En el fin, ¿cúales la importancia y las resultados?

In the end, what can be gathered from this survey? Have we been able to understand the usage of magical realism and it's purpose?

We've gathered that magical realism serves as a way to create a nearly believable environment in which the reader can relate to the fictitious characters while still being reasonably removed from the environment.

In addition, by using magic realism in the character's life and death, the author is able to create an echo or reflection of the character's life. Often meaningful, and always personal, it serves to put an emphasis on the important aspects of the character and to make a statement about what is important to the individual. In the aspect of death, García Márquez establishes his unique writing style in defining the death of the character.

However, could it be said that the most useful aspect of the motif is to add social commentary? By combining imaginative writing with social and political commentary in a novel, García Márquez is providing his native Colombia with not only a novel of respectable quality but with an iconographic work of literature of which they can be proud.

Perhaps the best way to discern the true potential and goal for not the only usage of magical realism and yet the novel itself is not to study multitudes of journals and books, but to look to the author himself. In reading or listening to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982, it's not too difficult to read between the lines and understand what it is he had hoped to accomplish through his prized novel and lifetime of work.

"Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. ... No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excesses of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude." (Ortega 90, emphasis my own)

Later on in the speech, García Márquez continues with the idea of Latin America's own solitude.

"Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a more utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth." (Ortega 91, emphasis my own)

A closing thought perhaps,

"The repeated follies of José Arcadio—like the name and hereditary stubbornness of his great-grandson, like Ursula's pronouncements, like the end of the novel—are attempts on the part of García Márquez to assert that history is, in some sense, circular. The "primitive" past of Latin America, like that of Macondo, might have provided countless omens of Colombia's future, if anyone would have paid attention—that is, if anyone would have avoided the delirium of progress." (Conniff 177) 

For academic purposes, I have attached a Works Cited page.

El propósito de mágica realismo en este novela

After surveying the usage of magical realism, it ultimately leads to one question. What purpose does it serve? What's the point? In creating a story based heavily in this genre of fiction, was there a particular purpose that García Márquez was looking to achieve?


Several examples from the author's life can be drawn upon in order to discern the purpose.

1.  García Márquez as Melquíades...Melquíades controls the progression of the Buendía family life, compressing a century of life into an instant when it is deciphered.In the same respect, García Márquez does the same thing with his readers. He conceived the story and wrote it out before the readers were able to read it and discern it for themselves. In the same respect, Aureliano represents the reader as they go on their own journey to discover the Buendía family history. It may be a bit of a stretch, but it's an interesting theory. 
2. The last Aureliano (the one to decipher the scrolls) was abandoned by his parents and left to live in his grandparents' house. (Sounds like Gabo's childhood...) 
3. Prototypes of García Márquez's grandparents can also be found in the novel. Colonel Aureliano Buendía (um, his grandfather was a colonel in the Colombian Civil War). Úrsula Iguarán, the storyteller and mother hen (his own grandmother wove wonderful tales, according to García Márquez). 

Looking again at the story within a story, is it possible that it serves as a way to continue the Buendía story? García Márquez has preserved the Buendía story the same way that Melquíades did. Only at the end of the novel are the messages deciphered, at which point, and obvious reaction would be to read them. Starting at the beginning of the scrolls and working through them would lead Aureliano to relive his family's history and his own once again. García Márquez does the same thing with the novel in a more aesthetic way by not numbering his chapters, limiting dialogue and lengthening the paragraphs. This causes the novel to have increased fluidity in reading, making it seem as the century passes by swiftly in about 400 pages.

"If the last Aureliano discovers on the last page that the won't be able to leave the magic room any more because that room is the last reality that remains to him in a world obliterated by the wind, it is not only because he has finally accepted being condemned to solitude but because perhaps on a non-conscious level he has accepted his reality as a creature forever lost in a world of mirages, of a being who inhabits a world of total fiction. But within that world, the wind that destroys the rest of Macondo in the last two pages does not touch Aureliano, petrified forever in the last line in the act of reading. Because that wind(like everything else in the Book) is made of words and is enclosed in a solid object made of pages that one can turn back to begin (once more and so on to infinity) the reading. What really ends on the last page of the Book is only the first reading. It is enough to turn back the pages for time to begin to run again, for the figures of the old and deceased come to life, for the fable to recommence. It's enough to read, or re-read." ( Rodriguez Monegal 151-152)

Furthermore, the usage of magical realism allows García Márquez to create a commentary on the historical and political concerns of Latin America.

