Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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The most famous place in South America, for those well read in literature, may be a town that does not exist. This town, Macondo, is the creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the center of action in his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. To say that Macondo never existed is tantamount to asserting the same for the Garden of Eden - one may have opinions, but there always remains some trace of doubt. Macondo breathes of mystery and wonder that gives the novel a Biblical, for lack of a better word, feeling that most readers will sense. So much fantasy and surrealism abound that the world Garcia Marquez presents seems as foreign as the ancient Holy Land. For most Western readers, Macondo could seem even more foreign. Does this say something about the West's indifference to learning about other cultures, or is Macondo so far-fetched that the connection is inappropriate? Often, a great cultural barrier seems to exist between America and Latin America. So one may ask how fantasy in the novel affects one in light of this cultural separation. Is it a hindrance, or does it somehow bring one closer to understanding the culture? The answers lie in the use of fantasy and myth by Garcia Marquez. Before looking at the relation between fantasy and cultural understanding, one should examine the cultural significance of the novel. The culture that one is hopefully led to understand represents Latin American culture, especially that of Colombia. Macondo is representative of La
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place" (Williams 78). Alan Weinblatt believes that this style earns the novel great praise. "The key to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude," he says, "was the idea of saying incredible things with a completely unperturbed face" (Weinblatt). This type of language can have many effects on a reader. But why is fantasy used? It would appear that it presents an even greater barrier preventing understanding of the novel and of the culture in the novel.
Different authors use varying forms of fantasy for a wide range of purposes. Sometimes the effects that fantasy have on a reader may go beyond an author's original purposes. The mixture of reality and fantasy that Garcia Marquez uses has a few purposes. The first, and most obvious, is to produce humor in a novel whose story line is essentially black and hopeless. The absurdity of some of the description is bound to provoke a laugh, even in the bleakest of moments.
A second purpose that is more pertinent in looking at cultural observations; it is that of relating the real and the false of cultures. Garcia Marquez is known for his blending of reality and fantasy, but what does he show by it? A culture has certain ideas of what is truth and what is fallacy. These ideas are
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Approximate Word count = 2272
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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