of history by the
government. In fact, following the Patriarch‘s supposed first death, one of the first acts
of those who step in to lead in the absence of the Patriarch, is to destroy the history of
his existence: ―… he watched the ferocious leaders who dispersed the procession with
clubs and knocked down the inconsolable fishwife, he watched the ones who attacked
the corpse… ‖ (AOP 24). Patricio Aragones appears primarily in the initial pages of
the novel. The incredible physical resemblance between the Patriarch and Patricio
Aragones, allows the Patriarch to use Aragones as a stand-in at public events. This
continues until Aragones is mistakenly assassinated in place of the Patriarch :
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...they were destroying the lair of power forever, knocking over the papiermache Doric capitals, velvet curtains and Babylonic columns crowned with
alabaster palm trees … annihilating that world so that in the memory of future
generations not the slightest memory of the cursed line of men of arms would
remain… (AOP 25)
It is not clear whether the leaders mentioned in this passage are acting on their
own or on the orders of the heirs to the regime, but what is clear is that an attempt is
being made to destroy the memory of the Patriarch‘s reign. Once again history is being
destroyed, and therefore the people are being robbed of their opportunity to learn from
the Patriarch‘s reign and draw strength from the proof of his mortality. Although the
passage above describes events which take place after the Patriarch‘s first death, there
is no reason to think that the same series of events will not be carried out following his
actual death at the end of the novel. After all, in many other respects the nation‘s
reaction to the Patriarch‘s actual death is identical to their reaction to his first, and thus,
it is in fact probable that the heirs to power will destroy any memory of the Patriarch‘s
reign of infamy before continuing their exploitation of the people as if nothing has
happened. Unless the people find a way to reconnect with the true history of their
country, they will be just as powerless under the new regime as they were under the
Patriarch.
Understanding one‘s history is vital to the formation of revolutionary
movements in neocolonial societies, and unless the people of postcolonial nations
immerse themselves in their history and draw strength from that history, they are
doomed to repeat the same neocolonial pattern enacted under the Patriarch indefinitely.
The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged, only if
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he decides to put an end to the history of colonization, in order to bring to life the
history of the nation, the history of decolonization.
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Chapter IV
Violence: A Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Nations
Colonialism, the most complex and traumatic relationship in human history, has
left its mark on international relations, the social relationships within nations, and the
ideologies and imaginaries of virtually all the peoples of the world. The collective
memories that members of the formerly colonized and the formerly colonizing
countries hold about the colonial times, and particularly about colonial violence, still
permeate their current relationships. On the one hand, these memories certainly weigh
on diplomatic contacts between the formerly colonized countries and their former
colonizers. On the other hand, they also undermine the inter-group relationships within
societies or nations. This violent past also has enduring consequences on the former
colonized people‘s wellbeing. The way this violent past is collectively remembered
today, is therefore a crucial factor for understanding the contemporary instances of
inter-group conflict, prejudice, stigmatization, and racism.
In Colombia, violent conflicts and crimes of violence have become a permanent
characteristic of its society and it can be said that violence is anchored in the culture of
the society. A culture of violence includes all socio-cultural structures and symbols that
are connected with, produced by, and perpetuate violence. Obviously, in a country like
Colombia, with a long history of civil wars and violence, almost every aspect of life has
been shaped and marked by this in one way or another. In addition to numerous illegal
violent actors, counteracted in the sphere of legality by the state security forces and
legal private security services, this system includes a highly complex network of
coalitions and confrontations between these actors, along with never-ending
negotiations of pacts and compromises. It also features a market order adulterated by
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pressure and coercion and a legal system devoid of its enforcement component, that is
essentially amputated. It is said that violence and coercion are now fixed components of
Colombia‘s social and political machinery and can no longer be simply removed from
it. This means that, along with all social sub-systems, violence too is constantly
replicated in that country.
There are three indicators that point to a culture of violence in Colombia. These
are structural indicators that arise from the nature of violence in Colombia (frequency,
intensity, etc.); mental indicators that suggest that there is a widespread propensity to
violence; and a lack of taboos and prohibitive rules that would limit the use of violence.
As for as the structural factors are concerned, it must be noted that violence is
ubiquitous in Colombia.
There is hardly a single social sphere, geographical location, or group that has
not been affected by violence. Be it in the cities or remote rural areas, the social
microsphere of the family or the macro sphere of politics, the lower, middle, or
upper class, the judiciary or any business sector, violence is everywhere.
(Sanchez 45)
The striking thing about Colombia is that a host of organizations and groupings
operate outside the law and employ coercion and violence in pursuit of their aims. In
doing so, they generally operate in a way that is both coldblooded and professional.
This professionalism is partly the result of mutual imitation and learning processes. For
example, it is obvious that the paramilitary forces learned different forms of violence
from the guerrilla organizations, which already had years of previous involvement in
partisan struggle and dubious sources of funding, before the paramilitaries came into
existence. In any case, the development of a wide range of techniques of violence,
whether based on personal experience or adopted from others, presupposes a socio-
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cultural ambience that does not stigmatize the unauthorized use of violence but accepts
it as one of several ways of attaining esteem and success.
People resort to extreme forms of violence even for insignificant conflicts that
can be solved with an act of compromise. There is a glaring discrepancy between the
brutality of means and the modesty of the ends pursued, along with torture, mutilation
of corpses, and the like, which are by no means exceptional in this country, but an
everyday occurrence. Such excesses, sometimes, escalate into orgies of violence. This
is possible only in the context of a society in which the taboo, limiting the unauthorized
use of violence, has not only been broken but, in some social groups and sectors, has
been practically removed and replaced by a cult of annihilation of enemies. The
annihilation of enemies leads to the violence--promoting patterns of thinking which is
anchored in their collective consciousness: first and foremost the friend-foe dichotomy
that enjoys a central place in the Colombian realm of imagination, in all social classes.
Originally associated with the rivalry between the two traditional political parties,
conservatives and liberals, thinking in terms of friend and foe, has now become a
matter of course and permeates social discourse on all social planes, from micro to
macro. There is no urban district, region, or village, without a sworn enmity between
two or three main actors, be they individuals, family clans, or organized groups, that
shapes the life of society and compels the remaining actors to take sides and fall in line.
Even in new settlements founded by war refugees far away from the central civil war
action, the well-known pattern of division is reproduced almost automatically, resulting
before long in confrontations and moves by mutually hostile groups to disassociate
themselves from one another. According to Gonzalo Sanchez, in Colombia, ―the
historical continuity with which enmities are cultivated and war is repeatedly waged is
sufficient to identify the existence of a culture of violence‖ (76). Massacres,
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abductions, the circulation of lists of victims before the actual act of violence is
committed, and the key role played by informers are not new phenomena spawned by
the most recent wave of violence but patterns of behaviour and role models that can be
traced far back into the past. What is remarkable is that these have survived almost
unchanged through the transition from a colonial rule to a highly urbanized social
structure and the associated radical transformation in values, from a highly religious to
a largely secularized society. This can only be explained by their being firmly anchored
in the Colombians‘ cultural memory. Many young men are unable to forget that they
lost their fathers in an arbitrary act of violence. Even if they do not know the killers, the
recollection of this crime is stored in their memory and fills them with a dull, aimless
hatred that can discharge at random.
Killing someone because of an insult to one‘s honour is not only considered
legitimate but is essential in some groups and circles, if one wishes to avoid
jeopardizing one‘s reputation. A further consequence of dividing the social
environment into friends and enemies, is the tendency to be intolerant, to think in
categories of black and white and to disdain nuances and compromises. On the one
hand, this leads people to seek the solution to problems in direct confrontation with the
opponent, rejecting outside mediation. On the other, it casts a dubious light on all those
who fail openly to take the side of one party or the other. Those who don‘t attack their
enemies are termed as ‗traitors‘. Another phenomenon that promotes the arbitrary use
of violence is the macho cult that is widespread in Colombia. Reverence for imperious
and brutal individuals is common in the rural areas of Colombia. Special deference is
paid to people who had gained reputations as cruel butchers and inhuman monsters,
during their lifetime. Studies on the Violencia period describe ―how gang and guerrilla
leaders who committed repeated massacres not only inspired fear and terror among the
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peasants, but were also admired by them‖ (Sanchez 53). Generally, on perusing the
literature in search of motives and attitudes that stimulate violence, one gains the
impression that the broad strata of Colombia society have little regard for either life or
death. For example, the sicarios or the professional killers are prepared to kill any
stranger for even small sums; there are frequent massacres and kidnappings that often
end in the death of the kidnapped person; homicide is the most common cause of death
among young men between the ages of 15 and 35. Yet this disregard for life,
somehow, extends to death as well. That explains why in the Violencia period, the
mutilation and desecration of corpses was nothing unusual, or why after massacres the
dead were often left lying on the ground or buried hastily in a pit, that is, without any
kind of funeral rite.
Another factor that encourages the spread of a culture of violence is the lack of
restrictive taboos and informal sanctions against the unauthorized use of violence. This
shortcoming is apparent in Colombia in the way the subject of violence is treated, both
generally in public discussion and in relation to specific individuals. First, as far as
general discussion, in public and especially in the mass media, is concerned, the
absence of systematic efforts to criticize and delegitimize the illegal use of violence is
striking. It may be possible to explain this as a reaction of fatigue to the never-ending
series of kidnappings, and murders, and it may reflect a certain resignation and
submission to the inevitable. Anyhow, the fact is that the media adopts a critical tone
only in exceptional cases of particularly brutal or spectacular acts of violence. They are
more preoccupied with and pay more attention to the conflict narrative than to the use
of violence. They warn against possible further escalation and polarization, speak about
an increased willingness to negotiate and compromise on all sides, and give expression
to the general longing for peace by calling for an end to the hostilities. However, they
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hardly question the use of violence as such, which is the mode in which the conflict is
played out. This has two consequences. Since acts of violence are reported only in a
routine tone, no public discussion takes place on the extent to which they can be
described as fair or unfair, courageous or cowardly, legitimate or illegitimate. Whether
certain minimum rules of engagement are adhered to, whether the violence is directed
at innocents or combatants, whether people are attacked frontally or shot dead from
behind, is all seemingly uninteresting. The only thing that matters is the outcome of the
fighting. Who won, who is the victor in a zone, who must vacate it? The second
consequence is that fixing attention on negotiations and a possible peace deal, lead to
past injustice being largely blanked out and played down. Somehow, the inflation of
illegal acts of violence and the swift forgetting of them are two sides of the same coin.
Where all hope is directed towards an early end to a violent conflict, little space is left
for reviewing, analyzing, and expiating past crimes. Naturally, dispensing with punitive
justice involves the risk that some time later the violent monster, which has been lulled
by a peace deal but by no means stripped of its lethal claws, will reawaken and strike.
Thus in Colombia, the unauthorized use of violence is neither an emphasized right nor
a generally decried outrage. Basically, there is no public discourse on violence.
Garcia Marquez is worried that there is not even a general discourse on the
subject of violence. People are generally aware of it, primarily because it is constantly,
and not infrequently excessively, perpetrated. This, in turn, is only possible because of
a widespread tacit tolerance and acceptance of the use of physical force to solve private
and social problems, an attitude that can be certainly described as a culture of violence.
This is based on mental stereotypes and models that stimulate aggression and the
independent, unauthorized enforcement on the one hand and on the absence of taboos
and informal norms that inhibit or limit violence on the other.
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Massacres and Sicarios are two forms of violence in Colombia which differ
from one another in their processes and the aims they serve. Massacres spread terror
and are a form of show of strength, while the sicario, or contract killer, offers violence
as a service for sale. However, they have a number of features in common, the most
important of which is that they constitute extreme forms and each carry a specific
motive for violence to its extreme. Acts of violence in which more than four people die
are termed massacres. The dead may be a family, a youth group, or an entire village.
Sometimes the number of victims can run into hundreds. The death squads and
paramilitaries in particular have a reputation for spreading fear and terror by means of
selective massacres. Massacres often follow a specific sequence of events. They do not
befall the unsuspecting victims out of the blue but announce themselves, or are
announced through vague rumours, threats, and forewarnings. The collective act of
violence often takes place in the evening, when the inhabitants of a farm, several
houses, or a village are surprised over supper or when engaging in some other
communal activity. Not infrequently, the attackers wear uniform, and they are always
heavily armed. In the countryside, the targeted group of houses is often surrounded so
that no-one can escape. All the occupants are then herded into the central square and a
list of names provided by informers is read out. The accused, usually men, are singled
out and taken elsewhere. Shots and cries of pain signal to the remaining villagers that
these men have been butchered. When the attackers have made off and the survivors
make their way to the scene of the murderous events, what awaits them is a heap of
lifeless, often badly disfigured, corpses. In an isolated settlement, it can be days before
neighbours notice that a massacre has taken place. In addition to this ―normal‖ pattern,
there are versions involving even greater cruelty. Sometimes, the butchers take their
time and torture victims before killing them. While women and children are generally
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spared, there are instances of women being raped and children being killed, to prevent
the possibility of revenge when they grow up.