• Macondo's first business empire is the banana plantation and is run by townspeople until they are overthrown by a foreign army. Shortly after the conquest, a massacre happens when the army decides to eliminate the Macondo workers as a way to assert their authority over the town. What's more, they rebuild parts of the city and eliminate any information regarding the massacre. (This idea sounds oddly similar to the displacement of the Incans by the Spanish Conquistadors.) Besides just the Spaniards, it's oddly reminiscent of the United Fruit Company of Boston during 1900-1928. They hired field hands through subcontractors as to be able to avoid Colombian labor legislation. In doing so, they were literally able to register that they had no laborers on payroll.
  

By creating a fictional and magical world, García Márquez creates a world in which he can write a commentary on the mistreatment of the native South Americans, the actions of the Spanish colonizers, and many more events in South American history.

This creative outlet allows for social commentary on several aspects ranging from the previously mentioned aspects through feminism, social rights and family dynamics. Latin American culture is predominantly male driven, and women are considered submissive to one man at a time, their father or their husband.

"In García Márquez men are flighty creatures, governed by whim, fanciful dreamers given to impossible delusions, capable of moments of haughty grandeur, but basically weak and unstable. Women, on the other hand, are solid, sensible, unvarying and down to earth, paragons of order and stability. They seem to be more at home in the world, more deeply rooted in their nature, closer to the center of gravity, therefore better equipped to face up to circumstances. García Márquez puts it another way: "My women are masculine." ( Bell-Villada 102)

Los ejemplos de mágica realismo en el uso de tiempo

 One of the most interesting aspects of magical realism in the novel plays a major role throughout the story but is not revealed until the last three pages. Remember the parchment written by Melquíades, our local priest-magician,  predicting the deaths of the first and the last of the Buendía line? Well, that wasn't the only parchment written about the family. In fact, before the founding of Macondo, Melquíades had already written several scrolls, in Sanskrit, no less detailing the one hundred years of solitude to be lived by the Buendías. While several of the men try their hand and deciphering the messages, it is ultimately the sole survivor, Aureliano, who is able to deciper the scrolls so easily "as if they had been written in Spanish," (García Márquez 415). What's so interesting about this is that the story is so detailed, that Aureliano questions whether or not his family was real or fictitious. This story within a story functions a lot like Hamlet.

"It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection, which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta Ursula, was based on the fact that Melquíades 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." (García Márquez 415, emphasis my own).

While the Buendías had lived one hundred years in one town, this passage of time was smaller for Melquíades. As the biographer/prophet of all their fate, he was able to oversee their entire legacy before it occurred. Throughout the novel, he serves as a mentor and guide to the family, always apparently one step ahead of their questions and ready to provide needed guidance. Even after his death, his endowments of books, technology, alchemy and science serve to educate the younger generations.

The Buendias' progression of life seems to the reader to be the only story being told. However, with the revelation that the family's entire legacy was preconceived, it opens up an idea that goes deeper than surface level. It takes the story outside of the confines of time by telescoping and compressing an entire century into a single moment on a page. Through this, Aureliano finds himself trapped in the words on a page.

Now for a good dosage of irony (I promise, it all goes together).

While the discoveries of the family legacy and death of the last generation are both taking place, things are getting a little crazy outside the Buendía house.

"Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia....

Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror."(García Márquez 415)

 Continuing on...it's not just the whole town getting blown away that is so significant but also the room in which Aureliano is living out his last few moments. This particular room is called the "magic room" (more irony for ya) and has served many purposes over the century.

• The alchemy lab where Jose Arcadio Buendía conducted experiments with the technology and tools purchased from the gypsies.
• Haunted by Melquíades ghost
• Where Aureliano's father taught him to read.
• The room is impervious to outside influence, such as dust, heat, wind, or fading from the sun. This traps the room into perpetual preservation. 

In a room impervious to the changes of time, the scrolls of the Buendía family's history and future are preserved until the last Buendía discovers the family secret. 

 "For García Márquez, history and reality are as open to imaginative interpretation as are the time and memory, for if memory is known to be somewhat unreliable and our concept of time too rigid, so are many of our unquestioned assumptions." ( McNerney 25)

Un otro tema...defamiliarización

While magical realism is the main study for this blog, considering this is for a Literary Criticism class, we're going to make a segway. I would be remiss to discuss One Hundred Years of Solitude and not mention defamiliarization.

"Evidently, what is more important in the novel is not history but the defamiliarization of history by fiction. ... The structure of the novel is a conscious defamiliarization..."(Mose 185).

Once again, we'll look at the gypsies in the story and the purpose they serve. Melquíades is the source of information, technology, and science for José Arcadio Buendía. He travels with other gypsies and visits Macondo to hock their wares. Their introduction of items that are mundane, and daily to us is often startling or new to the citizens of Macondo. Things that we may take for granted or let go unnoticed are extraordinary to the people of Macondo.

