After getting a taste of the new tools and technologies brought to his village by gypsies José Arcadio Buendía learns there’s more to life and sets out in search of progress. It is this same journey that leads him into a life he into solitude. Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “100 Years of Solitude” felt like starting the journey of life in a very basic civilization. José Arcadio Buendía evolves as a kind of pioneer of Macondo but his obsession with ways to apply these new technologies and his solitude drives him into madness and various “advancements” made by others drive the town into conflict. The democratization of the town and the social constructs that come with organized religion struggle for power between Arcadio and Don Moscote seem to signal the beginning of many tragedies for various community members. The way the town evolves by the middle of the novel, resembles less of the simplicity, and becomes more familiar to society today; polluted by religion capitalism and war.
A recurring theme we’ve talked about throughout our course is time. This week’s reading like previous ones covered in the course (e.g., Mama Blanca’s memoirs and Pedro Paramo) follows a non-linear structure. The narration jumps through time, through frequent referencing of different periods it shows the reader the past, present, and future within a short period (i.e., it starts out in with a reference to the future killing of colonel Buendía, in the present then by the second chapter it moves back to the past). It also spans several generations of the Buendía family but doesn’t describe them in chronological order. I think this only adds to the difficultly of the reader to follow along. Not only are there many different characters intertwined with very similar names but it’s difficult to pinpoint when these events are taking place. The only thing that made it possible to gauge a sense of time was through the tools they had available or actual historical references that personally were unfamiliar without additional research. Even by looking at the tools It’s still confusing because the first mention of the magnifying glass and daguerreotype happen quite close together. We also see repeated elements of magical realism like borges, where Garcia Marquez blurs the line between fact and fiction, the real and the magical, making the mundane more interesting than it actually is. My question for discussion is; why do you think Garcia Marquez chooses to employ magical realism in their writing? What do it accomplish that say a more natural approach couldn’t?
The theme of “progress” is present in the novel from the beginning, as you well mentioned. But it is difficult to establish whether this idea governs the novel conceptually: it seems that in several moments it even undermines the possibility of its existence. If you have reached the moment in history where the banana companies are mentioned here this issue becomes much more noticeable. Capitalism breaks into Macondo, but its consequences are not as promised by the myth of progress.