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A Cultural Analysis Of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez Mason Drastal Cross-Cultural Communication Professor Bram Groen 5/7/10
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Introduction: Gabriel García Márquez is commonly regarded as one of the most prominent writers from Latin America. One of the many reasons for this was his command and skillful use of a literary concept known as magical surrealism. Magical surrealism possesses many different ideas to what its value is in the literary world. One critic named Ray Verasconi believes that it is, “an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America.”1 Gonzalez Echevarria, a Cuban critic, thinks that it offers a new world view that isn’t based on objective reality.2 While magical surrealism does incorporate elements of fantasy into writing, there still exists a pervasive underlying truth that offers the reader a new perspective of the world. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Márquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude. Capitalizing on the fantasy of magical surrealism, this novel offers a recounting of general Latin American history through the town of Macondo and its inhabitants, primarily the Buendía family. It uniquely allows the reader to experience this history through a non-Western cultural lens and witness the circumstances surrounding events that were previously viewed from a single vantage point. Furthermore, it adds a real human aspect to the events of the story that seemingly transitions from the literary world to the physical with an exceptional amount of ease. Through reading One Hundred Years of Solitude the audience is transported to Márquez’s magical world and learns of the Latin American culture, ideology, and perspective in the traditionally Westerndominated reality.
1
Moore, Lindsey. "Magical Realism." Fall, 1998. <http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html> (accessed May 1, 2010). 2
Ibid.
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Cultural Dimensions: The culture within Macondo and the characters plays a vital role within the story and the actual history of Latin America. As the novel progresses, the reader is able to interpret the dialogue, character interactions, and other elements to create an accurate analysis of the two main cultures of the story. These are the local native culture of Macondo and the invasive foreign culture of the Banana Company. According to Building Cross-Cultural Competence by Fons Trompenaars, there are seven dimensions that can be used to identify and categorize a culture.3 These indicators were used to identify the value systems and characteristics of both Macondo and the Banana Company, both of which represent a real culture, and are then compared in the table below: Trompenaars’ Seven Dimensions to Culture
Macondo (Latin American Society)
Banana Company (Western Society)
Universalism vs. Particularism
More Particularism
Universalism
Individualism vs. Communitarianism
Communitarianism
Individualism
Specific vs. Diffuse Relationships
More Diffuse
More Specific
Neutral vs. Affective Relationships
More Affective
More Neutral
Achievement vs. Ascription
More Ascribed
More Achievement
Sequential vs. Synchronic Time
Synchronic
Sequential
Internal vs. External Control
External
Internal
Of these several dimensions, a couple stand out as being of paramount importance to the novel. The first critical dimension is internal versus external control. José Arcadio Buendía, who is the eldest patriarch of the Buendía family, is first introduced to the readers within the first few pages as being a skeptic of gypsies magic and gadgets. However, he decides to purchase 3
Hampden-Turner, Charles M. and Fons Trompenaars. Building Cross-Cultural Competence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
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magnetized iron ingots from a gypsy named Melquíades and use them to find gold even though Melquíades warned him that it would not work. After failing at discovering gold, the gypsies later returned to Macondo. José Arcadio becomes convinced that he can use Melquíades’ new magnifying glass as a weapon for war, buys it from him, and fails yet again.4 These examples demonstrate José Arcadio’s desire to possess external control over the elements. This is interesting as it opposes Macondo’s general tendency of having external control, and it actually parallels the Western notion of controlling one’s environment. His desire evolves into a fascination of using science to gain control over forces of nature. While it leads him to uncover discoveries such as the earth being round, it causes much strife and trouble for his family further into the book. It also becomes a very important part of a theme of the book that exemplifies the dangers and consequences of Western modernization. The other dimension that is critical to the novel is the concept of time. Márquez’s writing style addresses time in an interesting fashion. He doesn’t write the story in a sequential order, but has multiple timelines that all overlap and fold upon each other. This synchronism is also embodied as a theme of the book, and stresses the cyclical nature that time plays on the Buendía family and Macondo. The audience witnesses firsthand the ways in which the seven generations of Buendías repeat the actions of their ancestors, including having incestual relationships with one another. This all builds up to the climactic ending that has Aureliano, José Arcadio’s greatgreat-great grandson, reading aloud prophetic parchments that reveal the various acts by the generations of Buendías and the complete destruction of Macondo upon him reaching the end of the parchments.5 The near-apocalyptic ending further cements the importance of polychronism 4
García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. 3-4.
5
Ibid., 415-417.
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within Latin American culture, and how its influence on many aspects of life, including Márquez’s narration style.