The violence of the sicarios, on the other hand, usually takes the form of the
assassinations of individuals rather than large-scale carnage. In the cities, victims are
generally attacked with firearms from the back of a motorcycle. Sicarios are young men
between the ages of 15 and 25 – working in groups – who specialize in earning their
money from contract killings. The institution of contract killing originated in Medellin,
but spread to most Colombian cities. The gangs of young men who actually perform the
violent business, are only the tools of people behind the scenes who organize and
coordinate the entire action. These may be individuals, but often an agency is behind
the attacks. These agencies – which are disguised to a greater or lesser degree
depending on their geographical location and social affiliation – act as mediators
between the ―customers‖ and the sicarios who perform their murderous wishes. They
arrange the assassination contract, fix the fee, usually payable in advance, in line with
the anticipated difficulties, and identify among the gangs of young killers which is best
suited to undertake the violent transaction in question. Every sicario‘s dream is to be
hired for a ―mega attack‖ that would allow him and his family to live without worries
about the future. Yet his wages are only a fraction of the sum paid for the contract
killing. The lion‘s share goes to the middlemen and the people behind the scenes, who
plan the assassination and ensure its smooth execution. The poor state of affairs in
Colombia, in this regard, is attributed to many reasons. Generally, the lack of the state‘s
control over violence is one of the main reasons for violence running out of hand in
Colombia. The scope of the central state enforcement and security apparatus, has
remained decidedly modest. Evidently, the state‘s leaders shunned the cost of
maintaining stronger armed forces, preferring, instead, to wage conflicts using ad hoc
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militias recruited on a voluntary basis. The Colombian state is certainly present in
public consciousness as an intellectual and physical entity, but it has remained a weak
state incapable of enforcing the laws it passes and incapable of disciplining its own
officials and citizens. Though it may be able to establish a certain degree of public
order, its power is insufficient to guarantee public security. The main initiative within
Colombia‘s political system, still lies with the two traditional political parties, the
Conservatives and the Liberals. Generally speaking, the dominant axis of conflict in
this country is ―horizontal‖ (conflict between the political parties, between armed actors
such as guerrilla organizations and paramilitary associations, etc.) as opposed to the
―vertical‖ relations of power between the state and its citizens.
Yet another complex reason for violence and a culture of violence in Colombia
is the tension between the upper and the lower classes, combined with an inadequately
developed middle class and urban middle-class culture.
In rural areas where the state is hardly present – both the big landowning class
and the class of small farmers and agricultural labourers share a predominantly
instrumental, pragmatic understanding of violence. Colombia‘s agrarian history
has seen numerous violent confrontations within these classes in which legal
considerations certainly carried weight but the availability of means of coercion
determined the ultimate outcome (Le Grand 46).
In Latin America, in general, consistent condemnation of violence and its
banishment from public life, did not come about until urbanization processes
established the urban lifestyle, and, in many cases, this applied only in the cities for a
long time. Within the cities, in turn, it was primarily the middle classes who, due to
their specific resources, their socialization and their general orientation, had the greatest
interest in the emergence of non-violent spaces, governed by the rule of the law.
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However, one cannot avoid the impression that many lower class migrants from the
countryside have only completed the urbanization process half-heartedly and that their
mentality has remained rural and parochial in some important respects. Class struggles
in the city are still fought in a rough, physical manner. As yet, no typically urban
middle-class political party exists. The traditional parties – born in a predominantly
rural context – along with their clientelist appendages, still have the say. The
urbanization process the country has undergone in recent decades, has not actually
suppressed violence as a means of conflict resolution, but has only changed its
appearance. It is no longer openly on show and no longer employed visibly as a means
of domination and strength. Nobody in the central districts of the big cities disputes the
right of the state and the local authorities to keep the public peace and general order.
Yet violent plots are still hatched covertly in back rooms. In the cities, people are killed
or kidnapped on a daily basis, while in areas on the urban periphery, the law of the
jungle prevails, in any case. Violence has become more anonymous and selective, but
whether it has declined during the course of the urbanization and modernization
process, is an open question that should probably be answered in the negative. Thus the
incidence of violence in Colombia cannot be comprehended without understanding the
existence of a culture of violence as expressed in high homicide rates, the existence of
institutionalized violent actors, the prevalence of certain norms, such as those of the
macho and of revenge, and the absence of other norms, taboos, and prohibitive rules.
The culture of violence in Colombia, has its roots in the Spanish colonial rule.
The state has become synonymous with violence, because of the attitude of the
colonizers towards the subjects of Colombia. Like any other colony, Colombia was also
subjected to the dictum of ‗divide and rule‘ by the colonizers. During the Hispanic
colonial period, racial boundaries defined the formal social stratification, which served
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as a source of social tension in Hispanic cities. Spanish law formally divided the
population into the blanco (European) and indio (Indian) categories, each with different
rights and obligations. The Indians, for example, had to live in an Indian community
and were excluded from the urban traza, a zone in which only the Spaniards could live.
Enslaved Africans occupied a subordinate category dependent on the Europeans.
However, racial miscegenation created a fourth group--the castas--which included the
mestizos (Euro-Indian offspring), the free blacks, the mulattoes (Afro-Indians), and the
Indians who had left their legal communities. As creators of the system of castas, the
Spaniards occupied the highest rung on the hierarchy, using their position as a
mechanism of social control. The Castas, for their part, attempted to ―whiten‖
themselves by marrying higher on the social hierarchy as a means of social mobility, a
process that often was facilitated by cultivating ties with the blancos and the other
social superiors. Factions within the colonial elite frequently manipulated members of
the casta groups to enhance their own political interests. According to Richard Morse,
―by the eighteenth century, these formal boundaries were giving way to social
stratification that divided the plebe, or las clases bajas from the gente decente, although
the casta system still influenced social labelling‖ (10). By the end of the nineteenth
century, distinct groups were increasingly visible in incidents of violence, suggesting
the social differentiation that accompanied increased urbanization and the capitalization
of production.
In the late 19th century, Colombia was ruled by the Spanish Colonial elite. Great
social and economic inequality, with the mixed race and indigenous Indians were
relegated to the poorest strata of society. In 1849, the colonial ruling class split into two
formal political parties: the federalist Liberals and the Centrist Conservatives. A
prolonged series of regional battles followed, when both sides took up arms. Since then
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violence has become the order of the day in Colombia. There may be different kinds of
human beings in Colombia, but there are only two kinds of political beings viz., the
Liberals and the Conservatives. Liberalism and Conservatism in Latin America, have
unique historical roots. Latin America‘s struggle for independence began in 1808, after
the French Revolution and after the French revolutionaries, in the 1790s, began an
intellectual awakening, called the Enlightenment. The period of Enlightenment opened
the door for ideas of positivism in the Latin American society. The people in Latin
America turned to liberal ideologies. Liberalism clashed with conservative views. The
Liberals wanted to see changes in the ruling systems of Latin America. They wanted to
―step out of the box‖ of tradition, meaning that the Liberals wanted to open the boxes
of the church system, cultural background inequalities, and slavery. These issues, for
many years, strongly affected the way the Latin American society was organized. The
Liberals wanted to see the kings no longer in power. The majority of the Liberals
believed in a democratic system of government. This system created many changes and
much confusion in the Latin American communities, in the early 19th century. On the
other hand, conservatism was the pre-existing dominant system that was rooted in Latin
America. The Conservative governing systems consist of kings and the ruling blood
lines. Unlike in liberalism, the conservatives wanted to stay inside the box. They didn't
want to step out and try a new ruling system; they felt that chaos and disorder would
break out in the society. The Latin American Conservatives greatly believed in the
existing class stratification. In a nutshell, the Conservatives didn't want to see any
change of government in Latin America.
The contest between the Liberals and the Conservatives in Latin America, was
largely fought among the members of the landed white or the Creole elite. The systems
in place from the colonial period—such as slavery, patronage by the elite, and debt
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peonage—meant that the great mass of Indians, Africans, and people of mixed race,
had little power compared to the very small Creole ruling class. Thus, the concern that
liberalization would lead to the ―disorder‖ that the conservatives spoke about, was often
a veiled or transparent fear of race war.
These two parties, like two races, lived side by side but hated each other
eternally. The ideological difference between them has always been clear and distinct,
viz. armed conflict, bloody and recurrent. It was an axiom of Colombian historiography
in the early twentieth century, that, unlike the revolutions in other parts of Latin
America and other parts of the world, violent conflicts and intestine broils in Colombia
were caused not by conflicting economic interests or by brutal drive for power, but by
the opposition of political ideals. Abstract and principled, Colombia‘s conflicts were
bloodier and longer lasting than those of the other nations, because they could not be
satisfied with blood or bread or any material thing. Conflict has its roots in the colonial
period itself, and with the nation embattled over abstractions there was no room for
compromise.
Two historical phenomena are fundamental to the understanding of the
conflict. The first is the colonization of peripheral areas, which throughout Colombian
history, has served as an escape route from the tensions created by the highly
concentrated rural land ownership. In contrast to the other Latin American countries,
Colombia failed to implement the agrarian reform to redistribute land ownership.
Instead, a constant expulsion of the poor towards areas of unclaimed frontier,
occurred, where the presence of the central state's regulatory institutions and their
interaction with the rest of the society and the national economy were minimal.
Secondly, in political terms, this dynamic was reflected in a gradual state-building
process, in which, the staggered incorporation of territories and populations, resulted
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in an uneven state presence in the regions. Both processes had their roots in the
history of the settlement of the country from the colonial times to the present day.
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the most isolated and inaccessible
territories were inhabited by marginalized groups, such as the poor whites, mestizos,
Afro-Colombians and the mulattoes. In these areas of peripheral colonization, the
organization of social relations was left to the individuals and social groups, and the
state lacked total control on justice and the legitimate use of force. Even in more
integrated territories, the presence of state structures was uneven or the state was part
of a dual power structure whereby its control was exercised through the local elites.
The combination of the colonization process with this dependency on local powers,
made the integration of the recently settled territories into the rest of the country,
highly hazardous. From the end of the Spanish rule, until the consolidation of the
present-day Colombia, many of the rural and political structural problems inherited
from the Spanish colony, deepened. One group of people, the Liberals, fought for the
autonomy of these peripheral areas, free from the power of the centre. The other set of
people, the Conservatives, fought for a strong central government. The often violent
confrontation between the Liberal and the Conservative Parties dominated political
life during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.
At the same time, the relations between the two parties cannot be explained in
simple terms. The parties have consistently joined ranks to expel the dictators; factions
of one party had aided factions of the other in fomenting civil wars; both parties had
joined together not only to oust dictators who threaten the hold of either party on
political power, but also to quell the social unrest rising from below. Perhaps the most
bizarre arrangement anywhere in recent political history, was the formation of the
National Front in 1957, by which the two parties agreed to alternate in power for
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sixteen years with a Conservative president for one term and Liberal president for the
next and with balanced cabinets. Such an arrangement was possible only among those
with a common class interest transcending ideology. The ideological question that first
divided the parties was the structural one: federalism versus centralism. Even Garcia
Marquez lists the differences between the two parties in One Hundred Years of
Solitude:
The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to
institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate
children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a
federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The
Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from
God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They
were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were
not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities.
(OYS 98)
The Liberals wanted the New Granada to be united in a loose federation, with a high
degree of local autonomy and the Conservatives wanted a strong central government
with a powerful executive exercising significant control over the state governments.
Both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party became organized parties around
1850 after Colombia had been a sovereign nation for about thirty years. The support for
the Liberal Party came from the merchants, artisans and manufacturers. The odd thing
is that the merchants of the Liberal Party favoured free trade and the artisans and
manufacturers in the Liberal Party supported protectionism. The Conservative Party
was supported by the large landowners and the clergy of the Catholic Church. The
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small landowners tended to support the Liberal Party. The peasants tended to identify
themselves with the political party of their patrons.
In the early 1850's, a liberal constitution was adopted, which separated the
church and the state and gave substantial autonomy to the sub-regional political units
and limited the power of the central government. There was a military takeover of the
Liberal-dominated government in 1854 and, later, a civil war, in which, the Liberals
won. The Liberal Party controlled the government, which later enacted a new
constitution that placed more restrictions on the power of the central government. The
Liberal Party expropriated church lands but when those lands were sold, they went to
the merchants and the wealthy so that the concentration of the ownership of land was
not reduced; but instead it was increased. A radical faction within the Liberal Party,
took over power in 1867 and further reduced the legal power of the central government.
The central government was to have only those powers which were explicitly given in
the constitution.
