Magic Realism In One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Magic Realism, or what is known as amazing surprising realism, is a key genre found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is defined as a style of storytelling that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magic elements. This theme is important to the novel as it employs fantasy elements such as the ability of the real character to swim in space, fly in the air, and move static objects by simply thinking about them, or with hidden powers in order to contain successive real political events, and show them in a way that amazes the reader and confuses his senses, so he cannot distinguish between what is real and what It is fictional.
In this essay, I will look at three scenes that embody magic realism. First: the existence of the village of Macondo itself, as it does not exist in reality, but rather it is a figment of the writer’s imagination. Second: imagining the birth of children with pigtails just to marry a woman from his own blood, and finally to give an ordinary drink, like chocolate, one of the priests a superpower so as to rise six inches above the level of the ground.
In this paper, I can argue that the writer combined magic and reality to create for us a literary excitement of a special kind. The creativity in the novel comes from the fact that Marquis paints a picture of events for a long period of time spanning a hundred years imagining it in a specific place in the world. The time is not real nor the place, but both could be reflections of the world map. In order to confirm the literature of magic realism, we find that the writer sometimes does not care about the determination of time and at other times it determines it with the utmost accuracy, which creates a state of pleasure for the reader that causes him to fly in the sky between reality and imagination. To proof my argument, I take this excerpt from the story “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days”.
The spatial space of the events of the novel ‘The City of Macondo’ is the embodiment of magic realism in itself. Macondo is the legendary village where most of the literary work of the famous Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquis is revolted, an unrealistic fictional place, created by the imagination of Marquis. However, the fact that Macondo was not found on the map does not mean that it does not exist. In fact, the fictional stories that are repeated by generation after generation, along with the hustle and bustle of music and songs in the midst of intense heat, as the townspeople gather to play cards, are activities that all take place in hundreds of Colombian towns across the Caribbean region, which Each of them can be similar to a Macondo.
Macondo descends into a dictatorship. While “a hundred years of isolation” is rooted in South America, the moral and physical collapse of the village of Macondo reflects the decline of other civilizations, especially ancient Greece, and it is a warning to all of us. Modernity without morals is not progressed. The name ‘Macondo’ has entered the language of many Latin American countries as a representative example of a place where extraordinary news events happen, or for those whose birthplace is somewhat quirky. The Chilean refugees in Vienna, Austria, fleeing the rule of dictator Pinochet in the 1970s, called their asylum places ‘Macondo’. Their descendants, as well as refugees from other regimes, still live there.
The name of the city came to Colonel Aureliano Buendía in his dream when he was camping beside the river during the second civil war “He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo”.
From within the dirty world, a baby can be born with a pig’s tail. Aureliano Babylonian, who reads the notes when they were in his hands, remains alone at home with Amaranta Ursula, who is deserted by her Belgian husband. When they remain alone, Aureliano Babylonian and Amaranta Ursula, unaware of the relationship between them, fall in love and have a baby born with a pig’s tail. Amaranta dies from bleeding, and Aureliano drinks to the dregs and is caught by a former lover from the street. No one in the Buendia family would marry a woman with the same blood, because the children would be born with pig’s tails. “With any of them, your children will come out with the tail of a pig.”
A regular chocolate drink gives the priest extraordinary strength when drinking. Father (Nicanor) greedily swallows a cup of hot chocolate every time before he gets off the ground, this creates the impression of the bystanders that the simple drink has to do with the supernatural power of the priest. “Thereupon Father Nicanor rose six inches above the level of the ground”.
So, I have argued that through magical realism, the novel enables us to see an objective view of real life, embodied in the imagination of itself, and features of the unfamiliar appear in cases of similarity of fictional stories full of obsessions of the present, making room in a magical environment that alleviates social and human misery, in a way in which the magic coincides with the rigidity of reality and violence that dominates everyday life.
For over a hundred years, events and conflicts have been portrayed by Marquis in an interesting and exciting manner, through his narration, cultural background, and attitudes towards politics, love, and marriage to relatives, and as a social norm that such a marriage accompanies a fatal curse of the family itself by producing strange and distorted creatures. In addition to the manifestations of family members in Marvelous beliefs of magic and sorcery, all of which Marquez loves in the characters of his novel, and builds a world in a strange and secluded style. With the rise of the drama in the novel and the complexity of the events, until we reach the end of the novel, I was surprised that Marquis destroyed what he built. He destroyed all those characters with a devastating historical moment as if he wanted to send a message of his refusal for that style of living or he was not convinced of this model of society he built with his imagination and thought and wished It has no existence on our planet.
There is no doubt that what is meant by Macondo is to be a mirror of the reality of what is happening not only in Colombia but all over South America, which lived in isolation from the world that has kept an intermittent connection with it, only through the “Melquíades” gypsies, who invade it on the basis of wonders. Completely comparable, with beads and ornaments that always served missionaries and conquerors, but all this would have little value if Marquis had not relied on his legendary narrative style, and on all the magic that merges continuously with reality, which led to a legendary world that arose through Very expressive language.
If we do not understand things this way, it will be difficult for us to understand the novel in the way the author intended. Instead, many could accuse the writer of his style distracting ideas and lacking realism, and this, of course, is an inaccurate judgment for a novel that the author won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for it, has been translated to 46 different languages and 50 million copies out of it are already sold.
