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On the anniversary of my mother’s birth I binge-watched the first 8 episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Appropriate somehow because of the importance of Úrsula, the main mother in the book and Netflix series. Sadly, I will have to wait a year before getting to see the last 8 episodes. Only then will I make a final judgment on the adaptation, but my initial impressionist that it is fine indeed. I love it that the series opening, even before we get to the novel’s great first sentence about General Aureliano Buendía standing before the firing squad and remembering seeing ice for the first time, is cribs from the end of the novel but presented in such a way that the person who has not read the novel will not quite understand what is going on.
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel has come to define what we now call “magical realisms.” The adaptors here understand that the noun is realism, magical an adjective describing it. In the novel the most magical thing is the way the author makes the town of Macondo and its surroundings super-real. This series retains that. The more fanciful elements are presented in a matter-of-fact realistic manner. Yes, the bag of bones moves, but often this takes place in the rear of the frame, as if it is something not to be remarked about. Just life.
Yes, there is compression. Yes, plot is brought to the fore. This struck me as appropriate while I was watching. It had the effect of strengthening even more m belief that the novel is the Latin American version of William Faulkner’s “Absolom, Absolom!” (That ! is Faulkner’s.) Not a new insight of mine. Wiser heads than mine have found similarities. In the past I have suggested that there are passages in both that could be inserted as is into the other. I had considered the influence to be primarily stylistic, but now I see more clearly how what may be the Great Latin American novel echoes in a number of what might be the Great North American Novel.
Both have a central character who leaves home, has adventures, and establishes a community. In Faulkner that community was Sutpen’s Hundred, a great plantation with many enslaved. ln García Márquez it is a village, later a town, Macondo. Thomas Sutpen arrives without family or friend and is accompanied by a large group of slaves from Haiti to carve out holdings in the Mississippi wilderness. José Arcadio Buendía travels with a wife, a group of friends, and their families to found Macondo, also hewn out of a wilderness.
Both works involve generations that rise and then fall. Possibly both writers had heard the old truism that the first generation makes the fortune, the second generation uses the fortune, and the third generation loses the fortune. Possibly that old truism does have truth in it. Both novels follow a similar trajectory, although in Solitude there are more generations.
Incest appears in both novels. In Absalom, Charles Bon is the half-brother of Judith, the woman he courts and wishes to marry. There is a hint that her full brother, Henry, has longings for her, and this brother might also have such longings for his half-brother. In Solitude José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula are first cousins, and there is constant concern that offspring will be born with a pig’s tail. No wonder the Buendías are upset when a son wishes to marry his sister, but she is really not his sister but a distant cousin who had been brought to the family to raise after her parents were killed. And there is that relationship between nephew and aunt . . .
Children born outside of the main family are significant in both novels. In Absolom it is central to the disaster that strikes the Sutpen family. Charles Bon is the son of Sutpen’s first wife, a Hattian woman of status he had married and impregnated before discovering that she had a Black ancestor, anathema to this man with his dream of establishing fortune and dynasty. He divorces and abandons her and their son. It is Bon’s desire to have his father acknowledge him that leads to his disastrous courtship of his half-sister. Clytie (Clytemnestra) is Sutpen’s daughter by an enslaved woman, and she is among the last standing in the novel, the caretaker of what little remains. In Solitude the children born outside of marriage tend to be taken into the Buendía family, but this too leads to complications.
The name Buendía does not echo Sutpen, but it does somehow rhyme with another important name used by Faulkner: Bon. Buen in Spanish = Bon in French = Good in English. Not an accident, I’d suggest.
Amaranta. While watching the series at times I was reminded of Miss Rosa Coldfield and at times Clytie. Possibly she is suggested by both of Faulkner’s characters. It made me reflect on how both of the characters in Absolom become in their diverse ways caregivers. Amaranta in Spanish means "unfading" or "unfading flower." I think of Keats and his “unravished bride of quietness,” an image that pops up more than once in Faulkner. For me it defines Judith who also becomes caregiver.
