Abstract
A passage toward the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude resonates strikingly with Marx’s spectral metaphorics in The Eighteenth Brumaire. As Macondo and the Buendía household slowly self-destruct under the inherited weight of the past, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, his aunt and lover, are disturbed by the accumulated ghosts of the Buendía family’s history:
Many times they were awakened by the traffic of the dead. They could hear Úrsula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and José Arcadio Buendía searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsession can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after another species of future animal would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.
(331–332)
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Notes
Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 498.
Birute Ciplijauskaite, “Foreshadowing as Technique and Theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Books Abroad 47:3 (1973): 479.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Morse (1848; London: Penguin, 1985).
Martin, Journeys: “Needless to say, the family members themselves had perceived no spiral, only cycles of futility” (232). Michael Wood, in Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), similarly sees Pilar’s image as an indication that “the future has an end, winds down and dies; the repetitions themselves one day stop repeating” (51).
Jerry Root, “Never Ending the Ending: Strategies of Narrative Time in One Hundred Years of Solitude” RAJAH 15 (1988): 15.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1976) 91.
Martin, Journeys, 227‘. See also James Higgins, “Gabriel García Márquez: Cien Anos de Soledad,” Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction, ed. Philip Swanson (London: Routledge, 1990), who notes that, although the narrative largely traces Latin America’s postindependence, “the early phase of Macondo’s history evokes Latin America’s colonial period, when communities lived isolated from one another and the viceroyalties themselves had little contact with the distant metropolis” (149).
Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 15.
Cited without reference by Stephen Minta in Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987) 39.
Katalin Kulin, Modern Latin American Fiction: A Return to Didacticism (Budapest: Akademai Kiado, 1988) 65.
Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy, eds. James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson (New York: Anchor, 1972) 3–17.
Numerous critics have documented the relations between the novel’s banana plague and the real history of the United Fruit Company. For examples, see Minta (163–172) and Regina Janes, “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of Gabriel García Márquez,” Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989) 139–144.
Gabriel García Márquez, Leafstorm and Other Stories, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Picador-Pan, 1979).
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© 2009 Daniel Erickson
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Erickson, D. (2009). Spectral History in One Hundred Years of Solitude . In: Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619753_7
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