Tag Archives: history

Week 9: One Hundred Years of Solitude II

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 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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I read One Hundred Years of Solitude during the winter break two months ago – spoiler warning for those who haven’t finished since it’s hard to separate the first half from the second in retrospect. Some of the details of the plot have faded from my mind, yet the overall effect remains: this is a beautiful book. This didn’t fully hit me until the last chapter; though I enjoyed it immensely the full way through, the final scene was like waking up from a dream and discovering that I had practically been in a trance for the past few weeks. As cliché as it is, there really is no better word to describe it than “magical.” The whole thing is infused with this sense of playful wonder and it has quickly cemented itself among my favourite books ever.

A defining characteristic of many of my favourite books is the elevation of the mundane to incredible through literary elaboration; Ulysses is my favourite book of all time yet almost nothing actually happens in it. Márquez does the opposite and achieves a similar effect. So much takes place throughout the century this book covers, yet it can feel like nothing happens at all. Even the most marvelous events are portrayed in the same deadpan historical tone and no character is given much inner development; at times, it barely feels like a work of fiction at all. Despite this, it is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. There really is something childlike about it all; it’s like seeing the world without all those preconceptions that we’ve picked up, freed from expectations of reality, morality, modernity and narrative for a smooth plane in which everything is equally possible and nothing is elevated above anything else.

While reading, I kept trying to figure out who the real protagonist of the story was. Early on I figured out that José Arcadio Buendía and Colonel Aureliano Buendía were decoys; as important as they are in certain sections, both are absent for too much of the narrative to fulfill this role in the bigger picture. I then convinced myself that Úrsula was the real hero for how long she persisted and kept order while others came and went. This theory was also disappointed when she too died well before the ending. My next option was Pilar Ternera, who, though seemingly marginal, lives longer than anyone else, first appearing in chapter 2 and not dying until the last chapter. Or was it Melquiades, the mysterious traveller from the opening chapter who survives two deaths to reappear as a spirit and ultimately predict the demise of Macondo in the final scene? None of these possibilities was really satisfying. Ultimately, a book as decentered as this one has no need for a protagonist; if anything, Macondo itself is the protagonist. Or, if we can permit a bit of pretension, maybe that titular spirit of Solitude who comes to visit everyone sooner or later is the real central figure. Maybe a stretch for any other book, but for one such as this where anything is possible, why not?

Who or what do others think could best be characterized as the “protagonist” of this book?

Week 6: The Kingdom of This World

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I broke the rules a bit this week and ended up reading both Pedro Páramo and The Kingdom of This World since they were both on my reading list anyways. I enjoyed both, but I’m writing about the latter since I read it more recently so it’s fresher in my head. Though I don’t want to spend too much time comparing the two, I do have to comment that I find it surprising that, between the two books, Pedro Páramo is the one most often regarded as the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both in style and content, Carpentier seems far closer to García Márquez; he shares the same neutral, matter-of-fact tone and the blending of history with myth, while Rulfo’s writing is more intimate and dramatic with a focus on characters rather than historical events.

Otherwise, The Kingdom of this World was not what I expected it to be. Having read about the Haitian Revolution in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, I expected any fictionalized account to focus on the dramatic shifting of political alliances and the violent warfare that took place across the island. As it was, the novel almost jumped over the actual revolution – it depicted the first stirrings of revolution in Voodoo rituals, then skipped straight to the rule of Henri Christophe after independence had already been achieved. Toussaint L’Ouverture, easily the most famous figure in the revolution, was mentioned only once in passing, as was Jean-Jacques Dessalines; on the other hand, names like Dutty Boukman and Henri Christophe were as important in Carpentier’s fictional narrative as they were James’s historical one.

There’s a way in which this is an accurate representation of the way one experiences history through their own personal memories. I think we’ve all had moments when we found out that some major event that everybody else seemed to know about somehow just passed us by, only discovering it after it has already become enshrined as part of history. Other historical events can dominate our lives as much as they do a history textbook. However, even when we are aware as historical events take place contemporaneous to us, there’s still a kind of alienation between our own experience and history as such, that grand narrative stretching back to the origins of human storytelling. Perhaps we can intellectually accept that we are part of the same temporal sequence that included such historic events such as the Haitian Revolution, but those semi-mythical moments never really exist in the same way our daily affairs do.

Yet, as Carpentier would suggest, we do not all participate in the same history, but only a limited number of many histories. It’s somewhat like Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but the paths don’t only fork; they twist over and under each other, some reaching outwards and others turning back on themselves. It’s not just that Macandal either died or survived, or even both; each story only has significance insofar as it is remembered, transmitted, and acted upon. If one version of the story is “true,” that is because, from our position, that is the story that has been transmitted to us and appears most relevant, but alternative stories are still exercising their own subterraneous influence under and against it.

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?

Week 3: Cartucho

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When I first read excerpts from Cartucho for SPAN 280 in 2021, I was surprised at how difficult to read I found it. Not in the typical sense that it is difficult to understand, but in that it is hard to find anything constant to latch on to. Even having read the full book, this impression remains. The chapters are short and disjointed and characters are barely introduced before their often-gruesome deaths are narrated. Though some names do return in later sections, it is a struggle to recall who was who – afterwards, all that remains in my head are a handful of names disconnected from their stories. I suppose this is an accurate approximation of the disorienting experience of being in the midst of a warzone.

There were only three characters who recurred frequently enough to stick out to me from this blur of names and faces. The first is, obviously, the narrator, and the second is her mother. The third is Pancho Villa, whose appearances throughout the book link its disjointed narrative to the history of the revolution as it has traditionally been told. Perhaps he stood out to me only because I already knew of his significance; I wonder how different my experience reading would have been if I were not aware of his historical role. As far as I can recall, he never directly interacts with the narrator, yet he is omnipresent through his interactions with surrounding characters. Because of this, it’s hard to discern how much of his description is genuine and how much is mythological, especially given the differences there are between his depiction in the original edition and the 1940 edition as his reputation changed (according to Ryan Long in the interview video). At times he is described as brutal, as when he murders Pablo Siañez over an argument in “The Two Pablos,” while at others he is merciful and sentimental, as when he spares the concheños in “General Villa’s Tears.” Then there is the interesting case of “Nacha Ceniceros,” where two conflicting stories are given and one is denounced as propaganda to slander the revolution.

Despite this connection to grand historical narratives through the figure of Villa, the story is otherwise radically different from these narratives in another: the character’s motivations. The explicitly economic, political, or ideological motives that revolutions are traditionally attributed to are almost entirely absent. I’m sure much of this is simply on account of the young narrator’s disregard for such complex topics, but her account nevertheless reveals the degree to which interpersonal connections can shape historical forces. Many characters, including the narrator herself, seem to drawn to Villa’s side because of his charisma or kinship ties rather than a conscious weighing of conflicting ideological positions or economic incentives. Of course, such forces were working in the background, but they were only one part of a much larger picture.

What do others think of the role of Villa throughout this story? How much do you think his depiction is mythological and how much is personal?

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?