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Annotated Bibliography - On the influence of Cien años de soledad

"Cinco novelas claves de la novela hispano americana" Antonio Sacoto, 1979

According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at The City College of the City University of New York, Cien años de soleded is considered as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature. (Together with El señor Presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, y La ciudad los perros). These novels, representative of the boom allow Hispanic American literature to reach the quality of North American and European literature, with its technical quality, rich themes, linguistic innovations, and the list goes on. (7)

Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, Garcia Marquez is able to define clear themes; maintaining individual character identities, and use different narrative techniques, from third person narrators to specific point of view narrators and even stream of consciousness; cinematographic techniques are also employed, with the idea of the montage and the close-up; combining the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic, reality in all its historic and politic facets with the mythic and magical American world; and lastly, the human comedy of a family, town, and country unveils itself to show us its problems. This is all presented in what is known as Garcia Marquez’s art of narrating, because the novel never ceases to be at its most interesting point. (251)

The characters in the novel are never defined; they are not created from a mold. Instead, they are developed and formed throughout the novel. All characters are individualized, with many characteristics that differentiate them from others. (259)

The novel, with a rich imagination achieved by its rhythmic tone, narrative, and fascinating character creation, is truly a thematic quarry, where the trivial and anecdotal, the historic and political, the wars and plagues, are all combined. From this great pool of themes, we can find violence, incest, and heat. (260)

Opportunity to expand on themes: violence, incest, heat.

There are many mythical features related to the Bible, classical Latin-Greek culture, and indigenous Hispanic culture. Most likely, these mythical features are the result of Garcia Marquez hearing stories in his travels and converting them into myths with his gift of narration. (277) For example, in the foundation of Macondo, there are clear allusions to the Bible’s Genesis, where characters live for long years, just as in the novel: Francisco el Hombre lives for over 200 years. (279) Another parallel between the novel and the Bible is that in the Bible, the Creator flooded the world with plagues to punish the disobeying people. In the novel, there are punishments for the insomnia, and oblivion. (280)

Reality serves as a guide to the imaginary. Logic and fact are lost in a sea of magic and imagination, mixing together to a point where reality is erased and a fantasy world is created. Reception to this type of writing varied from impressive awe to absurd and grotesque critics. It is important to remember, however, that this novel and its characters pushed and broke all the chains and boundaries that limited the magical realism to really create a world where the imaginary was another reality. (286) Garcia Marquez narrates the most extraordinary facts as if they were very common and natural, while common events for us are narrated as incomprehensible happenings to the novel’s characters. For example, When Jose Arcadio Buendia is told that the world is round, this comes as a shock and something far out of reality. The same is seen when teh colonel Aureliano Buendia encounters ice for the first time. (292)

Cien anos de soledad’s structure is divided into at least four world and time sequences. 1. The founders’ mythic world and time. 2. The historic world and time that introduces colonel Aureliano Buendia and his wars. 3. The first characters’ maturity and death’s cyclic time. 4. Macondo’s deterioration. (293)

Time in the novel is complex and repetitive to a point where all characters eventually know about everything that is happening in Macondo, and everyone can foresee the end. The idea of repetition is seen in the novel many times together with other ideas of cycles and backward turns. (295)

When asking: how do you build up a story with no space or time, with an imagined foundation and fantasy roof, with mythical windows, biblical yet American characters, while always maintaining the readers’ interest at first sight? Sacoto’s answer is the euphoric narrative in tone and rythm with which the author communicates to us a story full of anecdotes and fantasies. Garcia Marquez tells and re-tells his story without worrying about how much his story was changing and growing, with no logic, reason, reality, time, or space constraints. He narrates for pleasure, without caring about readers who like or dislike his work. (298)

And that is where Garcia Marquez’s success is. The reader feels absorbed into a world and all we want to do is keep fleeing the pages, even though we know the end of the story from the start of the novel. (299) The author leaves such a strong impression on the reader that a second read is more enjoyable than the first, and a third analytical one sheds even more light into the complex narrative techniques. Of these techniques, the three most important ones arereiteration, anticipation, and intensification. (300) Together these techniques force the readers to follow their curiosity.

The previously mentioned narrative techniques are not all created by Garcia Marquez, but such a successful mix between all the techniques, like points of view and cinematographic montages for example, had never been seen. Unique writing, such as describing every character every time they showed up, also gives the novel a unique taste. (306)