Part of the act of defamiliarization includes a renaming of current items in existence. (Think, She Unnames Them by Ursula Le Guin). By taking away the current title, it helps push us into a different perception and away from preconceived notions.

For a long time, they will come every year, always "with an uproar of pipes and kettledrums," and always with new inventions, until the wars make such trips too dangerous, and the natives become too indifferent; but their first appearance is the most impressive, and the most ominous. 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" (11). Into this "primitive world" the gypsies bring an omen of the future, an invention of great wonder and potential: the magnet. (Coniff 169)

The magnet quickly becomes the focal point for the scientific experiments conducted by Jose Arcadio Buendía. After receiving the magnet from Melquíades, Jose begins to drag it around the neighborhood from house to house. He does this so that everyone can see pots and pans start flying off their shelves, nails and screws pop out of their woodwork and long lost objects expose themselves from their hiding places.

Besides the magnet, the gypsies also bring ice. While it may seem ordinary to us, the isolated citizens of Macondo are mesmerized by it. In writing this section, García Márquez introduces the object in a way that controls the reader's perspective.

"They insisted so much that José Arcadio Buendía paid the thirty reales and led them into the center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmer: "It's the largest diamond in the world." "No," the gypsy countered. "It's ice."(17)

Ejemplos de mágica realismo en la muerte

While One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of magical realism, for the sake of readership, I will cover just a few. But where to start? With miracles? With the supernatural? With medical wonders? Or how about just starting with an idea of what to look for?

The fantasy matter in García Márquez's novel forms a broad and diverse spectrum ranging from the literally extraordinary though nonetheless possible, to the farthest extremes of the physically fabulous and unlikely.( Bell-Villada 110)

So, for the rest of this post, let's look at some examples. For this post, we'll focus mostly on the manner of death for the characters as each one is unique from any other in the family. Within these individual deaths, each one is appropriate or echoic of the life lived by each individual character.

* Colonel Aureliano Buendía decides to kill himself and having his gun handy, shoots himself in the chest. However, the gun passes right through his back without damaging a single vital organ. While this is scientifically possible, it's not likely. (While he fails in this attempt, it is ultimately a firing squad shooting him that leads to his death.)

* When Úrsula passes away, thousands of birds fall from the sky in mourning. (This idea is in fact derived from a little tidbit of Colombian history. In 1925, the N/S El Niño current in the Eastern Pacific killed millions of birds caught up in the storm causing them to rain down on the shores of Ecuador and Colombia.)

* Remedios the Beauty ascends into the heavens because she is simply too beautiful to die, or to grow old and lose her youthful splendor. 

"Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o'clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her. (García Márquez 236)

After their death, her suitors bodies emanate a sweet perfume linked to her. The novel suggests that "her mortal effects on the men have obscure biochemical origins." (Bell-Villada 111). Remedios the Beauty serves the novel as the literal femme fatale stereotype since her lovers die immediately after consummating a relationship with her. (On a side note, her ascent into the heavens derives from the Catholic folk-legend of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which has been Catholic dogma only since the 1950's. Many countries in South America celebrate Assumption day on August 15.)

* When Jose Arcadio (the son of the patriarch) dies, his blood trickles across town and through the streets back to his home all the way to his mother's feet. It's easy to see that this is Oedipal and even implies an umbilical connection. In fact, this connection is more evident to the reader when reading the novel in Spanish because García Márquez uses the word hilo which is often used to say thread. (Another side note: there's SO much that could be said about the loss of meaning in translation. While the word trickle is sufficient to describe the passage of blood, thread  strongly emphasizes the mother/child connection.)

The story starts with hope, and the belief that a good life can be forged out of the wilderness in the creation of Macondo. By the end of the novel, death has occurred and the final death is based out of a cryptic prophecy from Melquíades(remember the gypsies?). What's so intriguing is that at the point that Aureliano Babilonia ( great-great-great grandson of the patriarch) finishes deciphering the mysterious scrolls of Melquíades, it is during the birth of his son.

" The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants." (García Márquez 415).

What is so significant about this message? José Aureliano Buendía, the first in this family, after founding Macondo eventually turns away from the magic (i.e. flying carpet brought by the gypsies) towards science and shuts himself off in his laboratory. Over time, his persistent search for a way to control time turns him insane, causing him to believe that he is constantly repeating the same day over and over. What happens? His family ties him to a chestnut tree in the backyard where he lives out the rest of his life. Thankfully, he has his wife, Úrsula Iquarán, to watch over and take his food to him. As his health diminishes, he is moved back into the house to rest in his bed. He passes away from old age and his death starts the sequence of phantasmagorical deaths in the novel. After he dies, tiny yellow flowers fall from the sky!

"Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía's room,shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by. (García Márquez 140).