Assimilation and Multiculturalism/Pluralism: The introduction of the Banana Company settlers initiates a large change within Macondo. One of the biggest factors in promoting this change is the new “settlers” desire to segregate themselves from the local residents. In order to implement this, they created a separate gated living settlement. This allowed the new immigrants to avoid any unwanted interaction with the native culture. As a result, multiculturalism became the predominant form of culture relations within Macondo society. This is quite similar to the current dilemma involving Muslims immigrating to Europe. As the European countries are discovering, the Muslim population is choosing to become loosely integrated into society rather than completely assimilated to its host country’s culture, which many times is secular. Like the Muslims in Europe, the settlers wished to continue their dominant culture in their new country. Márquez writes: “The gringos, who later on brought their languid wives in muslin dresses and large veiled hats, built a separate town across the railroad tracks with streets lined with palm trees, houses with screened windows, small white tables on the terraces, and fans mounted on the ceilings, and extensive blue lawns with peacocks and quails.”6
Because of the advancement and large population of immigrants, Macondo residents became a targeted minority that were eventually exploited for the benefit of the Banana Company.
6
Ibid., 226.
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This ideal is further explained in the essay “Racism, Exclusion and Cultural Incompatibility in Contemporary Guatemalan Society.” Considering that Macondo is a representation of Latin America, there are many similarities between actual Guatemalan history and events from the novel. On reporting about the effect of colonization in Guatemala, Silva and Jeffcoats state that, “a colonizer espouses the superiority of his culture to legitimize his oppression.”7 They continue in saying that, “the colonized can never fully accept the colonized so the only choice left is revolt or further oppression.”8 This happened to be to true for the residents of Macondo who were eventually pressured into fighting a war for their independence, which left a lasting impression on the town. Integration is defined as, “the intermixing of people or groups previously segregated.”9 While the foreigners did not want to assimilate, Macondo still experienced integration. As a result of the cross-cultural contact there were, “well-lit stores with products from abroad, displacing the old bazaars with their bright colors...and on Sunday mornings there were scattered on the ground bodies that were sometimes those of happy drunkards...”10 It also adopted a Western-based hierarchal system was installed by the Banana Company. It tactfully made the residents become dependent upon the labor and services of the company while manipulating and oppressing any form of resistance. This culminated into an open gathering in a square by the plantation workers, women, children, and residents who were disgruntled at the Banana Company. The company’s response was for its soldiers to open fire into the crowd and massacre 7
Jeffcoats, Alyson and Jake Silva. "Racism, Exclusion and Cultural Incompatibility in Contemporary Guatemalan Society." (2009): 11. 8
Ibid.
9
New Oxford Dictionary. University Oxford Press Inc., 2005.
10
García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. 227.
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anyone that stood in the way.11 Because of this, the division between the two groups was further engraved, marking the slow and steady demise of Macondo.
Culture Conflict: There is much culture conflict in One Hundred Years of Solitude between Macondo and the invasive immigrants of the Banana Company. As a result of the hostile tensions, the three types of manifestations of cultural conflict were experienced in Márquez’s fictional world. These are prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. A real-life case study comparison to this includes the suppression of the Romani people in Europe. As Hannah Barker and Anna Wiinberg explained in their presentation on the subject, the Roma were victims of all three forms of cultural violence by the dominant European cultures for many years.12 Being a minority, they were often presumed to be inferior, lacked political representation in government, and considered to be a nuisance to society. These three concepts also helped to sustain institutionalized forms of racism. This was predominantly carried out by the national government and the Banana Company. The consequences of business interactions between cultures is analyzed in John Hooker’s Working Across Cultures. The first chapter entitled “The Cultural Iceberg” investigates the Western world’s impact on other cultures. Hooker states that business, “brings many Westerners into direct and intimate contact with other peoples, and it has not been without its effect. In the old days Western business made little concession to the host culture, due to its economic
11
Ibid., 305-306.
12
Barker, Hannah and Anna Wiinberg. "Cultural Conflict in Eastern Europe: The Roma Exclusion." (2010).
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hegemony.”13 This was certainly the case with the Western Banana Company as it established its authoritative presence within Macondo, which can be classified as a non-Western society. Hooker compliments this idea by saying that, “The elites in any country instinctively gravitate toward the culture that represents wealth and power, and the lower classes follow to the extent they can.”14 Macondo’s inhabitants generally followed this trend, and viewed the technological innovations of the immigrants as being strange and very sophisticated. One of the Buendía daughters even started experiencing cultural diffusion with the settlers children, and started to assimilate to their culture. Such behavior is also experienced in a number of contemporary Latin Americans countries including Guatemala and Brazil. Jeffcoats and Silva found that in Guatemala the, “Spanish racist ideology doomed the indigenous to a life of sub human treatment...The early Spanish settlers also began confiscating indigenous land for their own use, relegating many to the status of landless unskilled laborers.”15 These conditions are very applicable to the Banana Company’s takeover of Macondo. In the essay “Racism and Inequality In Brazil,” James Lawrence and myself investigate the forms of racism that are present in Brazilian society today. Much like the methods used in Macondo, Brazil possesses many tools used the by white minority of the population to oppress the black majority of Afro-Brazilians. This includes the use of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination in the social, political, and economic spheres of life.16
13
Hooker, John. Working Across Cultures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003: 3.
