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Week 9: One Hundred Years of Solitude II

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Since I already addressed the whole book in my first blog post instead of splitting it up into two halves, I’m going to take a different approach this week: comparing Márquez’s style and themes against Borges’s. Whether it’s justified or not, the two often get paired together as the two great authors of Latin America and I certainly went into this book expecting something comparable to the otherworldly sensation of reading Borges. While they are obviously wildly different in countless ways, this expectation was satisfied even better than if the novel were truly Borgesian: it presents a picture of the world as original as Borges’s, yet so different that it’s almost as shocking as reading Borges for the first time was. Plus, I always find it interesting to compare my favourite books to each other in an attempt to extract which shared themes appeal to me.

One of the first differences I noticed between Borges and Márquez was their opposing authorial voices: Borges usually writes from a first-person perspective and includes the narrator in his stories, while Márquez is detached and absent from his subject matter. As the interview with Gerald Martin indicates, however, this technique of Márquez was a trick; though he takes the position of a distant observer, he is truly writing about his own life and memories as alienated from himself, comparable to the situation Borges explores in “Borges and I.” Relating to this, Borges has a tendency to spell out the possible implications of his stories, at times reading like a critic of his own work. Márquez, in contrast, leaves the wider themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude largely unspoken, or at most only vaguely hinted at; even later in life, he refused to elaborate on his intentions with this book. Despite Borges’s reputation as enigmatic and impenetrable, Márquez almost comes across as the more mysterious figure in this contrast.

In my post on Borges, I described his works as an attempt to illustrate infinity. Perhaps infinity isn’t the scope of Marquez – a hundred years isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things – yet this book gave me a similar feeling a vastness. While Borges manages to condense theoretical conceptions of infinity into stories no more than a couple pages long, Márquez paints a concrete world teeming with intersecting threads full of more detail than anything Borges ever wrote. The endless variation of minute differences that Borges imagines in “The Library of Babel” is realized in a story in which it’s practically impossible to keep track of everything at once, even while everything always seems to repeat. It’s only in the final chapter that this history is totalized, condensed into a moment through Melquiades’s manuscript. In the lecture video, this was compared to climactic scene in Borges’s “The Aleph,” a connection I also noticed. “The Immortal” (also not included in Ficciones) occurred to me as well as another story of a people as lost in time and doomed to repetition as the Buendias.

Did others notice further similarities and differences between Márquez and Borges? Or do you think comparing the two is even justified or worthwhile?

Week 2: Mama Blanca’s Memoirs

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Considering that Teresa de la Parra is hardly as legendary a figure as some of the other authors in this course, I quite liked Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. As the oldest book on the syllabus, I expected it to read more like a nineteenth-century text, but found it to be quite stylistically modern, despite its setting. Maybe I’m searching for relationships that aren’t there, but many parts reminded me of Marcel Proust – the instable, fluid relationship to memories that are always already lost is the most obvious connection, but other themes like the preoccupation with the function of names, the fascination with that which is forbidden, and the critique of social norms through the eyes of a child seemed to recall passages from the Reserche. Given that de la Parra was living in Paris during the 1920s, I wouldn’t be surprised if Proust was an influence on her writing, though I am curious to know if there is any documented evidence of a connection.

One line towards the end of the book stood out to me as oddly troubling: “memories do not change, and change is the law of existence.” I understand the point she is making about the dissonance that can occur between our memories of things and their present reality. Yet the two halves of the quote seem to contradict each other, and I am drawn to agree more with the latter – are not memories a part of existence and thus subject to change? And is not the variability of memory integral to her entire story?

Memories are not static in two senses. First, there is their ebb and flow, forgetting and remembering; secondly, there is the way in which even those memories that seem so set in stone are constantly open to new possibilities for reframing. Both are subject to the contingencies of the present. One can learn something that radically changes how a memory is interpreted to the point of changing the memory itself (for lack of a better example from the text – the discovery that Papa is not, in fact, God). Sometimes this knowledge need not even be new; perhaps a buried memory that had seemed lost to time is unearthed and shakes one’s entire personal history. All this seems quite in line with Mama Blanca’s humble approach to life, aware that “our capacity for error is infinite” and always open to contingencies and reimaginings. Perhaps this reflection on the unchanging quality of memory is not said with the voice of the elderly Mama Blanca but with that of seven-year-old Blanca Nieves, who saw herself as “an experienced person who, aside from certain trivial details, knew all there was to know about life.” Or perhaps this freezing of memories is a conscious choice, a way to preserve the innocence of childhood that could otherwise be lost.

How do others interpret this line? Am I overthinking an offhand observation, or is there a tension between memory as a static object and a dynamic process in this text?