Reality and Myth in García Márquez' Cien años de soledad

REALITY AND MYTH IN GARCIA MÁRQUEZ' CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD George R. McMurray George R. McMurray (B.A., Mexico City College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Nebraska), currently a professor of Spanish at Colorado State University, has served on the faculties of Washington State University and the University of Nevada and was the Secretary-Treasurer of the RMMLA in 1965. He has published several articles on the novel in such journals as the Modem Language Quarterly (University of Washington), Revista de la Universidad de México, and Hispania in which appears his most recent article titled, "Cambio de piel, an Existentialist Novel of Protest," Hispania, March, 1969. Among the most outstanding Latin American novelists writing today is Gabriel García Márquez. Bom in 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town in the Atlantic coastal region, this relatively young author studied law briefly in Bogotá, worked in Europe as a journalist for a short time during the 1950s, and subsequently lived in Venezuela, the United States, and Mexico. A political leftist at odds with conservative elements in his own country, he is presently residing in Barcelona. Before 1967 García Márquez' literary production included three novels: La hojarasca (1955), El coronel no tiene quién le escriba (1961), and La mala hora (1962), and one book of short stories entitled Los funerales de la mamá grande ( 1962). All these works, written in a terse, functional style leaving much to the reader's imagination, present fragments of life in the town of Macondo, a fictionalized Aracataca. In 1967 appeared García Márquez' fourth and most significant novel to date, Cien años de soledad, which, in contrast to his previous works, chronicles the entire history of Macondo in torrential, scintillating prose. However, the most notable aspect of his latest fictional endeavor and that providing the subject of this study, is its matter-of-fact fusion of Colombian and Latin American reality with regional myths which the author absorbed as a child from the tales of his grandparents. The plot centers on the lives of several generations of the Buendia family1 beginning with Macondo's founders, José Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula who, as cousins, live in fear of begetting a child with a cola de puerco, a legendary punishment for incest. Their descendants procreate prolifically for several generations through both legitimate and illegitimate unions before their vigor diminishes and the Buendia line comes to an end with a series of tragic and cataclysmic events. Macondo's turbulent history and the characters' intense struggles against a hostile environment constitute a vast synthesis of social, economic, and political evils which plague much of the continent and firmly anchor 1TlJe Buendia family tree is given in the appendix. 176RMMLA BulletinDecember 1969 the novel to Latin American reality. Founded toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Macondo experiences its first and only boom when an American company establishes a banana plantation nearby, imports gringo technicians, and employs local workers. The town's ephemeral prosperity terminates, however, with a series of labor difficulties after which the company closes down and moves out. The resulting economic stagnation hastens Macondo's disastrous physical and moral decay. The novel also presents a vivid and, generally speaking, a dismal picture of daily life in Macondo: the town's isolation from civilization; the ignorance, backwardness, and superstitions of its citizenry; its diversions, most frequently in the form of drunken carousals, passionate sexual encounters , cock fights, and carnivals brought in by roving bands of gypsies; its political upheaval and corruptions; and its decrepit, ineffectual Church. The striking difference in moral and social attitudes between the carefree inhabitants of the coastal region and the more conservative highlanders is brought out with the marriage of Aureliano Segundo (the great grandson of José Arcadio Buendia) and Fernanda, who is a member of a traditionbound , aristocratic family from the interior. The straitlaced Fernanda attempts to alter the daily patterns of life in the Buendia household to conform to those of her own upbringing. For instance, all doors and windows are closed to prevent contact with outsiders, especially foreigners, and meals are served in a formal manner on tables covered with...