In a backlash against the radicals in the Liberal Party, the electorate of
Colombia voted for the Conservatives in 1884. The Conservative‘s President, Rafael
Nunez, led the legislature to adopt a new constitution in 1886, which gave the
presidency strong powers, including the appointment, rather than the election, of
departmental (provincial) governors. It was a major victory for the centrists. The
Liberals chafed under the concentration of power in the central government and
eventually split into two factions, the War Faction which advocated armed rebellion
against the centrists and the Peace Faction which did not. The War Faction of the
Liberal Party rebelled three times; in 1893, in 1895 and finally in what was called the
War of a Thousand Days, from 1899 to 1902. The War of a Thousand Days cost a
hundred thousand lives, but ultimately failed to overthrow the Conservative Party
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government. The horror of the War of a Thousand Days convinced the Conservatives
that cooperation with the Liberals would be necessary and the Liberals were included in
the cabinets of the government. The conservatives continued in power until 1930 when
the effects of the worldwide Great Depression convinced the Colombian electorate of
the need for change. The Liberal government of Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo enacted
legislation for land reform, recognition of labour unions and public welfare assistance.
The Liberals continued in power until 1946, when a moderate Conservative
named Mariano Ospina Perez was elected. Both parties had their moderate and
extremist factions. Perez was perceived to become more authoritarian in office and
raised fears of what the future would bring about. In 1948, a prominent Liberal leader,
Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated in Bogota. Gaitan had originally come to
prominence in 1929, by exposing the brutality of the army‘s suppression of the banana
strike in Santa Marta. Named the ‗bogotazo‘, the riots that followed the assassination,
levelled large parts of the city, burned down the pension of a law student named Garcia
Marquez, and left thousands dead. Riots broke out in Bogota which the government
was able to suppress only with the deaths of 2,000 and the destruction of much of the
city. The riots and rebellion spread to the countryside where the government could not
contain it and it continued for eighteen years. This period of 1948-1966, known as La
Violencia, resulted in 200,000 deaths, a figure which amounts to 2.79% of the
population aged 15 years or older.
After Gaitan‘s assassination, the government systematically purged the police
force of the Liberals, thus creating a politically homogenous police who resorted to
terrorist tactics and to the harassment of the Liberals. In addition, the Conservative
counter-guerrillas began serving as paramilitary forces against the Liberal guerrillas
and the political gunmen, invested with legal immunity, initiated a wave of
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assassinations of the leaders of the Liberal resistance, as well as any other individuals
labelled Liberals. The conflicts between the executive branch of the government which
was controlled by the Conservatives and the Congress which was in the hands of the
Liberals, became so acute that they produced a collapse of the constitutional structure
of the government. Consequently, La Violencia spread with fierce intensity to all areas
of Colombia, with the exception of Narino and the Caribbean coast. People call La
Violencia with a capital V and it is not given the name of the Civil War of the 20th
century. Ricardo Penaranda explains that the
‗Violence‘ is the term that Colombians have adopted to describe the complex
political and social phenomenon--a mixture of official terror, partisan
confrontation, political banditry, pillage and peasant uprising---that the country
endured for nearly twenty years between the 1940s and the 1960s. Passionate,
enigmatic, and savage are the adjectives usually used in referring to this period
… (293, 294)
During La Violencia, the aim of both the parties was not just the control over
the perceived enemies but their complete eradication. In all cases, a specific discourse
or rhetoric preceded the violence. People were first convinced of the necessity of their
acts before taking up their weapons and massacring. Further, state-sponsored genocide
was the most devastating manifestation of political violence, but in many other
instances, ethnic, class, or political groups engaged in efforts to eliminate the other in
their midst, without direction from the state. From 1946 to 1964, members of the
Liberal and the Conservative parties, usually acting outside of the official state
apparatus, committed assassinations and massacres against their partisan rivals,
murdering entire families and burning thousands of farmhouses.
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As part of their strategy, both the parties indulged in the creation of a poisonous
atmosphere of intense distrust and suspicion between the militants of the two parties.
During this period, both the Liberal and the Conservative politicians increasingly made
inflammatory accusations connecting the opposition to an international plot to subvert
Colombia. Both sides perpetuated conspiracy theories involving international cabals,
while the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) became a metaphor for the partisan struggle
in Colombia for both the Liberals and the Conservatives. These new interpretive
discourses encouraged and deepened a sense of suspicion and distrust, contributing to
an overall expectation of violent interparty conflicts. Everyone in both the parties
believed this rhetoric, because there is a basic discursive structure that existed almost
since the establishment of the two parties. The parties maintained separate traditions,
symbols, and heroes that were so deeply embedded among the party faithful that the
differences can best be compared to two competing nationalisms within the same
nation. Benedict Anderson describes,
nationalism as more akin to religious belief than to an ideology, which
effectively describes the emotions expressed by Liberals and Conservatives in
Colombia, where politicians routinely spoke of their respective party‘s ideals.
The result was two separate ideas of ―nation‖, which competed with one
another. Throughout the world, public civic rituals, such as celebrating national
holidays and erecting monuments in public plazas, were important in
strengthening the idea of the nation; in Colombia, these rituals were based more
on the local party in power rather than on a nationalist consensus of all
citizens. (5)
Anderson also points to the importance of sacrifice in building nationalism. In
Colombia, battlefield sacrifices were made in the name of one of the two parties during
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the civil wars of the nineteenth century; this collective partisan experience continued to
inspire the rank and file in the twentieth century, especially at election time. Not only
did this reinforce the separate nationalisms represented by the two parties, but it also
glorified and legitimatized a degree of political violence so that nearly every contested
election resulted in a number of deaths.
Another issue that consistently separated the two parties from the time of their
emergence, was the role of the Church in the Colombian society. Debates over this
issue had been the cause of several civil wars and rebellions in the nineteenth century,
and it still stirred powerful passions in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Conservative politicians, with the support of the local and the national clergy,
frequently claimed that the Liberal Party was bent on putting the Church under its heel
and destroying religion in the Colombian society and they could back up their
assertions by citing the anti-clerical policies of the nineteenth-century Liberal
governments, as well as the official condemnations of liberalism by the Church
hierarchy at home and abroad. Liberals, for their part, claimed that religious fanatics
controlled the Conservative Party and would lead Colombia back into the Dark Ages, if
given the chance, stymieing any hopes of modernization and progress. They also drew
upon the rhetoric from the European radicals, in order to strengthen their
anticlericalism. Again, leaders on both sides were confirming their worldliness and that
of their party, by drawing on the rhetoric from abroad, especially from Europe.
La Violencia took its lessons from the Spanish Civil War. In both Spain and
Colombia, rising suspicions between political antagonists resulted in a conflict in which
civilians were both victims and victimizers. It is not coincidental that events in Spain
resonated in Colombia during the thirties and the forties. The political rhetoric of the
two countries was similar in certain ways, and it is not surprising that Colombian
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politicians took their cues from their Spanish counterparts, to a certain extent, after the
Spanish Republic was declared in 1931. The left in Spain, from the radicals and the
socialists through the communists and the anarchists, all generally agreed that the
Church had too much power, especially in education, and needed to be muzzled. The
right, for its part, felt that the Catholic religion was integral to Spanish identity. All
parties from the parliamentary right, through the traditionalists and monarchists
basically agreed on that point. Both sides had their echo within Colombia‘s two
traditional parties in the 1930s. The Liberal legislators pushed for anticlerical
legislation similar to that passed during the Spanish Republic, while after 1936, the
Conservatives proclaimed that an international leftist conspiracy was afoot in
Colombia, similar to that which was supposedly corrupting Spain, on the eve of its civil
war.
For almost twenty years, rural violence harried the Colombian countryside. In
the names of traditional political parties, small and large landowners were dispossessed,
properties burned, men murdered and women raped. Some called the perpetrators
guerrillas; others called them bandits. Quelled in the city, violence spread to the
countryside where, in widely separated geographical areas, independent bands of
guerrillas rose in rebellion. Some of the bands were Conservative; some ten to fifteen
percent were, it is estimated, Communist led; but most were Liberals who rose against
the Conservative regime, the local authorities, and the traditional enemy, Conservatives
of all classes, from campesinos to landowners. For ten years, the toll of civilian dead
alone rose, reaching over 300 a month in 1958, when it levelled off at 200 a month for
four years until 1963, and the rate began to fall. While some groups received support,
material and moral, from Liberal leaders in the cities, they were for the most part
disowned by the national Liberal directorate, which joined the Conservatives to
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repudiate the ‗bandits‘ or the ‗antisociales‘. In 1952, a national Conference of
Guerrillas convened to formulate a program including agrarian reform and other radical
goals, but the movements remained a guerrilla movement composed of largely
autonomous bands. The atrocities committed by both sides, guerrillas, army and police,
were horrific. Regina Janes quotes an anonymous witness who thus describes the
actions of the Conservative authorities:
My eyes have seen many sights. I have seen men coming into the cities
mutilated, women raped, children flogged and wounded. I saw a man whose
tongue had been cut out and people who were lashed to a tree and made to
witness the cruel scene told me that the policemen yelled, as they cut out his
tongue: ―You won‘t be giving any more cheers for the Liberal Party, you
bastard‖. They cut the genitals off other men so that they wouldn‘t procreate
any more Liberals. Others had their legs and arms cut off and were made to
walk about, bleeding, on the stumps of their limbs. And I know of men who
were held bound while policemen and Conservative civilians took it in turns to
rape their wives and daughters. Everything was carried out according to a
preconceived plan of extermination. And the victims of these bloodthirsty
policemen were poor, humble country people who were members of the Liberal
Party. Their wives, their old folk and their children were shot in the full light of
the day. The official police took possession of the property of Liberal farmers,
killed the owners, requisitioned their barns and disposed of their money, their
livestock; in a word, of all that had been the livelihood of their families. At
times these atrocious crimes were committed under the cover of night, with the
encouragement of high government officials. And all this in the false name of
God, with holy medals jingling around their necks and without remorse. (43)
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The common practice during La Violencia was that of making a cut with a
machete under the mandible, through which the tongue of the victim is pulled to hang
like a tie. It is known as the ‗Colombian tie‘. The fear associated with La Violencia
was not solely the fear of being killed or wounded; it was the fear of being torn apart.
Atrocious crimes included elaborated forms of dismemberment, crucifixions,
aggressions on fetuses and babies, vampirism, widespread rape and other sexual
offenses, massacres, many forms of torture, profanation of corpses, etc. Such acts
exceed the legal framework, in the sense that, there is no typification of felony that can
match them, and fines or time in prison or the death penalty--which Colombian law
does not approve of--do not seem to offer a satisfactory social reparation. Their offense
goes beyond that of crime; it enters the realm of what one would want to call the
infrahuman, when, in fact, it is rooted in an all-too-human cruelty.
Long before the end of La Violencia, the leaders of the Liberal and
Conservative Parties recognized the need for some political solution to the problems of
Colombia. In 1958, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party agreed to share
political power in, what was called, the National Front. Under this arrangement the two
parties would alternate in the control of the presidency every four years and equally
share the numbers of the appointed and elected offices in government. The National
Front arrangement continued from 1958 to 1974. Not everyone was happy with the
National Front arrangement. Under it, the office of President went not to the choice of
the electorate but, instead, to the candidate of the party, the Conservative Party or the
Liberal Party, whose turn it was to rule. The supporters of third parties, particularly the
leftist, felt excluded under the arrangement.
The traces of La Violencia in Garcia Marquez‘s fictions are relatively slight, a
few situations, an atmosphere, an intimation of guerrilla activity, but no direct
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grappling with the violence of La Violencia. He may not have written a full fledged
novel on La Violencia, but if at all he has written, ‗it would be about the living and not
about the dead‖ (Hoyos 18). In spite of this, there is an atmosphere of violence
prevalent in most of his novels. This is because the violence which has its roots in the
colonial past, moulds the representations, ways of thinking, and behaviours of those
who lived through it. In addition, even after the decolonization process, this influence
continues to permeate the social and cultural identities of the populations formerly
involved in the colonial experience, still deeply affecting the once colonized people.
Violence inherited from the colonial past, must be stopped, for it impedes the
development of a nation. Violence, which has almost become the culture of Colombia
because of the separatist-attitude of the Hispanic colonizers, must be completely wiped
out, in order to take the country in the path of progress.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals wanted to remain in power at any cost.
They would go to any extent to achieve their aim. When the Conservatives were in
power, they indulged in all kinds of unethical practices, to retain or grab power. Don
Apolinar Moscote who is the Conservative Magistrate of Macondo in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, conducts the election in a seemingly free and fair manner.
On the eve of the elections, Don Apolinar Moscote himself read a decree that
prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages and the gathering together of more
than three people who were not of the same family. The elections took place
without incident. At eight o‘clock on Sunday morning a wooden ballot box was
set up in the square, which was watched over by the six soldiers. The voting
was absolutely free, as Aureliano himself was able to attest since he spent
almost entire day with his father-in-law seeing that no one voted more than
once. (OYS 99)
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But, behind this seemingly fair and free election, there is the conspiracy of the
Conservatives, who would indulge in an unfair means, in order to win the elections.