14
Ibid., 10.
15 15 Jeffcoats, Alyson
and Jake Silva. "Racism, Exclusion and Cultural Incompatibility in Contemporary Guatemalan Society." (2009): 3. 16
Drastal, Mason and James Lawrence. "Racism and Inequality In Brazil." (2010): 6.
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Such evidence further illustrates the value of magical surrealism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and its clear association with the past and present circumstances of Latin America.
Social/Economic Class: The social and economic classes of the story’s characters are very important in determining the influence of cultural diffusion. According to class notes from the fourth week, the social class is a system of exclusion that is used as source of identity, rank, and monetary value. They also state that, “Classes of people who share economic and social position, thus share political attitudes; lifestyles, consumption patterns; and occupation.”17 Macondo was originally established with social equality in mind and even went as far to having all the houses being the same distance from water sources. The residents were regarded as being primarily on the same “rung” of the social ladder. This drastically changed with the introduction of the Banana Company’s Western hierarchal systems. As previously stated, the white immigrants oppressed the locals into subordination, which was achieved partially through being at the top of the social hierarchy by having more material wealth and technological advancements. The social inequality also transferred over to the economic sector and vice versa. Using the “Model of Class” diagram from the class notes, it is apparent how the authoritative immigrants were able to maintain their power over Macondo. This is because the higher segments of society that possess the most power are limited to a strict minority, whereas the lower classes are filled by a large number of people with much less influence and representation.18 Through the integration of this Western 17
Groen, Gerbrand. “Week 4 Notes.” (February 2, 2010).
18
Ibid.
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system, the Macondo residents were subdued into oppression at the hands of manipulative, capitalist entrepreneurs. Modernization was a large influence in ascribing the citizens of Macondo new, more defined class structures. While it was the advent of the railroad that directly connected Macondo with the Western world, there were many other unintentional consequences that were influenced in some regard to modernization. The “insomnia plague” that overcomes Macondo exemplifies this idea. When the plague was still just a possible threat, José Arcadio Buendía mentions a statement that seems to embody ideology of today’s Western, capitalistic societies. He says in response to the alarm of the plague, “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better...That way we can get more out of life.”19 This mirrors the Western working style of maximizing efficiency and productivity in life. When the insomnia sets in across the entire town, everyone begins to lose their memory and forget different aspects of their lives. A character named Visitación warns that, “when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.”20 This phenomenon could be interpreted as an allusion to the effects of modernization and cultural diffusion, causing a society to forget of it’s own culture and history. Márquez likely addresses this because much of Latin America has experienced or is currently experiencing this tendency of Westernizing and forgetting it’s native identity and culture.
19
García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. 43.
20
Ibid., 43.
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Conclusion: Gabriel García Márquez uses magical surrealism to narrate history from the Latin American perspective in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The reader is able to witness the effects of different cultural aspects on both Macondo and various Latin American countries. Márquez cleverly incorporates many of these concepts in his story to achieve this. Using Tompenaars’ Seven Dimensions to Culture, it was clear to see the distinction between the culture of Macondo and of the white Western immigrants. The story placed particular importance on the concepts of time repeating itself and desire for internal control. It also showed the difficulties that can arise from assimilation, integration, and multiculturalism. The impact of prejudice, stereotyping, and racism within a society and their be use in reinforcing institutionalized racism is vividly portrayed by the author in the culmination of hostility with over three thousand residents of Macondo get brutally slaughtered in a massacre. Social and economic class is also used to show how the Banana Company was able to exert its control over the citizens. The impact of modernization on the Western hierarchy and the characters were also shown throughout the story. Márquez skillfully weaves historical fact with mystical surrealism to deliver a tale told through the world-view of the Buendías and Macondo residents, giving the audience a very rare cultural experience from reading this spectacular Latin American novel.
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Bibliography: Barker, Hannah and Anna Wiinberg. "Cultural Conflict in Eastern Europe: The Roma Exclusion." (2010): 1-15. Drastal, Mason and James Lawrence. "Racism and Inequality In Brazil." (2010): 1-15. García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. Groen, Bram. “Week 4 Notes.” (February 2, 2010). Hampden-Turner, Charles M. and Fons Trompenaars. Building Cross-Cultural Competence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Hooker, John. Working Across Cultures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Jeffcoats, Alyson and Jake Silva. "Racism, Exclusion and Cultural Incompatibility in Contemporary Guatemalan Society." (2009): 1-18. Moore, Lindsey. "Magical Realism." Fall, 1998. <http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/ MagicalRealism.html> (accessed May 1, 2010). New Oxford Dictionary. University Oxford Press Inc., 2005.