 Melquíades scrolls were a family heirloom, a sort of relic passed down through the generations and while several Buendías attempted to translate them, the only successful one was Aureliano Babilonia. As aforementioned, his son was being born at the moment of his successful translation. In ending the story at this point, the novel completes the ascribed one hundred years spent in solitude in the city of Macondo by the Buendía family. 

"...and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rosebushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants." (García Márquez 415)

 At this point, the novel ends since there remains no more stories to be told.

¿Cúales la argumento?

You may be wondering at this point what the big deal is about One Hundred Years of Solitude, or what the story is even about. Well, before we go crazy explaining magical realism...I thought I would give you a taste of the plot, and maybe even make you want to pick up a copy and read it!

The story revolves around the isolated town of Macondo and the founding family, the Buendías. For years, the town has no outside connection to the world except for the occasional band of gypsies passing through to peddle their technology and goods, and when I say technology that includes anything from ice to telescopes. The patriarch is Jose Arcadio Buendía, impulsive, inquisitive, solitary and self alienating. These traits are inherited by all of his descendants throughout the novel. Eventually, the town loses its peacefulness during a Civil War bringing destruction and murder, the first time the town has experienced either of these. One of Jose Arcadio Buendía's descendants, Aureliano Buendía gains fame as a colonel in this war. During and after this war, the government changes hands many times, transforming Macondo into a less idyllic, or peaceful city. Yet another Buendía, this time Arcadio, becomes renown and takes over as a cruel dictator.

Keeping up with family members can be tiresome for the reader since the Buendía family likes to recycle family names. For example, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (the son of the patriarch, Jose Arcadio) has 17 sons and names them ALL Aureliano...so, yeah, it can be tough keeping up with them. Especially when those are only the sons from his wife, not including the one from a mistress...While the Buendía family tree may be overwhelming, this shouldn't deter you from checking it out, since most copies have a handy family tree in the front of the book.

And I must admit, I do own two copies, one in hardback and one in paperback...

¿Cúales realismo mágico?

Some of you may be asking yourselves...Amanda, what the heck is magical realism? Fantasia? Seeing magicians in real clothes? Well, it's neither of those things.


Magical realism is a literary motif used to make either mundane, ordinary things become extraordinary or to take something impossible or imaginary and twist it into something almost believable. hubpages.com has a definition of magical realism that I really like.

"Some absolutely love magical realism books, but other readers (and academics, for that matter) hate the genre created by magical realists, and look down their nose at it. Part of the problem is that the very term "magical realism" has a very nebulous meaning and now is often used for marketing purposes for stories (or movies) that are actually surrealist, expressionist, escapist, or experimental in nature. The original definition of magical realism fiction is fiction where the magical or distinctly uncommon occurs frequently, but is seen and treated by the characters as an everyday occurrence. While there are great examples of magical realist literature from other cultures, the earliest common use of this term came with Latin American literature, and early on it wasn't uncommon to see the term "Latin American magical realism." 

While One Hundred Years of Solitude is often heralded as the best example of this motif, several other works of Latin American fiction are also good examples. Por ejemplo....Chronicle of a Death Foretold by our man García Márquez///La Casa de los Epiritus (or The House of the Spirits) by Isabel Allende/// Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka/// Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie....and the list goes on.

Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature also has a really good article on the concept and birth of magical realism, and its evolution into post-modern magical realism.

"This heightened reality perception (Ringer's Das Abenteuerliche Herz) leads to the principal characteristics of magic realism, already strongly evident in Kafka, Mann and Musil: derealization (a sudden sense of detachment from the reality of the surrounding object world) and defamiliarization (the representation of familiar objects through a language or descriptive technique that causes them to appear new or shocking). In the derealized and defamiliarized world(s) of magic realism, the unusual juxtaposition of objects throws traditional descriptive systems into disarray, and the boundaries of an assumed "real" are stretched until levels of reality obeying different ontological laws coexist metonymically." (Columbia article excerpt) 

 Having a casual and more academic definition of magical realism gives more of an idea of what to expect from a novel within the genre. I think what I most enjoy about this genre is the escape that it provides. When reading these novels, it allows you to imagine what your own life would be like if the fictitious circumstances were reality. Furthermore, it shows creativity on the part of the author to stretch daily life into something plausible


Outside of literature, the concept of magical realism is also available. We've all seen at least one of the following films in which magical realism is abundant:
Pan's Labyrinth
Like Water for Chocolate (Warning: Nudity..and no subtitles)
Run Lola Run
Moulin Rouge
Pleasantville
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou   (or any Wes Anderson film for that matter...)
Barton Fink

If you haven't seen or heard of any of these films, just click on them to see movie trailer and that should help out with a mental picture.