Don Apolinar Moscote rigs the election in his own style in order to ensure the victory
of the Conservatives.
At four in the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the closing of
the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box with a label crossed
by his signature. That night, while he played dominoes with Aureliano, he
ordered the sergeant to break the seal in order to count the votes. There were
almost as many red ballots as blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and
made up the difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a
new label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to the capital of
the province. (OYS 99)
On the other hand, because of the atrocities of the Conservatives, the Liberals lead a
hopeless life. Dr. Alirio Noguera, who represents the Liberalist fervour, understands
that the elections are a farce. ―The only effective thing,‖ he would say, ―is
violence‖(OYS 101). Under his leadership, the Liberals conspire to assassinate
Conservatives. In order to liquidate the Conservative regime, they plan to kill all the
functionaries of the regime ―along with their families, especially the children in order to
exterminate Conservatism at its roots. Don Apolinar Moscote, his wife and his six
daughters, needless to say, were on the list‖ (OYS 102). When the Liberals thus plan to
exterminate the Conservatism, war breaks out. The only person who knows about the
war is Moscote. But he does not give the news even to his wife. An army platoon enters
Macondo noiselessly and sets up its headquarters in the school. They drag out
Dr. Noguera tie him to a tree in the square and shoot him without any due process of
law. Father Nicanor tries to impress the military authorities with a miracle of levitation
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and his head is split open by the butt of a soldier‘s rifle. The soldiers kill a woman
bitten by a mad dog with their rifle butts. On seeing the atrocities committed by the
Conservatives, Aureliano takes Twenty-one men under his command and kills the
Conservative captain and the soldiers who killed the woman. Thus, the two parties are
bloodthirsty without any concrete ideological base for their conflict. The hatred which
originated in the colonial era, continues to this day and the two parties treat each other
as their enemies, trying to exterminate the opponent at the first available opportunity.
What worries Garcia Marquez is that both the parties are equally atrocious.
When the Liberals possess power, their atrocities are less only because they are weaker.
When they are not weaker, they are fully as brutal. Colonel Aureliano Buendia
connives at the murder of a general who threatens his position as the leader of the
Liberal forces, Teofilo Vargas. ―But two weeks later General Teofilo Vargas was cut to
bits by machetes in an ambush and Colonel Aureliano Buendia assumed the main
command‖(OYS 170). His hunger for power makes him and his men further violent.
His orders are carried out even before they are given, even before he thought of them,
and his men always go much beyond what he expected them to do. Lost in the solitude
of his immense power, he starts losing his direction also. He even kills General
Moncado and destroys the house of Moncada‘s widow. Moncada was a Conservative
General, but he developed friendship with his counterpart in the enemy camp, Colonel
Aureliano Buendia. He is an antimilitarist and he does not like bloodshed. He writes
two letters to Aureliano. In the first letter, he invites him to join a campaign to make
the war more humane. The other letter is for his wife, who is in the Liberal territory.
From then on, even in the bloodiest periods of the war, the two commanders often
arrange truces to exchange prisoners. When there is no war, General Moncada teaches
him how to play chess. In due course, they become great friends. They even think about
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the possibility of coordinating the popular elements of both parties, doing away with
the influence of the military men and professional politicians, and setting up a
humanitarian regime that would take the best from each doctrine. Thus Aureliano
knows his good heart and his affection for everyone. But when Moncada is taken as a
prisoner by the revolutionaries, when the military court sentences him to death,
Aureliano refuses to show him any mercy; in spite of Ursula‘s violent recrimination, he
refuses to commute the sentence. He kills him and when Moncada‘s widow insults him
he destroys her house. ―Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not show any sign of anger, but
his spirit only calmed down when his bodyguard had sacked the widow‘s house and
reduced it to ashes‖(169). Through Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Garcia Marquez
suggests not only the corrosive effects of power, but also the brutalizing effects of
ideology, even radical ideology. No direct connection is drawn between radicalism and
brutality, but the two are consistently juxtaposed. As a youthful widower and
sentimental liberal, Aureliano Buendia could not understand shedding blood for things
that could be touched with the hands and he rejected Dr.Noguera‘s politics of
assassination as the politics of a butcher. As he becomes more effective as a military
leader and an instrument of political change, his humanity evaporates and he goes to
the extent of killing a good friend, General Moncada.
Attacking the weak is the most common form of violence. Colonizers perceive
the native people as vulnerable and target them as the centre of their violence. For
them, the natives are child-like, primitive and lacking in intelligence, morality and
emotional control. This ‗colonial mind‘ continues even after independence, and the new
indigenous regime continues to oppress the weak. In Colombia, if the weak belong to
the enemy camp, the oppression is double-fold. In a state of martial law, the weak do
not have much to say. This statement holds true in the novel, No One Writes to the
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Colonel. It discusses the political climate of one man, the Colonel, who after fighting to
create the government in power is being controlled by the bureaucracy. A corrupt
government can ruin a man, sap his will, and drive him mindless with hunger; although
the times are hard, the Colonel keeps his dignity and pride. He represents all those who
suffer under the military regime. He does not have a name, which shows that everyone
who is oppressed is a Colonel himself. The background of No One Writes to the
Colonel is La Violencia and the Colonel‘s problems stem from being the member of the
losing party in the civil war.
The government, through the use of martial law, controls the people quite
readily. The government maintains itself through the ―Big-Brother‖ tactics, that include
the use of censors, the secret police, and ordinances like ―TALKING POLITICS
FORBIDDEN‖ (Penaranda 290). The sweeping control that is present under this
martial law, is evident in the every day life of the Colonel and the people of his town.
The first example of the nature of their lives is shown through the funeral. A poor
musician has died of natural causes; the funeral is supposed to pass in front of the
police barracks. But it is stopped by the mayor, who is all powerful when the state is
put under the martial law. Though the dead mad is a poor musician and the death
procession is not a procession of any revolution, it is not allowed to pass in front of the
police barracks and the cortege has to change the direction. Even a poor dead man‘s
freedom is curbed when the state is under the curfew.
Garcia Marquez‘s subtle way of presenting the violent oppression of the regime
is evident throughout this novel. The Colonel and his asthmatic wife are living their
day-to-day life as best as they can. The Colonel is entitled to get a pension. Every week
he heads to the post office in the hope that there will be a letter for him, bringing the
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pension that he expects. But he has been waiting for more than fifteen years and no
letter has ever arrived or looks likely to, but he stumbles on with optimism:
The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every
Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‗We‘ve waited long
enough‘, his wife told him that night. ‗One must have the patience of an ox, as
you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years‘. The colonel got into his hammock
to read the newspapers‖. ‗We have to wait our turn,‘ he said. ‗Our number is
1823.‘‗Since we‘ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,‘
his wife replied. (NWC 23)
The long wait during La Violencia has almost driven the Colonel to the point of
poverty. Violence, which is present in the atmosphere of the novel, echoes through the
life of the colonel. The poor Colonel is not able to fight against this invisible violence.
Life becomes hard from him. He has to struggle even for a mug of coffee, everyday.
The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little
spoonful left. He removed the pot from the fire, poured half the water onto the
earthen floor, and scraped the inside of the can with a knife until the last
scrapings of the ground coffee, mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot.
(NWC 1)
The Colonel makes coffee and gives it to his asthmatic wife, lying that there is still
enough coffee powder left in the can. He doesn‘t have a mirror for a long time. ―After
shaving himself by touch-since he‘d lacked a mirror for a long time-the colonel dressed
silently‖ (NWC 4). In the words of his wife, the Colonel and his wife are ‗rotting alive‘
in the military regime. They live at the edge of the town, in a house with a palmthatched roof and walls whose whitewash is flaking off. The house leaks during the
rainy season. This symbolic economic decadence during La Violencia is evident as
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Garcia Marquez mentions the same kind of economic decadence in one of his short
stories, ―One of these Days‖. The story depicts with sheer realism the bitter social and
economic consequences of this turmoil. Without mentioning any political parties,
Marquez presents two ideological antagonists, a dentist and a patient, who happens to
be the Mayor, a representative of the oppressive regime. The dentist, who presumably
is one of the people, is sympathetically portrayed. He is an early riser, and a man
dedicated to his job, although he is preoccupied with matters other than his work. He
seems to be fearless, because the mayor‘s death threats have no effect upon his
determined attitude. On the other hand, the Mayor is seen as a violent man and, in one
sentence, the writer communicates that barbarism was the style of the times: ―He says if
you don‘t take out his tooth, he will shoot you‖ (CS 108). Thus the short story not only
portrays social erosion in this nameless town, but also reveals the economic decadence
of the entire community, through metonymical devices. The poor dentist‘s office with
―the crumbling ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider‘s eggs and dead insects (CS
110) and two pensive buzzards on the house next door, point to the material stagnation
of the community. It is evident from these incidents that La Violencia has brought this
town to economic prostration.
During La Violencia , the crude and the cunning flourished at the cost of the
poor and the ignorant. In No One Writes to the Colonel, Sabas is a character, who gets
prosperous by cheating the innocent and the vulnerable. While everyone lives in
poverty, Sabas lives in a ―a new building, two stories high, with wrought-iron window
gratings‖ (NWC 9). He has a secret understanding with the Mayor and pretends himself
to be a patriot. He is Agustin‘s godfather and a total contrast to the colonel. Agustin,
the only son of the colonel, was killed for distributing clandestine literature against the
military regime. Don Sabas is a corrupt businessman who will siphon off money from
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any source or person without blinking an eye. Although everyone knows that he is a
traitor and has accumulated wealth through illegal means, they also know that
corruption is so widespread that to take on Sabas may actually create more political
repression. Callous, mean, obese and a thorough product of La Violencia, he is not
above cheating the colonel, his godchild‘s father. He knows the predicament of the
colonel. He also knows the worth of the Colonel‘s rooster. He is aware that Colonel
would never part with it; he keeps the rooster in remembrance of his son, Agustin. But
Sabas tempts the colonel by offering a good price of nine hundred pesos for the rooster.
After much discussion with his wife, the colonel decides to sell the rooster to Sabas.
When the colonel takes the rooster to Sabas, he treats the colonel with a kind of
contempt and indifference. At the end he offers to buy the rooster only for four hundred
pesos. He tries to exploit the poor situation of the colonel. The doctor‘s words clearly
explain the evil nature of people like Sabas during La Violencia : ‗―The only animal
who feeds on human flesh is Sabas.‘‖the doctor said. ‗I‘m sure he‘d resell the rooster
for the nine hundred pesos‘‖(NWC 55). La Violencia has made him so selfish and
ruthless that he never shows compassion to anyone. ‗―Don‘t be so naïve,‘ he said.
Sabas is much more interested in money than in his own skin‘‖ (NWC 55). Such
characters flourished during La Violencia, feeding on the blood of the poor people.
Garcia‘s hatred for such people is evident, as he presents such a character even in his
short story ―Montiel‘s Widow‖. Jose Montiel is a despicable character and a product of
La Violencia . Right from the first sentence of the story, the whole community is
contemptuous towards him. ―everyone felt avenged except his widow‖ (CS 147).
People are not able to believe that this shrewd individual is dead because he is capable
of ―playing dead‖(CS 147). What makes his death more incredible is that he dies of
natural causes and ―not shot in the back in an ambush‖ (CS 148). Jose Montiel has
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made his immense fortune by causing the expulsion of those who owned property and
by acquiring their land at prices set by him, which was a common practice during the
worse years of La Violencia . He is the informant to the Mayor who has come to the
town to eradicate the opposition and as the narrator explains, Montiel ―segregated his
enemies into rich and poor. The police shot down the poor in the public square. The
rich were given a period of twenty four hours to get out of the town‖ (CS 151). After
Montiel‘s death, the community retaliates by boycotting his family‘s business and their
fortune rapidly begins to deteriorate. Montiel‘s children are sent to Europe and
although their mother is in a precarious situation, they refuse to return to Colombia. His
son, who is in a consular post in Germany, fears that he would be shot if he returns
home. His daughters are in France. They claim that they would like to continue to live
in a country where there is civilization. In the letters to their mother, they reveal that
―It‘s impossible to live in a country so savage that people are killed for political
reasons‖ (CS 153). Through the characters of Sabas and Montiel, Garcia Marquez
focuses on the inhuman nature of the Colombians who exploit their own countrymen.
Exploitation is a phenomenon practised by the colonizers. They do not show any mercy
to the colonized and, in a selfish manner, they exploited both man and material of the
colonized country. They show their allegiance to their mother-nation and they exploited
inhumanly the country they have forcibly occupied. This phenomenon continues even
after the colonizers leave the country. The local leaders wear the robe of the Europeans
and continue to exploit their own countrymen. The native leaders become selfish in
their attitude sacrificing the interests of the nation. They ruthlessly oppress their own
people in order to accumulate more wealth. They do not bother about the welfare of the
nation or its people. The legacy of the colonizers continues even after the independence
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in most of the colonized countries. In Colombia, it was evident especially during La
Violencia.
