10/25/2008 One Hundred Years of Solitude

The aspect of this novel that strikes me the most is the absence of death in Macondo up until Melquiades and the 17 Aurelianos. It reads like a fairy tale until Death marks Macondo on its map and then it seems like people can't stop dying violently. I think it traces back to when Prudencio is able to track down Jose Arcadio Buendia and finds out that he loves his worst enemy as the only person still remembering him. While this is an expression of magical realism, I think it is also a connection to the Civil War and political strife we discussed in class today. Gabo could be saying that none of the civil wars and deaths of millions of young men and babies under the age of 1 would have occurred (or certainly not at such a high rate of occurrence) without the colonial mindset that created the country and culture of Colombia. It seems as if Colombia is still trying to create an identity that is free of the Western influence which settled it. Colombia, in many ways, is an experiment in hybridity as a social creation as well as a cultural one. I think Gabo uses Colombia's history to give depth to a story which many can only appreciate for its literary qualities. (His Nobel-acceptance speech is pretty clear in his indictment of Western sympathy without concrete support of improving Colombia's infrastructure and place in the "distribution of the world".)Still, I think its power as art comes from the fact that he wrote it to make meaning of all the suffering and not just condemn imperialistic motives and demand reparations.