Women in OHYS

Solitude in OHYS

Magical Realism in OHYS

First generation

URSULA PILAR TERNERA

- the pilar of the family - Pilar

- Mother figure - Mother figure

-Loses sight but is able to see - Able to read the future

Pilar = Ursulas double

URSULA

Wife of the towns patriarch.

(superior social position)

PILAR

The towns whore.

(marginal/

transgressive)

SOLITUDE

It is worth pausing over the word. Soledad is an alluring,

mournful, much-used Spanish noun, suggesting both a doom

and a solace, a flight from love but also from lies, a claim to

dignity which is also a submission to neglect. Loneliness has

some of this flavour, but only some. Soledad is part of a

culture which calls its streets paradise or bitterness or

disenchantment; and gives girls names like Virtues, Sorrows and

Mercies. Soledad is itself a girl's name, and the name of

Octavio Paz's Mexican labyrinth. Soledades is the title of one

of the most famous poems in the Spanish language,

Gongora's evocation of a pastoral shipwreck.

M.Wood, 34

Before them, surrounded by ferns and pale trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the -blemishes of time and the habits of birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

The galleon

Death

Disaster/ Ugliness

Life

Beauty/Attractiveness

The dual function of the Spanish

galleon

It occupies a space of

solitude and oblivion.

It is itself

a tangible object,

a piece of material memory,

a reminder of the past.

Characters who spend their lives in

solitude

Rebeca

Amaranta

?

?

?

RebecaRelationship with Pietro Crespi

Marriage (Jose Arcadio)

Solitude

In her later years she gained 'the privileges

of solitude rather than the 'false charms of pity' (194).

The rivalry between Rebeca and Amaranta

Shortly before her death Amaranta discovered that her feelings had ended

neither in hatred nor in love but in the

measureless understanding of solitude (244).

Solitude-Solidarity

'The Buendias are incapable of loving and

this is the key to their solitude and their

frustration. Solitude, I believe, is the

opposite of solidarity.

From an an interview with G.G.Marquez

Solitude-memory/loss of memory

Many years later as he faced the firing

squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that distant afternoon when his

father took him to discover ice.

MAGICAL REALISM

There is not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.

G.G.Marquez

(Bloom, 2006: 92)

The origin of the magico-realist

tone of OHYSThe tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

Kafka recounted things the same way my grandmother

used to. When I read Metamorphosis, at seventeen,

I realized I could be a writer.' And again: 'I remember

the first sentence, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning

from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his

bed into a gigantic insect/' "Bloody hell!" I thought, "my

Grandmother used to talk like that."

Magical Realism

Magical Objects

Magical Events

The magic of words

Magical Objects

Ice

Magnets

Flying carpet

Magical Events

The death of Jose Arcadio

The Ascendance of Remedios the Beauty

Amarantas Death

Jose Arcadio Buendias ability to change his weight

Magical Events

(The death of Jose Arcadio)

One September afternoonhe returned home earlier than usual. He greeted

Rebeca in the dining room and went to the bedroom to change his clothes. As soon as Jos Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed

through the house.

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buenda house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amarantas chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jos , and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where rsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

They found no wound on his body nor could they locate the weapon. Nor was it possible to remove the smell of powder from the corpse. First they washed him three times with soap and a scrubbing brush, and they rubbed him with salt and vinegar, then with ashes and lemon, and finally they put him in a barrel of lye and let him stay for six hours. They scrubbed him so much that the arabesques of his tattooing began to fade. When they thought of the desperate measure of seasoning him with pepper, cumin seeds, and laurel leaves and boiling him for a whole day over a slow fire, he had already begun to decompose and they had to bury him hastily. They sealed him hermetically in a special coffin seven and a half feet long and four feet wide, reinforced inside with iron plates and fastened together with steel bolts, and even then the smell could be perceived on the streets through which the funeral procession passed.Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete. (chapter 7)

The Ascendance of Remedios the Beauty

She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. rsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four oclock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.

There is not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.

G.G.Marquez

Is the ascendance of Remedios the Beauty based on

reality?

Remedios, the beautiful girl who takes off into the sky and vanishes, is

a rendering of an excuse Garcia Mdrquez once heard for a girl who

had suddenly left home, probably in some sort of disgrace: she

hadn't run off, it was said, she had ascended into heaven.

He borrows this dizzying excuse as his fictional reality and then puts

the literal truth into his novel as an idle, misplaced speculation, what

foreigners wrongly think must have happened: 'the family was trying to

save its honour with the wild tale of levitation' [208]. The fantastic thus

becomes quite ordinary,

(M.Wood, 56)

Amarantas DeathBut on the following day, at eight in the

morning, she took the last stitch in the most beautiful piece of work that any woman had ever finished, and she announced without the least bit of dramatics that she was going to die at dusk. She not only told the family but the whole town, because Amaranta had conceived of the idea that she could make up for a life of meanness with one last favor to the world, and she thought that no one was in a better position to take letters to the dead.

The news that Amaranta Buenda was sailing at dusk carrying the mail of death spread

throughout Macondo before noon, and at three

in the afternoon there was a whole carton full of

letters in the parlor. Those who did not want to

write gave Amaranta verbal messages, which

she wrote down in a notebook with the name

and date of death of the recipient. Dont worry, she told the senders. The first thing Ill do when I get there is to ask for him and give him your

message. It was farcical. Amaranta did not show any upset or the slightest sign of grief, and

she even looked a bit rejuvenated by a duty

accomplished. (ch.15)

Jose Arcadio Buendias ability to change his weight

Not only was he as heavy as ever, but

during his prolonged stay under the

chestnut tree he had developed the faculty

of being able to increase his weight at will,

to such a degree that seven men were

unable to lift him and they had to drag him

to the bed.

(Chapter 7)

It rained for four years, eleven months,

and two days.

Is Magical Realism in OHYS

epistemological (based on perception) or

ontological (faith-based, based on the

reproduction of the world view of the

characters)?

Magical Realism

ONTOLOGICAL

G.G.Marquez

The magic proceeds

from the interactions of

multiple cultures

EPISTEMOLOGICAL

Borges

The magic proceeds

from the interactions of

multiple fictional

worlds

Magical Realism Metafiction

The story about the capon

Storytelling (writing/remembering) as an endless game.

The story as a labyrinth.

Language as a trap and deception rather than a device for

revealing truth

Magical Realism-Metafiction

The story about the infinite rooms

(end of chapter 7)

But actually, the only person with whom he (Jos Arcadio Buenda) was able to have contact for a long time was Prudencio Aguilar. When he was alone, Jos Arcadio Buenda consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to room. As in a gallery of parallel mirrors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality.. (end of ch.7)