Garcia Marquez‘s Chronicle of a Death Foretold is based on a real incident that
happened in his friend‘s life. Early morning in 1951, Garcia Marquez‘s best friend,
Cayetano Gentile, was hacked to death by two men in front of his house in Sucre. They
were the brothers of a woman married the day before who, having been returned by the
bridegroom on their wedding night, because she was not a virgin, had falsely named
Gentile as her secret lover. The brothers had washed their family‘s honour with his
blood. Behind the superficial sensationalism of the crime, there is a deeper meaning
that can be easily sensed. How could such savagery, erupt, almost unpredictably, in the
midst of a peaceful celebration? Where had it come from? And how was it possible that
the whole town, which knew that the crime was about to happen, had been unable to
prevent it? Is Latin America doomed to this sort of everyday civil war on its streets and
in its bedrooms? Does violence occur in their lives over and over again, in their
relationships with one another or with their rulers? It is obvious that the forces of
colonial violence that has incessantly obsessed the country, are at work in the lives of
the Colombians. The novel is obviously a political parable that hints at the way in
which the cyclical wheels of violence that determines the Latin American history.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold brings out the collective consciousness of the
people of a town, who have become insensitive to horrible violence. The whole town is
inactive before a violent action. Violence has become part of their life and they simply
sit as spectators to watch a violent murder taking place in front of them. Right from the
colonial period, violence has been in their blood and it has become part of their
character. From the beginning of the novel, everybody knows that the Vicario brothers
intend to kill Santiago Nasar. ―Many of those who were on the docks knew that they
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were going to kill Santiago Nasar‖ (CDF18). Everyone knows how they mean to do
it—with a pair of butcher‘s knives—and why. It is the murder of Santiago Nasar, a
young man who is thought to have taken the virginity of Angela Vicario. On her
wedding night, after discovering that she was not a virgin, Angela‘s husband, Bayardo
San Roman, returns her to her house. ―Angela Vicario, the beautiful girl who‘d gotten
married the day before, had been returned to the house of her parents‖ (CDF 20).
Angela's twin brothers, Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario, ask her who took her
virginity, and she tells them that Santiago Nasar did. The brothers find Santiago and
kill him. The day on which Santiago is murdered is a significant day in the town
because the Bishop is coming by boat to bless the marriage of Angela Vicario and
Bayardo San Roman. Many people are heading over to the dock to see the boats. Pedro
and Pablo Vicario are sitting in the local milk-shop, which is en route to the dock, so
that they could see Santiago Nasar either going or returning in order to track him down
and kill him. Bayardo San Roman has come to town to find a bride. After deciding on
Angela, the courtship is short. As Bayardo comes from a prestigious, wealthy family,
and the Vicarios are relatively poor, Angela does not really have a choice, even though
she does not love Bayardo at the time of their wedding. The night before the murder,
there had been lots of wedding revelry that had continued into the early morning at a
local whorehouse run by Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, where Santiago Nasar had been
carousing with the twins until early in the morning. After returning home and finding
their sister in disgrace, the Vicario brothers set out to avenge her honour by murdering
Santiago Nasar.
Honour is the main cause for the violence in Colombia. It is the ego of the two
parties which has torn the country into pieces. The division of the political system into
two parties during the colonial period, is the main cause for the conflict between the
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parties. The country is soaked in blood because of the colonizers who had split the
psyche of the Colombians into two parts inimical to each other. Ever since this cunning
machination of the colonizer, violence has become an everyday affair in the life of the
people. In the culture of the Colombia, honour is taken very seriously. It is evident in
the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, because nobody ever questions any action
that is taken to preserve someone's honour, since it is commonly believed to be a
fundamental moral trait, that is vital to keep intact. A person without honour is an
outcast in the community. Even Nasar‘s maid Victoria Guzman, fails to warn him
because she wants to save the honour of her daughter. She wakes him as ordered at 5.30
in the morning but does not warn him because she thinks that Vicario brothers are
boasting in their drunken mood. But, in fact, Nasar has asked her to send her daughter
Divina Flor, a nubile girl, whom Nasar has manhandled many times, to wake him. But
Guzman who herself had suffered the advances of Nasar‘s father, decides to go in her
daughter‘s place. Guzman wants Nasar dead, because she does not want him to repeat
his father‘s conquest. In order to save the honour of her daughter, she maliciously
withholds the warning that would easily have saved the life of Nasar. Like Guzman, all
of the characters in the novel are influenced by this powerful construction of honour.
The defense of this ideal is directly responsible for Santiago Nasar's murder. The
Vicario brothers kill Santiago in order to restore the honour of their sister. She
dishonours her family by marrying another man when she had already slept with
someone else. For this wrong to be righted, her brothers must kill Santiago, the man
who supposedly took her virginity, in order to clear her name. Though a few people in
the community, like Clothilde Armenta and Yamil Shaium, try to prevent the death
from occurring, most people turn the other cheek, because they believe that the severity
of the crime deserves a cruel punishment. The fact that death is considered a reasonable
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retribution for the crime of taking a girl's virginity, indicates how awful the culture in
Colombia is. If Santiago Nasar is doomed, it is not because his life is a circle that an
oracle has pronounced its end. He dies because of the sum total of rituals, habits,
misconceptions and prejudices that crisscross and corrupt the society ever since the
colonial period. People refuse to interfere, because they think that it is a rite—the
taking back of honour spilled the blood of the violator—with which they agreed. The
concatenation of misunderstandings and hesitations that spun Nasar‘s death are the
expressions of a culture that needs, expects and creates death and that stands by
passively while it is enacted. The real cause of the murder is the unproclaimed law of
war between two men or two parties or two powers.
The Vicario brothers in the Chronicle of a Death Foretold broadcast or
announce or advertise their intention of murdering Santiago Nasar. The brothers are
committed to a course of action that has been determined for them—honour can only be
redeemed publicly by their killing of Santiago. Once they have broadcast their
intentions to the whole community, everyone, by failing to stop them, participates in
the crime. Attempts to warn Santiago are half-hearted; people pretend that the threats
are empty; that the twin brothers bent on his death are drunk, incapable, unwilling; that
it is all a joke. Even though they repeatedly announce their intent to murder him, the
butcher, the police officer, and the Colonel all think that the Vicarios are largely
bluffing. After Angela Vicario reveals Santiago's name to her brothers, they
immediately go to the pigsty. They pick out the two best knives, wrap them in rags, and
have them sharpened at the meat market. Faustino Santos, a butcher, wonders why they
are coming—he thinks that they are heavily drunk and they may not know what time or
what day it is. They talk about the wedding, and Pablo declares that they are going to
kill Santiago Nasar. Because the twins are known to be good people, nobody pays any
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attention to them. After they leave, Faustino reports the conversation to a police officer
who comes by.
Meanwhile, the police officer informs Colonel Lazaro Aponte about the Vicario
brothers' plan.The Colonel goes to Clothilde Armenta's shop, takes the knives away
from the boys, and tells them to go home. He explains later that he thought the twins
were bluffing. The Vicario brothers go home, get two different knives, and go to have
them sharpened.
Clothilde Armenta, the proprietor of the milk shop, informs the local priest
about what the Vicario twins are threatening to do. However, in the excitement
surrounding the arrival of the bishop, he forgets about her warning. Those who rush
after the victim to warn him, are unable to find him. Those who could have warned him
do not do so for a variety of reasons. One man is dead and hundreds have murdered
him.
The consequences of the indifference of the people to violence, spread like a
disease through the village. The crime is simply a late symptom of an illness that had
already wasted everyone. Those people—lovers, enemies, friends, family—who were
unable to act during the murder, act with bitter, impulsive, self-punishing foolishness,
becoming old maids and worn whores, alcoholics and stupid recruits etc. For example,
Divina Flor—the servant meant for Santiago‘s furtive bed—is now fat, faded and
surrounded by the children of other loves. Santiago Nasar‘s fiancée runs away
immediately after the crime with a lieutenant from the border patrol, who then
prostitutes her among the rubber workers in a nearby town. And. Finally, after more
than twenty years, Angela Vicario is reunited with the husband who is the main cause
of the crime. Through this novel, Garcia Marquez gives the message to the rival
political parties of the colonized countries, that violence in the name of ‗honour‘ comes
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to nothing at the end. The machination of the colonizer--dividing the nation and causing
violence to disrupt the growth--must be defeated.
Garcia Marquez‘s The Autumn of the Patriarch is a political novel concerning
the nature of the paradigmatic Latin American dictator. But it is not about particular
political realities; it is about the most universal truth that underlies the nature of the
political reality in the erstwhile colonized nations: the truth of absolute power. The
concept of absolute power derives from the concept of colonization. The colonizer
enjoyed absolute freedom over the colonized nations. This concept continues even after
the colonizers leave the colonized nations. Mostly, the dictators are the machinations of
the imperialistic nations which enjoy vicarious power through the dictator. Garcia
Marquez takes up the figure of the dictator, particularly the ageing dictator, as the
subject of this novel. This is because, he wants the tribe of dictators to be eliminated
once for all, from the soil of Colombia and the other Latin American countries. He
doesn‘t want any representative of imperialism or any traces of imperialistic violence
finding place in his country. That‘s why he begins the novel with the discovery of the
dead body of the aged Patriarch, pecked by vultures and sprouting parasitic animals.
Although the Patriarch‘s entire life—from birth, to ascendancy to power, to marriage,
to suspected coups, to examples of his autocratic and magical rule – is recounted in
detail, the primary plot line focuses on the twenty-four-hour period from the discovery
of the body to the final celebration and jubilation at the end of the book. Like the
colonial rule, the dictator‘s reign is also full of violence and grotesquely brutal events.
Like the colonizers, the dictators do not like any revolt against them. They
eliminate it ruthlessly. For example, the Patriarch executes General Rodrigo de Aguilar
on the suspicion of instigating an attempt on his life. General Aguilar is the
artilleryman, the right hand of the Patriarch, who serves as the minister of defence, the
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director of state security and the commander of the presidential guard. His loyalty and
friendship to the Patriarch make him a stable reference point in the swirl of conspiracy
and cabal that surrounds the government; he even has been granted the privilege of
beating the Patriarch at the dominoes. During a period of political unrest, he is late for a
palace dinner held in honour of the high command. The dictator takes his late arrival as
a signal of revolt against him. After the officers fret for a while, General Rodrigo de
Aguilar is brought in on a silvery tray, cooked and stuffed; the Patriarch doles out equal
portions to each officer present. The Patriarch enjoys supreme power and sometimes
behaves like a mad man. On the night when he is to be the honoured guest at a banquet
for the palace guards, he makes his entrance on a silver platter decorated with
cauliflower and laurel branches, marinated in spices, browned in the oven, then carved
and served up with the order to eat heartily. After the death of Bendicion Alvarado, his
mother, who rots away of some mysterious disease, he preserves and displays the dead
body throughout the country and attempts to have her canonized as a saint. Leticia
Nazareno, the Patriarch‘s wife, and his small son, Emanuel, are devoured piece by
piece by a pack of trained dogs. After this murder, Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, who
is hired to find the killers, sends the Patriarch numerous bags of what appear to be
coconuts but which really contain the heads of some of his enemies, until, finally 918
heads are delivered, many of which decay in a filing cabinet. There are two thousand
children who have been used by the Patriarch as a way to cheat on the national lottery.
…they opened the balcony at three o‘clock, they brought up the three children
under the age of seven chosen at random by the crowd itself so that there would
be no doubt concerning the honesty of the method, they gave each child a bag of
a different colour showing trustworthy witnesses that there were ten billiard
balls numbered from one to zero inside each bag…each child with his eyes
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blindfolded will take a ball from each bag….felt at the bottom nine balls that
were just alike and one that was ice-cold, and following the orders we had given
them in secret they chose the ice-cold ball….(AOP 90,91)
The children, because of their innocent complicity in the lottery, are called by
placing them in a ship filled with concrete which is then exploded:
…but he got up irate, that‘s enough, God damn it, he shouted, either them or
me, he shouted, and it was them, because before dawn he ordered them to put
the children in a barge loaded with cement, take them singing to the limits of
the territorial waters, blow them up with a dynamite charge without giving them
time to suffer as they kept on singing…(AOP 95).
The ruthlessness of the Patriarch resembles the attitude of the colonizers. The absolute
power invested in the hands of the Patriarch emboldens him to do what he wants.
Sometimes, the Patriarch resorts to underhand activities in order to keep the people
under his control. This is worse than the open violence unleashed on his people.
