
Review | One hundred years of solitude
Mike Gonzalez •Gabriel García Márquez’s wonderful novel ‘One hundred years of solitude’, first published in 1967, has been translated into most of the world’s main languages, and sold millions of copies. But the writer always refused to allow it to be filmed… until now. On 11 December, Netflix broadcasted the first of sixteen episodes. The series was made in Colombia, with a Colombian cast and crew.
It begins with the expulsion of a community from a kind of Garden of Eden. Led by Jose Arcadio, the founder of the Buendía dynasty, they wander through the landscapes of Latin America until they create a new community, Macondo, the setting for all Marquez’s novels. Surrounded by tropical forests, high mountains, swamps and the boundless sea, there is no road out of Macondo. The galleon they find in the forest is the sign that others have already been there, that they are part of a world imagined by others, in this case the Spanish conquerors. Like all colonialists, the Spanish described what they found as empty space to be appropriated, just as the settlers of North America painted out the native American civilisations of the American West, Spain denied the existence of the great civilisations they found and subsequently destroyed. Then as now, they wrote the Histories (with a capital letter) of their conquests justifying their genocides as ‘just wars’ waged against barbarians.
History is written by the victors, and their victims are erased from the official narrative. The indigenous people are invisible, merged into the landscape. But they have their own narratives, their own shared memory conserved in the languages of the oppressed – in stories and legends, in myths, in songs and rituals that are impenetrable for their rulers. They were passed on through oral culture, transmitted from generation to generation but dismissed by the powerful as mere superstition. It is interesting how every example of indigenous resistance finds inspiration in the remembered struggles of the past – Inca Katari, Tupac Amaru, Caupolican, Geronimo.
Both histories are part of a single story, mirroring one another, Yet they operate in different times. Popular myth sees time as circular, like a serpent eating its own tail as Jose Arcadio puts it, whereas the official histories mark the stages of chronological progress. In Macondo it is always Monday and the struggles of the past repeat themselves. What Marquez called ‘magical realism’ is the coexistence of these two different histories; it is not magic in the sense of conjuring tricks (these are left to the Church in the novel) but myth and popular memory.
The history it reflects is real enough. The military coups led by ambitious generals, and the endless wars between Liberals and Conservatives have been the reality of Colombian history. As Jose Arcadio says, the only difference between the two factions of the ruling class was that they went to Mass at different times. Yet their conflicts shaped the history of Colombia and paralysed the country in a forty year period remembered only as ‘The Violence’.
Early in the story the wizard/magician Melquiades arrives with a circus. He teaches Jose Arcadio some of his knowledge and introduces him to ice, the first miracle in this secular society. But when someone accuses Melquiades of witchcraft, he shouts ‘no this is science’. Like so many changes Macondo receives the new, the modern ice, trains, magnets from outside. When Melquiades introduces Jose Arcadio to alchemy, the search for the philosopher’s stone that will transform base metal into gold, it becomes his lifelong obsession. But in the colonial world change is driven by external forces, who gouge minerals from the mountains, extract the black gold from under the earth, poison the rivers and the biosphere. The solitude of the title is the exclusion from history, and the lack of control over their own destiny. When the fortune teller warns Ursula, Jose Arcadio’s long suffering wife, that her last child will be born with a pig’s tail it is the curse of colonialism. Spain constructed its utopia, its Eldorado, by destroying the world it found; but in the popular imagination there are other utopias once they are liberated from oppression and exploitation.
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Garcia Marquez said
Faced with this awesome reality we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no-one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the peoples condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
2 comments
This does not the Netflix series at all. It is just a review of the novel. Or am I missing something
A wonderful novel and a lovely review Mike.