Tag Archives: time

García Márquez

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Collapse

I found that I enjoyed the second half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez significantly more than I enjoyed the first half. Many of the symbols, broader themes, and patterns started to become more coherent for me, and this awareness infused each chapter with much more significance.

The imagery of “spiral and collapse” has persisted throughout my reading of the text, and I believe it fittingly characterizes the world of Macondo and the Buendías. I imagined the plot, rather than a classic mountain, as a large corkscrew that coils forward in time but continually reifies the past’s events and tragedies. When I reached the end and read about the tornado winds that finally swept Macondo away, I thought this was a fitting symbol to complete the narrative. At the center of this spiral, trying bravely and desperately to create order within the chaos of the family, is Ursula, the relentless matriarch. She is one of the only constants in the midst of changing yet repetitive characters and events. In a sense, I imagine her being the “eye of the storm” in the center of the spiraling hurricane of this family.

In the second half of the novel in particular, we see Macondo and its founding family spiral through chaos and false progress. Capitalism and imperialism seem to overburden the once idyllic town until it explodes under the weight of its many tragedies. Conversely, we see the Buendía family collapse in on itself. This is illustrated quite vividly through their repeated turning in on themselves incestuously. Shut away, wading yet again through their enduring and collective solitude, the spiral finally seems to crash into its center upon the death of its indelible matriarch. But, like the text suggests, I think the beginning of the collapse really came upon the death of Pilar Ternera, who has always acted as a shadowy and unloved matriarch in her own right. Pilar is also one of the few founders of Macondo, present throughout the text. Despite being rejected, she births two sons of the Buendía family and comforts/”grandmothers” several others. In addition, she has a special relationship with time that seems to place her at the center of this hurricane too; able to envision events of the past and future, she seems to know the Buendías’ fate all along. When she dies, this spiral has finally lost the integrity of its center and collapses in forcefully.

This quote illustrated this imagery and Pilar’s role most for me: “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for [Pilar] because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (396).

To bounce off of Jon’s discussion question, I think the family’s fate could have been saved by the naming of the last Buendía Rodrigo, rather than another Aureliano. The text repeatedly alludes to their destiny for greatness and I believe this greatness could have been truly preserved with the symbolic ending of the name cycle. Question for discussion: Do you think something else could have saved the Buendías from their fate?

Standard
García Márquez

Week 7: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Spiral

The first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was a vibrant and overwhelming ride. It felt as if the narrative spun into chaos within the first 30 pages. It was beautiful to experience but also disorienting and somewhat tedious. Like the title suggests, and as Jon mentioned in his lecture, the greatest enemy of the characters (and the readers) here is tedium. A slow-boiling circus of chaotic personalities and circumstances that never seems to progress past its repeated mistakes.

Given the nature of magical realism and also the events of this novel, I found it difficult to differentiate the momentous from the mundane. Metaphorically speaking, García Márquez’s writing was extremely saturated and rich – it felt like a deluge of vivid colors – and hence, at times I wanted to put on sunglasses to mitigate the blinding intensity. Even the syntax of García Márquez’s writing seemed to contribute to this flood of imagery. He crafts his narrative through large blocks of text in which context, points of view, and time periods can fluctuate without apparent connection. Even dialogue would sometimes be buried in these long paragraphs, giving the reader a choppy sense of organization and progression. As I settled into the book, I began to acclimate to García Márquez’s game and found myself getting used to finding profound passages embedded in seemingly unrelated text – for example, “Amaranta’s sensibility, her discreet but enveloping tenderness had been weaving an invisible web about her fiancé, which he had to push aside materially with his pale and ringless fingers in order to leave the house at eight o’clock” (107). Breathtaking passages like these felt like were difficult to identify and ruminate on because they were often sandwiched by an excess of equally intense descriptions and events.

One thing I loved in particular about the text was the absurd humor, planted dryly at unexpected moments. There are too many instances to mention, but this one in particular truly made me laugh out loud: “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians” (71). Moments like this especially stuck out because their simple and blunt delivery stood in contrast to adjacent passages of serious intensity.

Disney’s Encanto popped into my head repeatedly in the first half of the novel. Upon further research I found that I’m definitely not the first to make this connection and many believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude may have been a significant (or entire) source of inspiration for La Familia Madrigal. Both the Buendía and Madrigal families live in massive, multi-generational mansions in the jungle of Colombia, acting as the social and political leaders of their village, and juggling surreal and magical powers. I loved thinking about this possible connection as the novel progressed; it helped to lighten some of the darker aspects of the plot.

Question for discussion: How did you make sense of time in the novel? At times it felt like the narrative crawled along at snail’s pace and then sped into overdrive skipping across decades. I could never get a sense of the children’s ages or relationships to each other. Do you think time is also subject to the magic of Macondo?

Standard
Borges

Week 5: Labyrinths and the Maze of Understanding

Exactly as the title foreshadows, I found myself quickly getting lost in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The first definition Google provides for labyrinth is “a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Fittingly, I found Borges’ narrative style to be at times complicated, meandering, or just misleading. I found myself needing to read sentences or passages more than once – usually several times over. And even when I felt that I was properly following the storyline, I’d come across a passage that would make me question my understanding of what came before. In this way, both frustratingly and amusingly, I felt like I was navigating a real labyrinth consuming Borges’ work. I’d like to think this was his exact intention.

Despite feeling occasionally uncertain, I really enjoyed the reading journey Labyrinths led me down. The stories were unusual and unexpected yet vivid and compelling. In each, I am positive something significant or interesting completely flew over my head. But, again, faithful to the title, I think the stories were written to provide unique paths for every reader and allow certain details to go unexamined upon your first pass. Typically in a maze, people will walk up and down the same corridors repeatedly in the process of way-finding, and in this same way, I expect multiple reads of Borges’ text to be necessary to reveal all the nuanced mysteries.

Before reading this text, I had known Borges to be associated with the genre of “magical realism,” but upon finishing, I was surprised that scientific-fiction (sci-fi) wasn’t a more affiliated style. The short stories were full of incredible invention, science, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Certain passages were so formal and academic – almost mathematical – that I sometimes felt a rigorous background in these topics was needed to properly appreciate what was being said.

Throughout, Borges remained faithful to the themes of time, plurality, and importantly, labyrinths. In many of his stories, Borges completely deconstructs my understanding of time and introduces extraordinary layers of possibility in each narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way Rick Riordan describes the Labyrinth in the fourth novel of the Percy Jackson series; a self-aware, self-expanding maze that bends time and has a fragile relationship to reality. Similarly, Labyrinths felt like an infinitely vast, infinitely layered maze, with supernatural intelligence. There is one quote in the very first short story that I think perfectly reflects the text’s enormity: “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (8).

Question for discussion: Do you think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays?

Standard