García Márquez ends his novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch with an optimistic
statement that, upon the death of the dictator known as the Patriarch, ―the uncountable
time of eternity had come to an end‖(AOP 229) . But there is no indication in the novel
to suggest that the unnamed nation will be able to break free of the bonds of
dictatorship. The legacy of the dictator continues even after his death, just as the legacy
of the colonizer continues even after the independence of the colonized nation. Here the
dictator is the colonizer who enjoys absolute power. The Patriarch‘s death does not
guarantee the full decolonization of the nation, and thus a great deal of uncertainty
exists as to whether or not the nation has truly escaped the shackles of military
dictatorship and neocolonial oppression. The question then is, why, in light of the
unending cruelties perpetrated by the Patriarch and his regime, does the indigenous
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people fail to take up arms against the dictator and ―thoroughly challenge the colonial
situation‖ (Fanon 2) established by the West and enabled by the Patriarch?
The Patriarch uses the techniques of the colonizers. He prevents the people from
forming a revolutionary movement. This type of appropriation of colonial techniques
by the Patriarch speaks to both the knowledge which neocolonial empires pass on to
loyal dictators as well as the Patriarch‘s role as the colonizer of his own people. The
Patriarch, in a cunning and deceitful manner, brings the people under his control. He
uses the classrooms for this purpose. According to Fanon, this method is not
uncommon:
In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of
moral reflexes handed down from father to son … those aesthetic forms of
respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and
inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and
order. (3, 4)
This is precisely what the Patriarch seeks to do through the public school
system. He orders a free school established in each province
…to teach sweeping where the pupils fanaticized by the presidential stimulus
went on to sweep the streets, after having swept their houses and then the
nearby highways and roads so that piles of trash were carried back and forth
from one province to another without anyone‘s knowing what to do with it in
official processions with the national flag and large banners saying God Save
the All Pure who watches over the cleanliness of the nation… (AOP 35).
The main goal of the schools is to teach the people to be docile and to create a
generation of citizens who are brainwashed into believing that the Patriarch has the best
interests of the nation at heart. Within the public school system, children study the
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official history of the Patriarch in textbooks created by the regime, for the purpose of
making the Patriarch appear god-like and invincible:
Contrary to what his clothing showed, the descriptions made by his historians
made him very big and official schoolboy texts referred to him as a Patriarch of
huge size who never left his house because he could not fit through the doors,
who loved children and swallows, who knew the language of certain animals,
who had the virtue of being able to anticipate the designs of nature, who could
guess a person‘s thought by one look in the eyes, and who had the secret of a
salt with the virtue of curing lepers‘ sores and making cripples walk… (AOP
44).
The Patriarch‘s manipulation of textbooks is important, for, the events, ideas,
and institutions which are not recorded in the official history of the nation simply cease
to exist: ―he had them tear the pages about the viceroys out of school primers so that
they would not exist in history …‖ (AOP 131). The act of removing information about
the viceroys from the official textbooks of the nation is enough to cause viceroys to
disappear completely from the history of the nation. The deliberate failure of the public
school system to teach the people about the true state of the nation protects the
Patriarch‘s reign and impedes the people‘s ability to form a revolutionary movement.
The Patriarch, as a colonizer of the people, denies the people access to the truth about
their country because ―Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime,
what fosters the emergence of the nation. Truth is what protects the ‗natives‘ and
undoes the foreigners‖ (Fanon 14). The Patriarch does not resort to any open violence
to bend his people according to his wishes. Like a colonizer, he brainwashes the people
into accepting his dictates. He hides the truth from the people and makes them to accept
a forged truth in order to make the people docile and submissive. At the end, the people
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forget their true nature, lose their spirit to fight against any injustice done unto them
and simply tow the line drawn by the dictator.
Garcia Marquez wants the colonized nations to understand that the violence in
their lands is the legacy left by the colonizers. They should realize that it is the
violence that mars the growth of the colonized nations into becoming formidable
powers. They should know that it is a ploy by the colonizer to make the colonized
nations powerless. Garcia Marquez exhorts the colonized the people to avoid violence,
get united, live together and work hard in order to make their nations a power to reckon
with.
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Conclusion
Postcolonial Studies have been gaining prominence since the 1970s. It is the
study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized.
The European empire is said to have held sway over more than eighty five per cent of
the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over
several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its
disintegration after the Second World War, have led to widespread interest in
postcolonial literature and criticism, from 1970 onwards. The list of the former colonies
of European powers is a long one. They are divided into settler (e.g. Australia, Canada)
and non-settler countries (India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka). Countries such
as South Africa and Zimbabwe which were partially settled by colonial populations,
complicate even this simple division between the settler and the non-settler. Of late, the
formation of colony through various mechanisms of control and the various stages in
the development of anti-colonial nationalism have become a major study in literature.
By extension, in postcolonial studies, temporal considerations give way to spatial ones
in that the cultural productions and the social formations of the colony long before the
colonization are used to better understand the experience of colonization.
The process of colonization affected every aspect of indigenous life. The
colonial powers have left its traces on culture, education, science, technology, etc.
Colonial education and language have deeply influenced the culture and identity of the
colonized. Western science, technology, and medicine have completely changed the
existing knowledge systems of the natives. Colonization, in short, has distorted the
identity of the colonized. In this context, all the colonized individuals should become
aware of subjects like ‗imperialism‘ and ‗Euro-centrism‘ and the western ways of
knowledge production and dissemination in the past and the present. They must also
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know the processes such as, formation of the empire, the impact of colonization on
postcolonial history, economy, science, and culture, the cultural productions of
colonized societies, and the agency for marginalized people etc. The aim is to regain
the lost identity. The dilapidated history must be reconstructed. The colonial legacies
and traces must be wiped out; especially the legacy of violence must be stopped. This
process of decolonization would dismantle all colonial structures and create a new
nation that would be truly independent in all aspects.
An attempt has been made in the thesis, to examine select novels of Garcia
Marquez, from a postcolonial perspective. The aim of Garcia Marquez‘s novels is to
create a new identity for Colombia and Latin America, as mentioned in his Nobel
speech.
Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied
us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice
sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal
for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? (290)
The study concentrates on three methods which Garcia Marques uses to
construct a new identity for Latin America. With ‗magic realism‘, he has successfully
created a new identity for Latin America. His ‗reconstruction of past‘ serves two
purposes. He brings out to light, through this, the true history of Latin America which
was distorted by colonization; he creates awareness in the minds of the people that the
past errors should not be repeated. His portrayal of violence signifies that ‗violence‘ is
a legacy of colonial rules, which mars the growth of the colonized nations and which
should be stopped at any cost.
Garcia Marquez uses magic realism in his own inimitable style, in order to
create a new identity for Latin America in the field of literature. His use of magical
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realism marks a hybridized re-appropriation of a literary style, to reflect the postcolonial conditions of Colombia and Latin America. In the language of narration in his
magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working
toward the creation of a different kind of fictional world, different from the other. Since
the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into
being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the ―other,‖ a
situation which creates disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems,
rending them with gaps, absences, and silences. He adapts the realist mode to the
fantastic elements. The mixture of the western realistic and the eastern fantastic
elements is the most striking feature of his magical realism. He drives home the point
that the aspects which are considered fantastic in the rational-empirical western world
may be completely unproblematic, realistic and normal in other cultures. Thus his
magical realism incorporates, into a basically realistic world, elements which,
according to the standards of literary realism, would be considered highly implausible,
impossible or even disturbing intrusions from another realm. Further, he goes to the
extent of presenting realistic elements as fantastic in his magical realism. He presents
items or occurrences, that, from a realist perspective, are perfectly ordinary, and as
astonishing and marvellous or, by contrast, as threatening and supernaturally horrific.
Especially, technological innovations are frequently treated as instances of magic. Thus
he upsets the categories ―realistic‖ and ―fantastic‖. His magical realist techniques
highlight the cultural contingency of the categories within which reality is perceived
and represented, and the literary and social conventions upon which they are based.
They promote a certain degree of scepticism about all-too-assured assumptions about
the ―real‖ and the ―unreal‖. There may be, it is implied, more things between heaven
and earth than have been dreamt of, and the rational-empirical paradigm may not be the
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only path by which knowledge is to be gained. Especially, if one wants to understand
human actions and the reactions, it becomes necessary to take into account other
approaches to reality as well.
Through his magical realism, Garcia Marquez critically evaluates the roles of
some irrational approaches. His use of ex-centric focalizers to focalize the narrative
through characters who adhere to a magical world-view, greatly facilitates the
representation of the fantastic as realistic and vice versa. For magical-realist focalizers,
there is nothing incredible about the various strange occurrences that happen in their
world; the ‗other‘ perspective becomes the norm and adherents to a rational-scientific
world-view are seen as sadly deficient. In aligning the ex-centric with the magical or
the marvellous, magical realism cleverly exploits long standing social and cultural
constructs of the dominant world view, only at the same time to undermine them.
While the Western constructions of the ‗other‘ as primitive and irrational are apparently
affirmed, these ‗other‘ perspectives are then accepted as equally valid ways of seeing
the world. In short, the magical world-view symbolically stands for an ex-centric
perspective. Thus the magical realism of Garcia Marquez levels the hierarchy between
‗margin‘ and ‗centre‘, arguing that alternative outlooks must be taken into account and
sounded out as to their epistemological potential. It unsettles the received ideas about
how reality is to be perceived and portrayed and explores alternative approaches to
view the reality of the ‗other‘. At the same time, his magical realism does not amount
to an unqualified endorsement of magic, myth or irrationality. His fictions quite
critically reflect on the harm that unwarranted superstition and false beliefs may cause.
While magical beliefs must be taken seriously to the extent that they may determine
human action and therefore shape reality, the important point is to keep an open mind
and always be prepared to revise one‘s ideas and ways of seeing the world.
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It is perfectly possible for the magic realist characters to have power over even
death. The characters struggle to create and define their own worlds; their fight is
against time, history and fate. It could be said that Marquez‘ endowment of his
characters with special power is an illustration of their powerlessness against forces
which remain outside their control. By crossing the border of normal possibility,
Marquez reminds the Colombians of the limitations of man‘s ‗real‘ lives, but also of the
possibility of viewing the world in an entirely different way. Marquez‘s characters
struggle to create their own world. It is through this act of creation that they can truly
escape the forces in life over which they have no control. Garcia Marquez suggests that
magical realism is the means by which a new understanding of a world-view can be
gained, which is different from the regular one. While politics and ideology have the
power to de-humanize, magical realism has the power to make everyone human.
Magic realism allows for a kind of political, cultural, and even religious
leniency, since it combines the realistic aspects of the everyday world with aspects
from indigenous culture. Stories about ghosts and spirits are given as much credence as
those about everyday concerns and the melding of the two is like a melding of
cultures—the indigenous and the modern. As Hart notes,
Occurrences seen as supernatural in the First World such as ghostly apparitions,
human beings with the ability to fly, disappear, etc. are presented as natural
from a Third World perspective, while other occurrences seen as normal in the
First World such as magnets, science, and trains are presented as supernatural.
(Hart 115)
Garcia Marquez takes the aspects of folk culture and, instead of evaluating them
against the modern standard of reason, he gives them equal value and by doing so,
validates them. Since he was raised on the stories of his grandmother, who often spoke
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of ghosts and supernatural events occurring within the framework of a ‗logical‘ story,
he learned that both ways of thinking about the world are correct. His attempt to
incorporate both the real and the fantastic into the same work shows his social and
political ideas, wherein both the ‗centre‘ and the ‗other‘ are equal to each other.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, time does
not follow the Western pattern of linear time. Sometimes it is possible to see time in
magical realist novels as simultaneous presence. In the last chapter of One Hundred
Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez encapsulates the theory of time in the whole book in
a sentence: ―Melquiades had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but
had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one
instant.‖ (OYS 421) Gullon agrees that in magical realm, events and worlds appear
with a simultaneity and density that may be "captured only at the moment of death‖
(Gullon133). He says that it is no accident that Melquiades‘ parchments guard their
secrets, which may be deciphered only when the narrative concludes. The characters in
magical realism can even live in a time prior to their own existence. This contradictory
property of time occurs at the end of both Jose Arcadio Buendia's and Ursula's final
days. In his retreat into delirium, Jose Arcadio Buendia loses all sense of temporal
measurement, reverting to ―a state of total innocence‖ (OYS 81), in which Jose Arcadio
Buendia falls into the past and speaks a foreign language. In the same way, Ursula,
during the time of the deluge, gradually loses her sense of reality and confuses the
present time with remote periods, in her life. She even converses ―with her forebears
about events that took place before her own existence‖ (OYS 334). The future in the
novel, also carries a different meaning from the daily clock time. The future in the
novel is a period in which an event has not yet happened, but may not be unknown to
the present or the past. That is why reading into the future, is an act as ordinary as
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remembering the past in the novel. To explain it in linear terms, the future events would
appear in the form of flash forwards, foreshadowing or deja-vu. In this way, a future
event of history is remembered by both the characters and the readers before its
happening, and when the actual event plays out in the present, the characters or readers
relive the experience again. Right from the beginning in the first sentence, the novel has
set down this unusual tone. Two future events are ‗re-membered‘ in the present time of
the narrative, namely, ‗facing firing squad‘ and ‗discovering ice‘. Later in the novel, it
is learnt that the future information about the firing squad is not entirely correct. It is
literally correct but Colonel Aureliano Buendia does not die as a result, as anyone
would predict when reading the first sentence of the book. The ultimate twisted fate
sarcastically questions the accuracy of re-collection and the fundamental ability to
recall at all.