Sutpen’s Hundred and Macondo are both isolated places created from wilderness. Interactions with the outside world does not lead to good in both instances. Both become involved in civil wars resulting from competing ideologies. Those who go to war return changed, not for the better. Both are destroyed at the end: Sutpen’s Hundred by time and fire, the town of Macondo and the Buendía home by time and natural (or supra-natural) disaster.
Mothers and motherhood are important in both. Úrsula is central to Solitude, but other characters also play mothering roles. Ellen Coldfield, much older sister to Miss Rosa, is less central except as a breeder of children once she marries Sutpen to produce Henry and Judith. Still, without her there would be no plot. There are other mothers and mother figures: Charles Bon’s abandoned mother, the unnamed slave mother of Clytie, Clytie herself as acting mother, and even Judith toward the end, even in her virginal state.
Madness. José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch, goes mad and spend much of his life tied to a tree. The last survivor of Thomas Sutpen is Jim Bond, son of Charles Bon (and I love the change form Bon to Bond), and he is a madman screaming in the night.
Thomas Sutpen and José Arcadio Buendía both come from peasant stock before being motivated to seek fortune elsewhere. Sutpen leaves his hardscrabble Appalachian home after he, while in the coastal lowlands, had knocked on the door of a great mansion and was told that he had to use the back door. His motivation is to have his own front door. José Arcadio leaves home to escape the wandering ghost of the man he has killed after an altercation following a cockfight. Different motivations, but the similarity lies in both trying to escape the past. In Garcia Marques as well as Faulkner that rarely works.
Who tells the tale in each novel? In both that does not become clear until toward the end. (Clear might be the wrong word here: more nearly apparent?) In Absolom we learn that all the tales and accounts with varying points of view we have heard have been filtered through the mind and voice of Quentin Compson, a Mississippi boy now a student at Yale, and discussed and meditated upon with his roommate from Canada, Shreve. In Solitude we learn that the coded manuscript left by the long-dead character Melquíades, who had come to Macondo with his band of Gypsies, is at last being fully deciphered by the last Buendía even as he, his home, and his town are blown to smithereens by the elements, and at that final moment he realizes that the history of his family and even this its and his own final destruction had been foretold in the manuscript, which is, of course, the novel we have just finished reading.
The endings of both are in their own way apocalyptic. In Absolom the apocalypse involves particularly the one family of Sutpens, but in Quentin Compson’s final musings you get a suggestion that it just might apply to his society. In Solitude not just the family but the community is destroyed. Nations, like families, rise and fall. A theme that still resonates.
García Márquez once said of his novel, "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends, and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves." This is of course a statement that might be said of any great work of art and those who study it. If they are truly great, they defy dissection. Although they can speak to the intellect, their truest impact takes place on some other, higher, level, beyond explication.
That word joke. I think back on a bunch of us librarians at Columbia University sitting around a table at John Jay Cafeteria and talking about Solitude. I remarked that it was one of the few works that moved me to tears. One of the women took issue. I thought it was funny, she said. Yes. It is. But that does not negate the possibility of its being incredibly moving. Part of what moves me so deeply is the incredible perfection of the ending.
But the novel is definitely funny. Not that the author cracks jokes, and his characters never act as if they think they are funny. But who can resist a smile when the first magnets ever to make it to town pull lost metal objects from their hiding places to the astonishment of all. It may be sad that Colonel Buendía remembers the first time he saw ice as he is facing a firing squad, but Buendía’s actual moment of seeing that ice is funny. Much of what makes one laugh comes from the suer-realistic portrayal of the most outrageous incidents. DareI use the word deadpan?
Something similar happens in Absolom. Sometimes outrageous things happen and the prose becomes so outrageous that one cannot help but smile. Adjectives pile up in a manner that becomes funny. Not an accident. I think Faulkner knew what he was doing. But as in Solitude, what is funny is inextricable from what is serious and moving.
