A hundred years of solitude is one of those books where everyone knows the title, without necessarily having read it. For those who have immersed themselves in the novel, the reaction is often strong: you fall in love or you give up after a few dozen pages. This is a very particular universe and prose, which Netflix has tried to adapt to the small screen. On this occasion, Caroline Lepage, a great French specialist on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, explains to us how this masterpiece was written and why its magical realism is still often misunderstood.
When, on June 5, 1967, A hundred years of solitude appears in Buenos Aires, García Márquez is 40 years old. He is a seasoned journalist, his career beginning in 1948 at theUniversal from Cartagena de Indias as a reporter and columnist, as well as a writer with a notable reputation in the Colombian literary world.
He has three short novels to his credit, Leaves in the storm (1955), No letter for the colonel (1961), The Bad Hour (1962) and a collection of short stories, The funeral of the Great Granny (1962), as well as a handful of texts published in newspapers and collected in 1972 under the intriguing title: Blue dog eyes.
In one way or another, these works will have represented detours, but also, to a much greater extent, laboratories: laboratories in which to experiment, test oneself and learn, in order to succeed in writing the great novel that he had in mind since the age of 18, then titled The House.
As he explained later, he felt that he did not yet have the solution, nor probably the energy, to put it down on paper. We must therefore see in these three novels and these twenty short stories, the famous “Macondo cycle”, the pieces of a puzzle which will find their place and meaning in The Housebecome A hundred years of solitude (for example, in 1955, the short story “Monologue of Isabel watching the rain fall on Macondo” constitutes the embryo of the story of the episode of the four-year flood subsequently overwhelming the Buendías, in the 16e chapter of A hundred years of solitude).
After waiting more than two decades, it took García Márquez only 18 months to finally overcome it, while he was living in Mexico City, in a very precarious economic situation. According to her, the “solution” was always within reach: telling the whole story like her own grandmother, her aunts, her neighbors, a number of storytellers and a few storytellers (including her grandfather), told him theirs, during his childhood in the family home in Aracataca, a large town in the Caribbean region of Colombia.
Misunderstood magical realism
As he believed in it simply because for him, it was simply reality, there is no reason why fiction would not be capable of getting the reader to believe in it in turn. This is where the famous “magical realism” is located, seemingly inseparable from A hundred years of solitude which, by this very inseparability, generates a partial critical misinterpretation, unfortunately never resolved.
Because no, García Márquez does not postulate that the Caribbean, Colombian and Latin American reality is magical in itself (if this is done in the pages of his work, he does not believe that his fellow citizens travel on magic carpets, put themselves levitating after drinking a cup of hot chocolate, nor ascending to the sky by spreading a pair of sheets in a high wind), but that the words to translate it into narration know how to become it.
In this case, this story that García Márquez wants to tell at all costs constitutes both the collection of a precious heritage of stories and anecdotes (there is more than posturing when he claims to have invented nothing in A hundred years of solitude) and the writing of his own childhood memories, his nostalgia and his illusions – García Márquez had to leave the house in Aracataca at the age of 8, a departure representing for him a real tearing away, a trauma that his entire literary work will have been rehashed… Because writing is, he understood the teachings received, giving reality.
Macondo thus becomes the sum of stories that no longer exist and stories that never existed, both those that we have been told and those that we have told to ourselves. Are affirmed here, in the amplitude of A hundred years of solitudethe spatiotemporal coordinates of the omnipotence of fiction and autofiction, a sort of superlative collective and individual performance: it is born with the opening of the novel, when the world is then so new that the pebbles of the river resemble prehistoric eggs, where things are so new that they do not yet have a name and must be pointed out, ending with closure, when a wind of apocalypse carries away everything, a whole forever preserved from the “real reality” likely to come afterwards, since this world remains closed in 500 pages.
Now, all you have to do is start again on page 1, with another reader, and the story begins again, again and again. In this mechanism, the beginning and the end, life and death constitute little more than almost fortuitous circumstances linked to reading.
A metaphor for Latin America?
We have insisted on seeing above all, and sometimes exclusively, behind this immense unbridled fiction, a metaphor for Latin America, of which, to use the famous expression of the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, A hundred years of solitude would be the Bible. With his novel, García Márquez would thus have told nothing less than the entire history of the subcontinent (from its Discovery by the Spaniards to its destruction by American imperialism, including its self-destruction in the various forms of local political and social violence), describes the “essence” of its inhabitants, shown its most “authentic” and “true” reality…
Paul Arellano/Netflix
In addition, many Latin American readers of A hundred years of solitude said they finally knew who they were as Latin Americans thanks to this book. The reasons for this desire to identify with the destiny of the Buendía family and the village of Macondo are multiple – the first certainly being the powerful temptation to seek to contemplate oneself in an image before which readers around the world have no interest. stopped raving about this splendid, wonderful and magical Latin America since the end of the 1960s.
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The fact remains that this has fixed the portrait of a García Márquez writer as a small wizard craftsman, as spokesperson for a region, a country and a continent incapable of entering history. , because they are locked in myth and legend. Enough to make him appear naive and a passive “renewer” of colonialism.
Except that everything changes if we reverse things, if we no longer subordinate fictional reality to “real reality”, when we return literature to literature, in short. In the beginning was the story, so powerful that it could recreate the world from scratch, a world made of stories and a singular language, but tragically invaded and contaminated by the outside, according to the arrivals of foreigners, bearers of other stories of sordid reality.
What would a rereading of A hundred years of solitude simply by believing in it, like young Aureliano in the first line of the novel, when his father takes him to the funfair?