Sometimes, when events are occurring, time stands still, because the characters
concerned are caught in their own self-absorption or self-dissipation and so, in a sense,
are completely cut off from the daily clock time. For example, when Colonel Aureliano
Buendia shuts himself up to make gold fishes in his old age; or when Rebecca lives like
a ghost in her broken house, their time does not progress. In the magical chamber pot
room, where Melquiades‘ spirit occasionally appears, parchments are well-preserved
and dust does not settle, as if time were an external element not applicable to the room.
Time is not necessarily infinite in the novel. In fact, the narrative time of the story stops
sharp at the moment when the last Aureliano decodes the secrets of Melquiades‘
parchments. Finally, the conventional linear clock time also plays its part in the novel,
entailing the linear development of the history of Macondo, from its Utopian founding,
to its becoming a flourishing modern town, with trains and cinemas etc., to its decline
and ultimate destruction. In the light of the many twists and turns of various concepts
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of time in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the traditional-western linear understanding
of time seems to lose its reliability and persuasive power.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold also, Garcia Marquez follows circular time
instead of the western canon of linear time. The arrangement of events in the novel is
not in the chronological order. The first paragraph of the novel ―foretells‖ many of the
concerns that Garcia Marquez develops throughout the novel. For instance, he focuses
on time--mentioning that Santiago woke at 5:30 a.m., that he was killed on a Monday
and that the narrator is speaking from twenty-seven years in the future. Specific
mentions of time continue throughout the story. Garcia Marquez complements this
concern with an unusual structure: instead of unfolding chronologically, the novel is a
kind of spiral. Each chapter has its own system of time, tending to circle back on itself.
This obsession with time, coupled with Garcia Marquez' unusual structure, suggests the
paradox that however journalistically the events of Santiago's death may be recorded,
human knowledge can never be certain. Garcia Marquez's descriptions of events almost
always include specific times, but they often contradict one another, suggesting that
each account "believes" in its own accuracy--though none is wholly accurate.
Characters consistently respond in an intuitive way to the coming murder. For instance,
Santiago's recoil at the sight of the butchered rabbits (a sight that he, a hunter, is well
accustomed to and doesn't usually mind) anticipates his own evisceration at the end of
the novel. This tendency to foretell the future also reinforces the treatment of time in
the novel: time is not a linear thing, but rather cyclical--hence the spiralling structure of
each chapters. Santiago's death is present before it happens and many signs point to it;
the characters simply fail to read these signs before it is too late.
Garcia Marquez reconstructs the history of Colombia in order to bring out its
true history which is distorted by its colonial rulers. He wants to teach his readers that
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the knowledge of their country‘s history is essential to create a new identity in the
postcolonial scenario. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, through the plague episode,
he emphasizes the importance of remembering the past. When the plague attacks, the
Macondons lose the ability to recollect their childhood, names and functions and all
manner of objects. Then, slowly, their identities begin to vanish; people do not
recognize one another, and some even lose a sense of their own being. Jose Arcadio
Buendia who is terrified that he cannot remember the word ―anvil‖ for one of his own
crucial tools, frantically places labels on everything in his house in the hope he will not
lose all memory. He labels animals and plants, furniture and windows — a cow, a pig,
a banana. ―Little by little,‖ writes Garcia Marquez, ―studying the infinite possibilities of
the loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be
recognized by their inscriptions but no one would remember their use‖(OYS 48 ).So, he
began to write longer and longer descriptions of function: ―This is the cow. She must
be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in
order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk‖(OYS 48).
Buendia becomes traumatized by the prospect of living a life of endless
labelling to survive with a sense of humanity. He tries to develop a memory machine
that will store written entries of all experiences and all knowledge in each villager‘s
life. After placing thousands of entries into his machine, Buendia is mercifully saved
from his nightmare by a friend who cures him miraculously from the plague. Buendia
recovers his full power of memory. But he had seen this world without memory, a
world of despair and incurable confusion, a world where people lost their humanity in
the anarchy of ignorance. There is no personal identity and all forms of symbolic
communication have come to an end. Remembering the past, Garcia Marquez implies,
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is essential for the colonized nations to establish their identity, as it is a known fact that
colonization obliterates the past.
Garcia Marquez‘s treatment of history and time signals dangers, if one takes for
granted the simplistic subversion of Western conceptual frameworks in an attempt to
create local narratives of the postcolonial nationhood. Both the issues of reality and
history show how the processes of post-colonial search for national or continental
identity, are highly complex, as they are reliant upon the re-appropriation, subversion,
and demystification of the Western conceptual frameworks. Thus the task of One
Hundred Years of Solitude is to counter the history that Garcia Marquez calls ―the false
one that historians had created and consecrated in the school books‖ (OYS 296). The
liberal rebellions that Aureliano Buendia leads against the conservative forces, the
strike on the banana plantations that end with the gunning down of workers and many
other incidents from history are recovered from oblivion and retold from the point of
view of the defeated. The repressed ‗other‘ returns to haunt the ‗expurgated‘ and
‗censored‘ real in these instances. Repressed memories suddenly take a ghostly form,
testifying to an essential indelibility of historical trauma and calling for remembrance
and atonement. Like the gaps and silences of dreams, One Hundred Years of Solitude is
filled with the unaccountable presences of those who are not supposed to inhabit them,
the ‗banished‘ voices which return in the guise of ghosts, hallucinations, grotesque
figures and surreal apparitions. This postcolonial ―rhetoric of haunting‖ (Punter 79)
shows how the characters are filled by the history they cannot escape, by the memory
of their pasts. The language of Garcia Marquez‘s writings remains forever split,
schizoid, in a state of self-alienation, haunted by the vanished voice, which resurfaces
and tries to break through again and again, in a permanent ―revisitation of the site of
trauma‖ (Punter 98). In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the ―remembrance of things
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past … is not primarily nostalgic‖ and historical representation ―foregrounds the gaps
and absences occulted by hegemonic discourses. They presuppose the organic
integration of the levels of the past and archaic human consciousness that are no longer
available to Western culture, and that can therefore only be conjured as ‗images‘,
fetishes, ghosts‖( Faris163).
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez reconstructs all the major
events of Colombian history. By reconstructing the pre-Hispanic life of Colombia,
Garcia Marquez drives home the point that the European ―self‖ and the Colombian
―other‖ were present together in the land of Latin America right from the days of
discovery. He creates Macondo on the model of Chibcha clan. Thus, he yearns for the
return of pre-Hispanic life to Colombia. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the
Chibchas led a peaceful life. In the same way, the Macondons led an idyllic, peaceful
and self-contended life before the arrival of Melquiades and Don Apolinar Mascotes.
The Buendia family and their home town become the foundation for Garcia Marquez to
reconstruct the history of the colonization of Colombia. Macondo, with its mirror walls,
reflects Colombia. The two characters, Father Nicanor Reyna and Fernanda del Carpio
represent the colonizers. These colonial characters are portrayed by Garcia Marquez to
show that the culture of Colombia is contaminated and that the innocent arcadia has lost
its indigenous traits with the arrival of the colonial people. Garcia Marquez continues
his reconstruction of Colombia in its post-independent state. Two violent incidents
namely, the War of a Thousand Days and La Violencia, become the backdrop of some
of his novels.
The reconstruction of events related to the two major political parties, brings
out the hypocrisy of the leaders who fight only for pride and not for their ideology. The
conservatives and the liberals fight for the sake of fighting without any ideology. The
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repetitious wars between them lead to no absolute or clearly defined progress. Both the
conservatives and the liberals become oppressors when they are in power. Garcia
Marquez finds that the reason for the tension between the two parties is pride. They
fight for power and not for any ideology. The disillusioned Colonel Aureliano
understands the futility of wars. Garcia Marquez wants his fellowmen to understand the
futility of civil wars, through the character of the Colonel. With the two governments in
power, there cannot be any progress. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio Buendia
and Ursula, believe, through various experiences in their life, that there will be only
stagnation and there cannot be any change at all. Garcia Marquez‘s burden is to present
the true nature of the two major political parties, and the rest is in the hands of the
people to draw their own conclusions.
In Of Love and Other Demons, Garcia Marquez reconstructs the incidents that
are related to the Catholic Church right from the time of colonization. The novel takes
place in Cartagena in the eighteenth century, when the city was one of the centres of the
Spanish slave trade and a colonial headquarters of the Inquisition. The Church played a
major role in sustaining colonialism in Spanish America. Garcia Marquez reconstructs
the colonial church in order to bring awareness among the people who follow their
religion with blind faith. The novel is an astonishing portrait of the violence and abuse
heaped upon an innocent and helpless 12-year-old girl, Sierva Maria, by an intolerant
and cruel Catholic church, during the 1740s. It is about the exhumation of a body that
was buried in the ancient cemetery of the convent, Santa Clara. Through this
exhumation, Garcia Marquez digs out the hideous side of the church and shows it to his
people, so that they may have a new understanding of their church. Garcia Marquez
presents the colonial church as a religion of death. It brings death to Sierva Maria, the
protagonist of the novel. Through Sierva Maria‘s free and powerful sensuality, Garcia
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Marquez shakes the very foundation of the inquisitorial, intolerant and guilt-ridden
world of colonial life. He also uncovers the flaws and fears of those around her and of a
crumbling political and religious system. The portrayal of the slaves, the Church
authorities, the nobility and the Inquisition reveal a colonial Latin America, fraught
with fear and vulnerability. The bishop‘s excessive weight and bad health shows that
the church exercises too much power for its own good, and not for the people. The
bishop is equated to a devil. Garcia Marquez juxtaposes the bishop‘s charges that the
illness of Sierva Maria is a demonic possession, with the long descriptions of the
bishop‘s illness. This shows the real demons of the church. Garcia Marquez presents
Abrebuncio, a Portuguese Jew, as a man of knowledge and reason. Through this
character, Garcia Marquez wants to educate his people that blind faith in religion leads
to death, whereas religion combined with reason and knowledge affirms life.
In the recuperation of history, Garcia Marquez uses only mild hyperbole:
―Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and lost them all. He
had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated
one after the other‖ (OYS 94). The prodigious violence and the prodigious sexuality,
bear witness to the unfinished business of consolidating a nation and an identity on
ideals other than the censorships and official pieties of the colony retained in the
oligarchy. One Hundred Years of Solitude criticizes both the conservatives and the
liberals. The endless civil wars between them, represented by Aureliano‘s insurrections,
lead to little stability and less change. Further, the dynasty that lives out the pained
history of Colombia and Latin America, is the liberal Buendia clan, not unelitist itself;
for all their progressiveness, the liberals, who also had their turn at leadership, are
hegemonic as well. Yet, it is the conservatives who embody the worst feature of
oligarchic repression, which they justify under the banner of a God-given power to
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establish ―public order and family morality‖ (OYS 97). Garcia Marquez advocates an
end to all forms of elite ascendancy.
Garcia Marquez has the burden of bringing into light the truth behind the
banana incidents. While One Hundred Years of Solitude recreates Spanish colonization,
the power of the Roman Catholic Church, the enlightenment, the Independence and the
Thousand Days War, its most striking historical commentary is its depiction of the
banana strike of 1925. With the arrival of Banana Company, Macondo has been
transformed from a crude rusticity to a wonderful modern town. But, for Garcia
Marquez, the arrival of new machines and farming techniques do not make Macondo a
better place to live in. In fact, things only get worse instead of providing prosperity and
order to the inhabitants of Macondo. The banana company brings ruin and devastation
upon the people. All that remain of the former wired-in city are the ruins. The only
human trace left there was a glove belonging to Patricia Brown in an automobile
smothered in wild pansies. The school books portrayed the Banana Company as the
benefactor which brought prosperity and progress to the country. Garcia Marquez
rewrites this history written in the school text books.