Of the novels I believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the more easily accessible. Would I have the patience to tackle Absalom, Absalom! For the first time in my old age? I don’t know. Reading it for the first time is like slogging through a swamp with deep mud and quicksand that can suck you down. You must not stop to think and analyze or you will be lost. Plunge ahead and maybe you will get through, and on the next read the path will become clearer. I first read it when I was in my early 20s, and since then I have reread it at least 3 times, most recently a couple of years back. For me it repays the effort.
Now I am starting Solitude again. I will go slow this time, reading just a few pages at a time, savoring. There is a lot to savor.
Yes, there is compression. Yes, plot is brought to the fore. This struck me as appropriate while I was watching. It had the effect of strengthening even more m belief that the novel is the Latin American version of William Faulkner’s “Absolom, Absolom!” (That ! is Faulkner’s.) Not a new insight of mine. Wiser heads than mine have found similarities. In the past I have suggested that there are passages in both that could be inserted as is into the other. I had considered the influence to be primarily stylistic, but now I see more clearly how what may be the Great Latin American novel echoes in a number of what might be the Great North American Novel.
Both have a central character who leaves home, has adventures, and establishes a community. In Faulkner that community was Sutpen’s Hundred, a great plantation with many enslaved. ln García Márquez it is a village, later a town, Macondo. Thomas Sutpen arrives without family or friend and is accompanied by a large group of slaves from Haiti to carve out holdings in the Mississippi wilderness. José Arcadio Buendía travels with a wife, a group of friends, and their families to found Macondo, also hewn out of a wilderness.
Both works involve generations that rise and then fall. Possibly both writers had heard the old truism that the first generation makes the fortune, the second generation uses the fortune, and the third generation loses the fortune. Possibly that old truism does have truth in it. Both novels follow a similar trajectory, although in Solitude there are more generations.
Incest appears in both novels. In Absalom, Charles Bon is the half-brother of Judith, the woman he courts and wishes to marry. There is a hint that her full brother, Henry, has longings for her, and this brother might also have such longings for his half-brother. In Solitude José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula are first cousins, and there is constant concern that offspring will be born with a pig’s tail. No wonder the Buendías are upset when a son wishes to marry his sister, but she is really not his sister but a distant cousin who had been brought to the family to raise after her parents were killed. And there is that relationship between nephew and aunt . . .
Children born outside of the main family are significant in both novels. In Absolom it is central to the disaster that strikes the Sutpen family. Charles Bon is the son of Sutpen’s first wife, a Hattian woman of status he had married and impregnated before discovering that she had a Black ancestor, anathema to this man with his dream of establishing fortune and dynasty. He divorces and abandons her and their son. It is Bon’s desire to have his father acknowledge him that leads to his disastrous courtship of his half-sister. Clytie (Clytemnestra) is Sutpen’s daughter by an enslaved woman, and she is among the last standing in the novel, the caretaker of what little remains. In Solitude the children born outside of marriage tend to be taken into the Buendía family, but this too leads to complications.
The name Buendía does not echo Sutpen, but it does somehow rhyme with another important name used by Faulkner: Bon. Buen in Spanish = Bon in French = Good in English. Not an accident, I’d suggest.
Amaranta. While watching the series at times I was reminded of Miss Rosa Coldfield and at times Clytie. Possibly she is suggested by both of Faulkner’s characters. It made me reflect on how both of the characters in Absolom become in their diverse ways caregivers. Amaranta in Spanish means "unfading" or "unfading flower." I think of Keats and his “unravished bride of quietness,” an image that pops up more than once in Faulkner. For me it defines Judith who also becomes caregiver.
Sutpen’s Hundred and Macondo are both isolated places created from wilderness. Interactions with the outside world does not lead to good in both instances. Both become involved in civil wars resulting from competing ideologies. Those who go to war return changed, not for the better. Both are destroyed at the end: Sutpen’s Hundred by time and fire, the town of Macondo and the Buendía home by time and natural (or supra-natural) disaster.
