Hello Blog readers,
We finished ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez this week. There was so much that happened, but it was hard to keep my head straight trying to identify and separate the members of the Buendia family. The novel kept on getting more complicated as we were reading. Going through six generations of a family can be overwhelming to read and comprehend. The people are different, but some have similar characteristics and personalities. They all seemed to be different, yet, Garcia names them all so similar, which must have had a message of importance behind it. Additionally, I found interesting the banana plantation plot because of the real history behind that event and the craziness of the event in general, so that is what I will focus on in this post.
What I found most interesting about the second half was the colonization of Macondo. First, these foreigners arrived and got forced into labour for a banana company. Eventually, the workers go on strike but get told they don’t have any rights because “the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis” (301-302). Then all the workers get sent to the train station where “three thousand people, workers, women, and children, had spoiled out of the open space in front of the station” (302). Next thing we know, all these workers are being shot and brutally killed. As the novel says, “The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce” (305). This tragedy was immense; so many people were shot dead, and only two witnesses lived to tell the tale. Jose Arcadia and the young boy he grabs and saves are the survivors. These two experience all this death, violence, and killing and get thought of as crazy. Jose Arcadia ends up with almost a sort of PTSD, yet he keeps getting his thoughts invalidated by people saying these events did not happen. Everyone seems disconnected from the reality of this violence and madness except for Jose Arcadia and the boy who saw everything happen. Memory and remembering get associated with madness. Three thousand people died, which doesn’t mean anything to the town members because they are so dissociated from the event and the ones who did see the event get viewed as mad. Also, magically, it starts raining after three months of drought because these workers died, which ties the magic aspect into it again.
I think this book compels people because it has this magical realism approach that soothes history into more manageable pieces. We are learning about political issues, labour forces, and capitalism but in an easier way because of the fun magical elements introduced. We are learning about the real banana Massacre, which happened in Colombia with the United Fruit Company but through the novel in a more playful way, unlike a history lesson. This novel has some critical, relevant, and historical aspects, and I like how Garcia used magic realism to integrate these multiple realities.
Additionally, this event was chaotic, and I believe it was one of the reasons for the destruction of Macondo. In the end, Macondo died from the curse of the pigtail, which we knew would be the reason for the end of the family. From the beginning, we knew the Bundia family was cursed because of their relationships filled with incest. This incest would eventually lead to a child being born with a pigtail, and the family would die when this child was born. Therefore, the Buendia family was doomed from the beginning. However, I still believe the chaos of the banana company strike also weakened the town, which helped the death of Macando before Amaranta Ursula’s child was born.
My question to you is, what specific moment did you realize before the childbirth that Macondo was in decline as a town? There is a multitude of reasons for this decline, including the expansion of Macondo, and I want to know your thoughts on exactly that.
The episode of the banana company is one of the most remembered in this novel. Thanks for writing about this in your post. I think there is another element that we can take into account, and that from my reading is implicit: fear. Especially in Latin America, the Official History (in capital letters) is another form of fiction, a survival pact. Although the novel is full of small events, the real danger is oblivion: that of political struggles, that of prophecies. Fear is the weapon of the world's disenchantment.
ReplyDeleteHi melika! Great blog post this week! I always love reading your posts and insight on the books! There are a multitude of reasons that brought Macondo to its decline, I mentioned a few in my own blog post. I believe that the addition of the train was the first incident that led to the town's decline. This is because the train represents new innovation and outside knowledge. The train brought massacres, like the banana one you mention in your post. The train was the beginning to allowing new people in, new death to occur, and ultimately tempt the people of Macondo to a new way of life, outside the town. After the train, many things started to go wrong inside Macondo, but ultimately I believe that Macondo would decline and disappear because of the fate in the manuscript's.
ReplyDeleteHi Melika, I liked how your blogpost plays on historical events that happened in both One Hundred Years of Solitude and the actual history of Colombia. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude made me interested in looking deeper at the history of capitalist exploitation by foreign companies like the United Fruit Company. To me the United Fruit Company in One Hundred Years of Solitude, acts more like a criminal organization or mafia, which employs murder and intimidation to squeeze money out of the 'poor' (both literally and figuratively) citizens of Macondo.
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