Garcia Marquez reconstructs the banana incidents with a vengeance, to bring
out the conspiracy behind them. The army favours the plantation owners and terrorizes
the town. Martial law comes into effect. The army enters the town noiselessly before
dawn, with two pieces of light artillery drawn by mules, and sets up the headquarters in
the school. The army men drag out Dr. Noguera, tie him to a tree in the square, and
shoot him without any due process of law. The workers battle them using guerrilla
techniques. At last, pretending to seek a resolution, the government invites the striking
employees and kills all of them at the train station. This tragic massacre of the workers
is the novel‘s emotional and spiritual centre. It is the book‘s strongest statement against
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the distortion of truth by the colonial powers. As a child living near the banana
plantation, Garcia Marquez witnessed the massacre of the striking banana workers. The
dead bodies were then systematically removed from the town and thrown into the
ocean. When he was in high school, Marquez realized with shock that the incident had
been erased from his history text book. Knowing the importance of history, he decides
to tell the true history, to the people of Colombia. With the reconstruction of the banana
episode, Garcia Marquez creates a new history which, in, turn creates a new awareness
in the minds of fellow Colombians.
As Krapp notes, ―No amount of passionate denunciation can rouse the
Macondons from their indifference, even as the Banana Company effectively
inaugurates the clearest identity disparity witnessed in the novel: the Company owners
and the banana workers‖ (Krapp 403). This is important because, Garcia Marquez
forces himself to look beyond the decaying state of the family and the central
characters, to consider the larger historical implications of this small village. Although
it is somewhat utopian, further influences from outside keep causing more problems
and Garcia Marquez seems frustrated at the reaction of the characters, just as he might
have been with his own people when after the Banana Strike Massacre, an official
statement was released that made the event no longer seem violent—a lie in which
many in Columbia were willing to believe. Just as in real life, the author expresses his
thoughts about social and political responsibility when after the false report comes out,
―There were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the
banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped‖ (OYS 332).
Garcia Marquez wants his fellow countrymen to find a voice in the political chaos of
the years since active colonialism. He also wants to gently scold or warn them about the
dangers of allowing atrocities to continue, when peace could be possible. This is a
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particularly potent political and social message, coming from a man who has seen and
reported on one of the worst and most devastating periods in the history of Columbia.
Colombia has become synonymous with violence. It has been engulfed in a
complicated civil war for more than a century, and most of the victims of the violence
have been civilians. They are killed by soldiers at roadblocks, taken hostage and
tortured by paramilitary death squads, blown up by land mines, shot by drug traffickers,
because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and massacred because they are
thought to sympathize with one side or the other. The Human Rights Watch issued a
chilling appraisal of life in Colombia which concluded:
Violations of international humanitarian law -- the laws of war -- are not
abstract concepts in Colombia, but the grim material of everyday life....
Sometimes, armed men carefully choose their victims from lists. Other times,
they simply kill those nearby, to spread fear. Indeed, a willingness to commit
atrocities is among the most striking features of Colombia's war. (182)
Garcia Marquez is worried about the present status quo of Colombian violence.
He began his life as a writer during the early years of a bloody conflict, La Violencia.
Between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people, most of them in the
countryside were killed during La Violencia, which lasted roughly until the early
sixties. In Colombia, there are many possible sources of violence; violence may erupt
from either drug traffickers or guerrillas. The paramilitary armies are at war with both
drug traffickers and guerrillas. A victim in Colombia is always confused about his
oppressor. Nearly two hundred people are kidnapped and more than two thousand are
murdered every month. Even Garcia Marquez has to travel in a bulletproof car with
several security personnel. The roots of Colombian violence can be traced back to the
Spanish colonial rule. The Spaniards adopted the dictum of ‗divide and rule‘ to keep
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the nation under their control. Gradually, there came into being two major political
parties which started hating each other. The hatred continues to this day.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the political violence characteristic of
Colombian national history is paralleled in the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who
wars against the treasonous Conservatives, facilitating the politico-economic power of
foreign imperialists in the national affairs of Colombia. The banana plantation owners
possess a private police force with which the business corporation attacks the
Colombian citizens at will. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez shows
Latin America which suffers from the absence of purposeful political organization and
the will required for progress. The tragedy of Latin America is the lack of a definitive
national identity, without which there is only self-destruction, not preservation. This
might be partly attributed to five centuries of Spanish colonialism; subsequently, the
continual violence, repression, and exploitation, rob the Colombian of a definite
identity. The historical reality of the Latin American countries occurs as the recurring
fantastical world of Macondo. The desire for change and progress exists in Macondo as
in the countries of Latin America; however, the story's temporal cycles symbolize the
nationalist tendency for repeating history. The result is there is no progress in Latin
America.
No One Writes to the Colonel is set in the background of La Violencia. Garcia
Marquez presents the violent oppression of the regime, in a subtle way. The
government, like the colonizers, oppresses the weak. The Colonel‘s sufferings are
endless in the military rule. He waits endlessly for his pension which he never gets.
Even the funeral procession of a poor musician cannot take place in a peaceful manner.
The crude and cunning people like Don Sabas flourish during La Violencia. People like
him get prosperous by cheating the innocent and the vulnerable. Garcia Marquez is
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concerned with the continuation of oppression and exploitation even after
independence. The local leaders, like the Europeans, continue to exploit their own
people, without any concern for the welfare of the nation.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is about the collective violent consciousness of
the people of a town, who have become insensitive to violence. Right from the colonial
period, violence is in their blood and hence they do not react to the violent death of
Santiago Nasar. They become passive spectators to the violent murder committed by
the Vicario brothers. Honour is the main cause for violence in Colombia. The political
system of Colombia is divided into two parties, and the psyche of the people is also
split into two parts. The people are ready to do anything for the honour of their party.
Thus, honour is taken seriously in the culture of Colombia. The Vicario brothers kill
Santiago Nasar in order the save the honour of their sister, Angela Vicario. Garcia
Marquez ends the novel with a warning that indifference to violence will ruin the life of
the nation.
The Autumn of the Patriarch is about absolute power and the violence
associated with it. The colonizers enjoyed unlimited freedom over the colonized
nations. This concept of absolute power continues even after independence, in the form
of dictators. The dictators are the machinations of the imperial nations. The dictators‘
reign, like the colonial rule, is full of violence and oppression. They do not like any
revolt against them. Garcia Marquez wants the tribe of dictators to be eliminated from
the Latin American countries. He wants to wipe out any traces of imperialistic violence
in the form of dictators. In Autumn of the Patriarch, while Gabriel Garcia Marquez
stresses the need to understand one‘s history in order to put an end to colonization or
formation of absolute power, he also brings out the truth that the ruled are also implicit
collaborators in the construction of the dictator‘s absolute power. The construction of
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authority or the dictator's rise to power depends on the way in which his subjects
interpret his - and their - story. The latter follow their leader blindly, thereby
collaborating in the establishment of his authority. This unwritten contract between the
ruler and the subjects, sheds light on the nature of political authority in the aftermath of
Latin American independence, and on the role which the people played in establishing
and sustaining that power. The legacy of absolute power continues even after the
independence.
The youthful patriarch founds his nation modelled on the Caudillista regimes
which existed in the post-independent Latin America. But the ―truth‖ of the nation's
founding, as conceived by the patriarch and ―revealed‖ to the people, is in fact a
fabrication. The dictator here does not base his story on experience nor even on
reportage or textual interpretation, as he is illiterate, but rather on the prints and
illustrations made by European travellers to the New World, at the end of the
eighteenth century. This explains that the construction of the authoritative power and
the resulting dependence of the people on the Latin American caudillos, is based on the
designs of colonization. The patriarch establishes a paternalistic relationship with his
people. In paternalism, there is a hierarchical link between an authority figure who acts
as proxy father, such as disciplinary institutions like the state, the nation, the classroom,
the family, and an imaginary audience of figured children, such as the people of the
nation, the students and children. One of the effects of paternalism is the infantilization
of the children by the father. Infantilization results in ‗docility‘. This is the ‗illness‘ that
colonizers generally attribute to the colonized. The infantilized people of the nation are
forced to accept the repressive nature of the dictator. Thus Garcia Marquez‘s The
Autumn of the Patriarch is different from other dictator novels of Latin America. In the
other Latin American dictator novels, the people are forced to suffer under the power of
203
irrational dictators, whose hold on power is beyond the people‘s control. But Garcia
Marquez brings out a new notion that the people are also collaborators in the
construction of dictator‘s power. As long as the people are docile and blind, there will
not be any dearth for dictators with absolute power. If they stand against him with
courage, the dictators and their absolute power will disappear once for all from the
minds of the people.
For Garcia Marquez, the search for national or continental identity in the postcolonial light is no longer an innocent business of subverting the colonial heritage. It
becomes a deconstructive enterprise which shows how colonialism is constructed and
how the processes of ideological domination function. This can be seen in the ending of
the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the Buendia family and Macondo are
wiped out by the apocalyptic wind. The demise of the Buendia family, for Garcia
Marquez, signals how people who are obsessed with themselves and their own kin to
the extent that they commit incest, are not allowed to live. The incestuous solitude that
marks the first generation of the Buendia family in Macondo in the marriage between
Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, comes back to haunt them again in a nuptial
bond that holds Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula together. While Jose Arcadio and
Ursula are lucky since their children are not cursed with a pig‘s tail, Aureliano and his
aunt are not so fortunate: their son, also named Aureliano, is born with a pig‘s tail and
is subsequently eaten by ants. By having the whole town destroyed at the end of the
novel, Garcia Marquez seems to deplore the solitude to which the Buendia family is
subject, as the last phrase of the novel runs as follows: ―races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth‖ ( OYS 416). The
Buendias are incapable of loving and this is the key to their solitude and their
frustration. Solitude is the opposite of solidarity. This can also give a second meaning
204
to Jose Arcadio Buendia‘s dream of a city with mirrors when he founds the town of
Macondo. The inhabitants in this town are too occupied and obsessed with themselves,
as they choose to look inwards at themselves as in mirrors, rather than looking
outwards and learning to understand and love others. In terms of nationhood, such a
solitary attitude towards oneself is dangerous, as it distances one from the other,
separating ‗we‘ and ‗them‘. This becomes one of the main causes of colonialism, as one
believes in one‘s superiority to another. If Macondo is marked by the irrational and
cyclical time, they also simultaneously point towards the insularity of the town, which
makes such oddities possible.
In bringing up the issues of unique reality and history of Macondo, Garcia
Marquez in turn, demystifies those myths and shows that in fact magic and circular
time are often preordained in a place that is secluded and solitary. If there is a need to
find unique characters or traits to define a nation, there should also be a need to
demystify these processes so that people understand the concept that a nation is an
imagined political community. In bringing Macondo to a tragic end, Garcia Marquez, at
the same time, opens up new routes, new possibilities in which one can think of
nationhood and national consciousness, not as a closed, solitary entity, but as a hybrid
existence, spurred by an interaction of various sources of influence, both internal and
external, and by a judicious recognition of other races and cultures. It is in this
optimistic spirit that Garcia Marquez ends his Nobel address: ―it is not yet too late to
undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia for life wherein no
one can decide for others how they are to die, where love really can be true and
happiness possible…‖( 290). For him, national identity cannot be found when one
looks inwards at oneself; it is generated by an endeavour to understand oneself and the
205
other and how the two sides are related. It is only through these processes that the real
sense of nationhood can be achieved.
Garcia Marquez, in his novels, attempts to carve out a new identity for
Colombia. In magical realism, he vehemently positions ‗magic‘ on par with ‗realism‘.
Hitherto, the ‗other‘ perspectives which were relegated to an insignificant position, are
lifted up to occupy an equal status with that of the dominant world views. His magical
realism paves a new way to perceive the world with alternative methods. Through
magical realism, Garcia Marquez reminds his people that they can be elevated from the
restrictions they face in day to day life, and they can also be enlightened as to the true
potential of their lives, and their own individual power to create and shape their own
destiny, which is free from colonial consciousness. This is most vividly expressed by
Garcia Marquez through his magical realism‘s own effect of constantly confounding
the readers‘ expectations and precluding any comfortable suspension of disbelief. His
‗reconstruction of past‘ reminds his people of the calm and quiet life of the various
clans of pre-Hispanic Colombia. The colonization has robbed away its tranquillity,
bringing chaos and confusion and scattering the identity of the nation. He rewrites the
past with the hope that the people would learn from their past mistakes. He also
unravels the truth that the civil wars have further wiped away the identity of the nation,
restricting the country into becoming a world power to reckon with. His portrayal of
violence signifies that it is a plot devised during the colonial period, which continues to
this day. He wants his people to be united and the colonial legacy of ‗divide and rule‘ to
be done away with. Thus, Garcia Marquez has done enough foundational work that
would pave the way for a great social and political change in the years to come.
206
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http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0361-1299%281998%2952%3A2%3C99%
3ALALSRA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=MOL0120000607&s
ite=lrc- live">Latin American Short Fiction.
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=9311193859&site=
lrc-live">Leaves of light: The textual journeys of Dante and Garcia Marquez.
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=369949151&Fmt=4&clientId=23804&RQT=309
&VName =PQD.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gabriel_Garcia_Marquez.
http://rupkatha.com/V2/n3/MagicRealisminMarquez.pdf.
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