Mothers and motherhood are important in both. Úrsula is central to Solitude, but other characters also play mothering roles. Ellen Coldfield, much older sister to Miss Rosa, is less central except as a breeder of children once she marries Sutpen to produce Henry and Judith. Still, without her there would be no plot. There are other mothers and mother figures: Charles Bon’s abandoned mother, the unnamed slave mother of Clytie, Clytie herself as acting mother, and even Judith toward the end, even in her virginal state.
Madness. José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch, goes mad and spend much of his life tied to a tree. The last survivor of Thomas Sutpen is Jim Bond, son of Charles Bon (and I love the change form Bon to Bond), and he is a madman screaming in the night.
Thomas Sutpen and José Arcadio Buendía both come from peasant stock before being motivated to seek fortune elsewhere. Sutpen leaves his hardscrabble Appalachian home after he, while in the coastal lowlands, had knocked on the door of a great mansion and was told that he had to use the back door. His motivation is to have his own front door. José Arcadio leaves home to escape the wandering ghost of the man he has killed after an altercation following a cockfight. Different motivations, but the similarity lies in both trying to escape the past. In Garcia Marques as well as Faulkner that rarely works.
Who tells the tale in each novel? In both that does not become clear until toward the end. (Clear might be the wrong word here: more nearly apparent?) In Absolom we learn that all the tales and accounts with varying points of view we have heard have been filtered through the mind and voice of Quentin Compson, a Mississippi boy now a student at Yale, and discussed and meditated upon with his roommate from Canada, Shreve. In Solitude we learn that the coded manuscript left by the long-dead character Melquíades, who had come to Macondo with his band of Gypsies, is at last being fully deciphered by the last Buendía even as he, his home, and his town are blown to smithereens by the elements, and at that final moment he realizes that the history of his family and even this its and his own final destruction had been foretold in the manuscript, which is, of course, the novel we have just finished reading.
The endings of both are in their own way apocalyptic. In Absolom the apocalypse involves particularly the one family of Sutpens, but in Quentin Compson’s final musings you get a suggestion that it just might apply to his society. In Solitude not just the family but the community is destroyed. Nations, like families, rise and fall. A theme that still resonates.
García Márquez once said of his novel, "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends, and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves." This is of course a statement that might be said of any great work of art and those who study it. If they are truly great, they defy dissection. Although they can speak to the intellect, their truest impact takes place on some other, higher, level, beyond explication.
That word joke. I think back on a bunch of us librarians at Columbia University sitting around a table at John Jay Cafeteria and talking about Solitude. I remarked that it was one of the few works that moved me to tears. One of the women took issue. I thought it was funny, she said. Yes. It is. But that does not negate the possibility of its being incredibly moving. Part of what moves me so deeply is the incredible perfection of the ending.
But the novel is definitely funny. Not that the author cracks jokes, and his characters never act as if they think they are funny. But who can resist a smile when the first magnets ever to make it to town pull lost metal objects from their hiding places to the astonishment of all. It may be sad that Colonel Buendía remembers the first time he saw ice as he is facing a firing squad, but Buendía’s actual moment of seeing that ice is funny. Much of what makes one laugh comes from the suer-realistic portrayal of the most outrageous incidents. DareI use the word deadpan?
Something similar happens in Absolom. Sometimes outrageous things happen and the prose becomes so outrageous that one cannot help but smile. Adjectives pile up in a manner that becomes funny. Not an accident. I think Faulkner knew what he was doing. But as in Solitude, what is funny is inextricable from what is serious and moving.
Of the novels I believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the more easily accessible. Would I have the patience to tackle Absalom, Absalom! For the first time in my old age? I don’t know. Reading it for the first time is like slogging through a swamp with deep mud and quicksand that can suck you down. You must not stop to think and analyze or you will be lost. Plunge ahead and maybe you will get through, and on the next read the path will become clearer. I first read it when I was in my early 20s, and since then I have reread it at least 3 times, most recently a couple of years back. For me it repays the effort.
Now I am starting Solitude again. I will go slow this time, reading just a few pages at a time, savoring. There is a lot to savor.
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