One Hundred Years of Solitude

This study will examine Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, focusing on the politics of memory, or how the novel relates the act of remembering or forgetting with political/economic power. The study will argue that the dynamics of power in politics and economics are deeply affected by remembering and forgetting. Invariably, those with power encourage those without power to forget the past, to forget even the future, in order to remain passive in their powerlessness and poverty. On the other hand, those without power are often willing or forced to forget, or, perhaps more often, willing or forced to create for themselves false or mythical memories which allow them to live without power. Overriding these considerations is the untrustworthiness of the world described by a magical realist such as Garcia Marquez. Magical realism creates a "reality" which is constantly being altered and therefore it is difficult to know that the memory of a character or of the entire community is itself trustworthy. The world of Macondo and its people in Garcia Marquez's hands is one which by its very nature defies the memory, or at least the memory which demands certainty and accuracy.

Clearly, Garcia Marquez's novel is not an optimistic one. In that sense, his book is designed to stimulate the memory, to honor the memory and the past, despite the fact that what is remembered by the poor and powerless politically and economically is often very painful. The community portrayed

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major elements of the magical realism of Garcia Marquez is its flexibility, its mutability, the feeling of uncertainty with respect to reality itself. This uncertainty extends not only to the past, which is remembered as the changing elements of a dream are remembered, if not completely forgotten, but also to the present: In spite of his triumphal return, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was not enthusiastic over the looks of things. The government troops abandoned their positions without resistance and that aroused an illusion of victory among the Liberal population that it was not right to destroy, but the revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendia better than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five thousand men under his command and held two coastal states, he had the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was . . . confused. . . . (137). Earlier, Aureliano's father-in-law, who had been hiding in a closet from the terror of the civil war, says, "This is madness." The Colonel says, "Not madness. War" (105). In other words, reality is what one calls it, and those who name reality are the ones with power, or at least with more apparent power than others. In any case,

Category: Literature - O