Marquez opened that speech by explaining where fact, fiction, and history began for South America, i.e. in the original passage of Magellan. "Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image."
Strictly accurate? Perhaps? Perhaps not? Perhaps hardly at ALL.
A bit dreamy and confusing? Yes.
Such is the history of Latin America and even more so is the story of Marquez in CIEN ANOS DE LA SOLEDAD.
However, particularly because in Spanish the same word "historia" can mean both "tale" and "history" , one should not be surprised (in English) for the confusion one witnesses in deciding what is fiction and what is not as mirrored in this famous work by Marquez. For Marquez also quoted to listeners in his famous Nobel speech in 1982 that madness envelopes his (our) Latin American history.
Marquez stated specifically: "Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio Là ³pez de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel Garcà a Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernà ¡ndez Martà nez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Morazn erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures." Such is the point where fact outdoes fiction in its own world of exaggeration and hyperbole.
- What does the theme of loneliness mean for Latin America?
According to Dictionary.com, synonyms for the word solitude in English are:
"1. retirement, privacy. Solitude, isolation refer to a state of being or living alone. Solitude emphasizes the quality of being or feeling lonely and deserted: to live in solitude. Isolation may mean merely a detachment and separation from others: to be put in isolation with an infectious disease. 2. loneliness. 3. desert, wilderness."
Recall that one of the earliest adventures for the townspeople in Macondo was the epidemic of an insomniac disease. The town put itself under quarantine until Melquiades, rising form his Singaporean grave, came and rescued them.
Without a doubt, Macondo is located in a wilderness. It was dug out of a swamp and two days from the nearest town--which the Macondo villagers never even discovered until the wife of the patriarch, Ursula Buendia Iguaran, left town in search of her oldest boy who had run away with the circus gypsies. In a few days she had discovered the closest village--a discover which had evaded the male inhabitants of Macondo for decades. This lack of contact from most outsiders for a decade or more had allowed for the developing of Macondo in relative solitude. In short, as noted above, the original founders of Macondo had many years and opportunities for development in solitude, i.e. an incubation period without much pressure from outside states, nations nor ideologies (nor religions) trying to force them to conform to specific codes of conduct and to political or social control from outside benefactors.
This is why some-years-later, the first national government magistrate ever sent by the distant capital to the solitude of the tiny village of Macombo was taken to the edge of town and unceremoniously thrown into a swamp. This occurred when the government agent attempted to tell the villagers what color they should paint their own homes (by his own arbitrary decree). Some of the Macombo townspeople may have been depressed at the isolation of their wilderness community but most families sided with the patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, in his insistence that the national government should have as little presence as possible in the solitary lives of these families (at the crossroads to nowhere). This detachment was fine for the majority of Macombites since at that time crime was not prevalent and wars were kept far away.
Throughout the book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the individual characters also take on the world of solitude in their own lives and homes. Constantly, despite a strong sense of family, in life the main protagonists sense a pull towards solitude themselves. Amaranta, the daughter of Jose Arcadio and Ursula, never marries although she is courted most of the time and begins to bemoan her solitude ( & despite turning down various suitors dozens of times). Meanwhile, Aureliano's wife (Amarant's her brother) Remedios dies quite young in childbirth but he never marries again.
Finally, the oldest brother, Jose Aracadio Segundo, lives a violent and aggressive lifestyle, often playing the role of a bully and braggart, and eventually dies violently long before his own parents and other siblings do. After Arcadio Segundo's execution, his own wife, Rebeca, refuses then to remarry and for the rest of her decades moves into an isolated world of her own imagination--just as had her adopted father, Jose Aracadio senior, had done sometime earlier. Eventually, the matriarch of the powerful Buendia family, Ursula Iguaran, finds a life of prolific free market productivity to be the means by which she fights off her own personal sense of solitude, i.e. as her family members either died or became more isolated and estranged. (She also offers to raise and help educate many a child over the decades.) She is always coming up with items to produce and sell throughout the land
Even the author, himself, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his NOBEL PRIZE acceptance speech noted still one other important aspect of the LatinaAmerica's experience of isolation--i.e. their sense of treatment as illegitimate sons and daughters of Europe. Marquez observed in his speech that over the past centuries Latin Americans have observed in Europe's abandoning of the Empires (and in Europe's segregation from the rest of the world in recent decades) a particularly painful isolation of sorts.. In short, Europeans and their state governments have often forgotten or ignored Latin America--and treated it like as an illegitimate bastard son, and then taking no real self-reflection in wondering why Latin America did not develop like Canada or the United States.
Marquez emphasized in 1982 on this visit to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize, the following: "I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world."
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