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)